Mediaboss Marketing

2 June 2020

In an act unprecedented in American history, Donald Trump has repudiated the Constitution and is attempting to establish a presidential dictatorship, supported by the military, police and far-right fascistic militia acting under his command. The Socialist Equality Party appeals to the working class and all those committed to the defense of democratic rights to oppose this criminal action.

Speaking on national television, Trump proclaimed: I am your president of law and order Our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, arsonists, looters, criminals, Antifa and others.

Trumps fascistic rant came only minutes after he ordered massively armed military police to launch a violent attack on citizens engaged in a lawful and peaceful assembly outside the White House to protest the police murder of George Floyd.

The cowardly and vicious assault by military forces on unarmed citizens exercising their First Amendment rights in Washington DC will live in infamy as the beginning of a coup dtat by a criminal administration.

These are not acts of peaceful protests, Trump said, These are acts of domestic terror.

Trump is enraged by the most significant display of multi-racial, multi-ethnic unity of workers and young people in opposition to racist police violence in the history of the United States.

Trump declared that he will deploy the military, in violation of the Constitution, to suppress protests. Referring to a conference call with governors that he held earlier in the day, Trump said that a number of state and local governments have failed to take necessary action, and that he had strongly recommended that they deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers so that we dominate the streets.

He then issued the following criminal threat: If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the US military and quickly solve the problem for them.

Trump also announced he was using the nations capital as a staging ground for a national military deployment: I am also taking swift and decisive action to protect our great capital, Washington DC. As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement to stop the rioting.

Trump declared that protesters will be arrested, detained and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I want the organizers of this terror to be on notice that you will face severe criminal penalties and lengthy sentences in jail. This includes Antifa and others who are leading instigators of this violence. One law and order is what it is. One law, we have one beautiful law.

These are the threats of a would-be tin-pot military dictator. Trump provided no legal or constitutional basis for his unprecedented actions. His invocation of the 1807 Insurrection Act is historically fraudulent and legally invalid. The Act does not allow him to deploy the military in cases where the governors of the states refuse to request intervention.

In his earlier call with state governors, Trump demanded that they violently suppress protests against police violence. This is a movement, and if you dont put it down it will get worse and worse. You have to dominate, and if you dont dominate you are wasting your time. They are going to run all over you, and youll look like a bunch of jerks.

Trump called the governors weak for failing to mobilize tens of thousands of national guardsmen against the demonstrators, saying they must wipe them [the protesters] out.

To oversee the domestic deployment of the military, Trump announced that he was appointing General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to be in charge of the government response. Trump did not explain on what legal basis he made this decision, which violates the Posse Comitatus prohibition on the domestic use of the military.

In the call with governors, Attorney General William Barr also explained that federal prosecution of demonstrators had been placed under the Joint Terrorist Task Force, a multi-department military-intelligence agency in charge of prosecuting combatants captured in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Trump demanded that the Department of Justice put em in jail for 10 years.

The presidents congressional ally, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, called for widespread assassination of political opponents: Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?

A turning point in American history has been reached. Trumps efforts to establish a personal dictatorship on the basis of military rule is the product of a protracted crisis of American democracy, under the impact of extreme social inequality and endless war.

The defeat of Trumps attempted coup dtat depends on the intervention of the working class, which must take the lead in the defense of democratic rights.

No serious opposition to Trumps actions can be expected from the Democratic Party. It has responded to Trumps proclamation with characteristic fecklessness. The favored response of Democrats to Trumps illegal actions is that the president is not being helpful by inflaming social tensions. As if being helpful was part of Trumps political agenda!

After Trumps conference call with governors, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker meekly called for Trumps removal at the ballot box in November, while former presidential candidate Hilary Clinton urged the population to vote. But Trump may not plan on holding an election at all. If an election is held, it may be under conditions of martial law, with massive intimidation by the military, police and right-wing paramilitaries. Such were the conditions under which the Nazis presided over the last legal election in Germany in March 1933, six weeks after Hitler had become chancellor.

For the past three-and-a-half years, the Democrats have worked to suppress mass opposition to the Trump regime and direct it behind their own reactionary anti-Russia campaign, channeling the demands of dominant sections of the military and intelligence agencies. The Democrats are no less terrified than Trump of the emergence of a mass movement of the working class.

Trumps authoritarian moves