Jorge Capelán, November 10th 2020
http://www.tortillaconsal.com/tortilla/node/10651
Last Saturday, the outlets of the Western media dictatorship proclaimed the Democrat candidate Joe Biden the winner of the elections in the United States, and the world seemed to explode in jubilation at the end of the era of "Trump the madman" as all the main really existing media powers, from NetFlix to CNN - with the warm approval of the planetary social democratic progressives - made sure of portraying the still incumbent president.
As far as Donald Trump, "Trumpism" and the politics of the empire are concerned, we can see that there is a serious case of confusion of form with substance. Most observers have been content to consume the various (though monotonously similar) versions of Trump provided by the Western corporate media, including FoxNews, which many take to be "Trump media" but actually are not. In short, it can be said that the world has come to know Trump through publications by or about him that have not yet been censored by Facebook and Twitter.
What few have tried to do is: 1) Ignore Trump's verbal outbursts in order to try to understand what he is really saying to his own supporters and to others and 2) Compare his actions to the standard actions of previous presidents, who in handing over the White House to Trump also handed over a world with 8 major wars: Libya, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Donbass (Ukraine) and Yemen. "Trump the madman", on the other hand, is the first in the last 60 years who has not started a war and the only one who has said that he wants to dismantle NATO.
"The world breathes a sigh pf relief": It got rid of "Trump the madman" to put a "sane" president in his place. In fact, Joe Biden, apart from his obvious symptoms of dementia, is notorious for being a corrupt pawn of big corporations, "the credit card senator" of the state of Delaware.
A commonplace that is constantly repeated these days is that Biden's appointment as president opens a new and better period for the world, which from now on will be able to focus more on public health and climate change and less on immigrants. We regret that we do not share such a pollyanna forecast.
Biden, for instance, opposes abolishing the disastrous practice of "fracking" by large oil corporations, supports Obama's decision to open the Arctic to oil exploration, and works to promote a "Green New Deal" based on agreements that favor corporate and financial solutions to global warming.
Biden has said publicly that he does not support universal health care. Biden and Obama denied support to more than 5 million citizens who lost their homes after the 2008 financial collapse. Most recently, they supported the greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history to the corporate and financial elites in the United States with the misnamed CARES Act. This CARES Act rescued the US plutocrat sector from the financial aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic but left only a few crumbs of subsistence living for the vast majority of the population.
In the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Joe Biden supported, voted for, and even actively participated in virtually every war of the empire over the past 30 years: NATO's enlargement into Eastern Europe, the wars in former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine (where he turned his own son into a gas mogul, a scandal suppressed by Facebook, Twitter, and the big corporate media) and Yemen.
Here in Nicaragua we must "thank" Biden for the treacherous 2018 coup d'etat since the Obama administration (of which he was vice president) from the beginning was organizing, financing and directing the criminal (and fortunately defeated) attempt to subvert the will of the Nicaraguan people. For many years the Washington Ambassador in Managua, Laura Dogu, outwardly showed an angelic face and spoke of cooperation and dialogue, while at the same time her embassy handed out millions of dollars under the table for the destruction of Nicaragua.
If Joe Biden is indeed finally elected President of the United States, we believe that a period of serious threats to humanity and renewed winds of war will open up due to the combination of four factors, namely: 1) The unstoppable collapse of the U.S. economy, and especially the progressive decline of the dollar as the world's reserve currency; 2) The worsening of tensions within the United States itself, a country torn by conflicts of all kinds with a political organization (union of states) that does not allow for the peaceful resolution of such conflicts (for example: what state would be willing to give up its privileges for the sake of the common good? ); 3) The aggressive agenda of the globalist sectors that support Biden (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the media and the intelligence "community"); and 4) The imminent danger of the outbreak of a civil war which in fact in the current conditions would probably turn into a world war, if not a global one (the current elections, which have forced the whole world to take sides on one side or the other, are an example of a possible outcome).
The power gained by the Democrats in this election will not allow Biden to govern in peace, as the Republicans are likely to retain their majority in the Senate and increase their minority in the House. Above all, they have control of the Supreme Court, which would make it extremely difficult to make changes, especially those affecting the interests of religious sectors. As far as the states of the Union are concerned, the political polarization could not be greater (with the east and west coasts supporting the Democrats and the center of the country supporting the Republicans), and even the situation within the states shows enormous differences in political orientation between urban and rural areas.
"Trumpism" as a socio-political movement with roots in the working class has not been weakened, on the contrary. A record number of people went out to vote, but did so for one party or another, thus dispelling the myth that greater voter turnout would mean an automatic collapse for the Republicans. Shallow analysts point out that Biden received far more votes than Trump among minorities and women, but Trump is the most voted Republican candidate by those groups since 1960, increasing rather than decreasing that support in relation to the 2016 election. The only socioeconomic group among which Trump lost voters from the previous election was white, college-educated men, while among Democrats, the middle-class vote has been strengthened, especially among white, educated women.
In general it can be said that the electoral victory of the Democrats is quite pyrrhic and takes place under conditions of strong attrition and with important controlling heights (Senate and Supreme Court) in Republican hands. In the street, the political base that the Democrats have mobilized by calling for a strong radicalization of the speeches of certain groups (for example, the slogans of "defunding the police," the "right to loot" and others) will not cease to vent their discontent with Biden, who is by no means noted for promoting of progressive policies, as Bernie Sanders demonstrated in his debates with Biden during the Democratic Party primaries. On the other side of the divide, Trump's supporters will become even more belligerent, especially as any new Democratic government tightens containment measures and restrictions under the guise of the Covid-19 pandemic in support of the globalist agenda promoted by the "Great Reset" of the World Economic Forum.
Superficial analysts have made the mistake of taking as valid the version of Donald Trump given by the Western monopolistic media, turning him and all his followers into a bunch of retrograde "deniers" of everything. According to this version Trump is what Hollywood, CNN and FoxNews say he is. In reality, these media hide, caricature, marginalize and criminalize everything Trump and his followers say and do, while instead suppressing the historic betrayal of the majority of people in the US by the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton's first presidency.
Another mistake that is made is to take as Trump's own, statements made by many of his officials who have often turned out to be his sworn enemies, such as former international policy advisor John Bolton, or those of his allies, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a man directly linked to the energy and gas sector and the anti-Chinese lobby, the only factions of imperial interests on whose support Donald Trump depends.
It cannot be said in truth that Trump himself is a fascist even if some of his followers do have a neo-Nazi or supremacist ideology. The difference between fascism and any other colorful movement is that it is a product of the bourgeoisie and imperialism. Fascism is nihilism, reaction and authoritarianism plus the imperial will to power -- a will to power not based on mere ideas and ambitions, but on material forces and interests. Mussolini cannot be understood without his military intervention in Libya and his plans to restore the Roman Empire. Fracking, "big oil" and "stop China" are not enough today for an agenda of global domination. The decisive sectors today are on the globalists' side: finance, "big data", technology, "big media", etc., those are all factions that have colluded to support Biden.
In this context, the "Make America Great Again" from the mouth of a president who promises to "end the endless wars" and "stop funding NATO" does not mean a restoration of the U.S. empire but rather the promise to recover a mythical past of economic, productive, political and moral strength of the nation. Donald Trump is actually a right-wing populist. He has no support from the old guard dominated by the party's neocons, who instead have openly supported Biden. He is a maverick millionaire of the elite, but he represents sentiment among broad sections of the working class who support him from very diverse perspectives, most of them deeply suspicious of all narratives that come from what they perceive as modern centers of power and authority.
Many of the people who participate in the Trump rallies do not do so for ideological reasons. Analysts whose lenses have been colored by the hegemonic media see in the pro-Trump rallies only a handful of Nazis, climate change deniers, misogynists, religious fanatics, flat earth believers, and Miami "gusanos" (anti-Castro fanatics). They are unable to see the thousands of faces of working class people fed up with the progressive promises of the last 50 years that have resulted in the steady decline of their real wages and life chances and endless spending on more and more wars.
They are not able to see the thousands upon thousands of faces of all colors of self-employed and precarious, gig-economy workers prevented from going out to earn their daily bread by the draconian measures of the quarantine. They laugh at Trump's tax breaks, but they don't see that these breaks for many mean relief (although that relief is actually much greater for the richer). They ignore or ridicule measures like the relief of student debt or the significant drop in the price of medicines, or even the mere fact that more jobs have been created (no matter how badly paid they are), but for popular sectors tired of decades of empty promises from politicians of the Democratic and Republican "establishment," these measures represent concrete achievements worth defending.
Trump's detractors feel outraged by the denial of climate change, but they do not want to understand what cheap gasoline means in the consciousness of broad sections of the population (in this sense, we only need to reflect upon how difficult it has been to eliminate the strong subsidies for gasoline in Venezuela, an economically imperative but politically very unpopular measure).
"Trumpism" is populism, but of the right-wing sort. It is anti-communist, anti-socialist, conservative (although not totally religiously fanatical), it is bourgeois-nationalist (although not totally racist, as CNN says it is), it is anti-feminist (although not contrary to the participation of women). It is a movement full of mistrust of all things technocratic and of social engineering - a not at all baseless mistrust in a world where absolutely everything has been commodified. It is truly amazing to see how broad sectors of world opinion today cling to an abstract (metaphysical) conception of "science" as something pure and infallibly accurate when one knows how much that ideal today has been totally subordinated to monopolistic capitalist interests.
This is true, especially as multinational corporations have increasingly taken over the funding of universities. Most scientists today research on subjects that are jealously guarded under seven locks to protect the property rights of their employers, in open violation of the scientific method of open debate (and their own consciences as scientists). The world today is dominated by propaganda, not scientific debate, so how can we fail to understand why there are large sections of the population inside and outside the United States that feel a deep mistrust of "science".
But there is another dimension of that conservative mistrust of technocracy that is not necessarily reactionary either: It is the concrete, vital experience of broad sections of the world population that in modern times have been the subject of all kinds of interventions by the State "for their own good". For example, states as diverse as Germany, Sweden or the United States, have a long record of interventions such as mass sterilizations, experiments of all kinds on a large scale, policies of eugenics (not only by the Nazis), often abusive policies of separating children from their parents, etc. Also the massive application of "big data" and surveillance of populations, the implementation of powerful technologies, from Artificial Intelligence to genetic manipulation and the profusion of electromagnetic radiation produced by modern technologies are other sources of concern for sectors that regard them as inextricably linked to corporate interests.
Those who (rightly) condemn "Trumpism" for its denial of climate change are often completely naive about the serious ecological consequences of many of the globalist policies, for example, how the often forced profusion of mask use has led to an increase in the presence of non-biodegradable plastic in the oceans and other water sources. Concentrations in support of Trump are cited as "hot spots" for Covid-19 while the same agglomerations against Trump are not criticized in the same way. The hypocrisy could not be more evident and is not at all revolutionary.
But let's look now at the other side, at the movement of the "anti-Trumpists", which also has roots in popular sectors that rightly protest against racism and neo-liberal policies. That movement has been co-opted by sectors that have nothing to do with popular agendas. It is impossible not to see the profusion of pages of George Soros' Open Society Foundation raising funds for the Black Lives Matter movement. It is a movement dominated by social-democratic sectors close to the Democratic Party and by sectors inspired by various variants of Trotskyism - with apologies for wounding certain susceptibilities, both currents functional to the plans of the CIA throughout modern history.
Today, in a world dominated by the policies of quantitative easing, by the creation of money without productive support and by the leverage of a big speculative bubble at the hand of negative interest rates, social democracy is no longer progressive. The idea of "spending our way out of the crisis" through the creation of money without productive support is only a demagogic policy aimed at maintaining the power of a banking sector that long ago stopped fulfilling a productive function. The power of this speculative, financial-industrial, computerized, media-ideological elite can no longer be sustained by the logic of the market and must impose its interests through the direct dictatorship of the corporations. How? By doing it "for the good of humanity".
The objective of the globalist axis Wall Street-Silicon Valley-City of London is to maintain Western supremacy, there should be no doubt about that. The globalists also don't want to see China become the head of the new world order any more than the protectionists who support Trump. However, they differ from the protectionists in the ways and means of maintaining their domination. Many U.S. companies, for example Apple, are very comfortable with continuing to relocate production in Asia, particularly to China, which gives them huge profits and a large market, even at the cost of seeing the U.S.'s own competitiveness collapse.
What they are trying to do, especially with the pandemic, is to kick over the chessboard of the world economy in search of a new way to subdue China through their control of the global financial system and the dollar which, for the time being, but not for much longer, will remain the main reserve currency. If in order to maintain their 0.01% privileges they have to do without the United States, they will do so, because their homeland is in fact their elite membership, not any US or European nation state. They are betting on the global nation state in the form of the agencies of a United Nations Organization that they have already corrupted in a very determined way and they will try to reform on terms they set.
Thus they aspire to establish a new "rules-based" World Order - using only rules they set themselves - to empower decision-making bodies like, for example, the World Health Organization, which is largely dependent on funding from private corporations and not from Member States or the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is dominated by NATO governments. They aim to use these bodies as privileged platforms for interference in an empire where, while intensifying their containment policies against Russia and China, they have reduced most states' sovereignty to the level of municipalites.
The climate change that concerns Western corporate elites is not the one that concerns the people of the world. In this context, it is worth remembering the outburst on Twitter by Elon Musk, owner of the Tesla electric car company, about the coup in Bolivia: "We will coup whoever we want". Musk promotes the human colonization of other planets while the people of the world struggle for a tomorrow they can still inhabit. The globalist elites dream of two things: A world transformed into their private hunting ground, where if possible the poor do not physically exist, and a platform from which they can realize their elite dreams, whether it be climbing on "the cloud" and achieving eternal life, taking a trip to Mars or conquering the universe. In a world of robots where vehicles will drive themselves, human beings are increasingly dispensable.
The first step to achieving that dream is to tell people: "Stay home", the second is "Take this dole check so you can stay home". The problem is that that check will soon be (and already is being) eaten up by inflation and soon the measures to ensure that people "stay home" will be more and more repressive (they already are). Needless to say, the implementation of that project will be very conflictive, inside and outside the United States, since the American people, as well as Russia and China, will resist it.
It would not be strange if issues such as climate change and the pandemic were to become pretexts for "humanitarian" intervention in our countries. In its minimal expression, for example, it will allow countries that depend on tourism to be designated as safe or unsafe destinations according to the ideological alignment of their governments. In any case, they will be used as a means of political pressure and financial extortion so that we accept the unlimited indebtedness of our countries "because there is no other choice". Ultimately, and arguing "whether from the right or the left", they will intervene in entire regions to "bring order to organized crime and corruption". From the popular movements of Our Latin America we must resist these plans with more direct control over the means of production, with more common sense, more organization and consciousness and with greater capacity to develop our own productive forces.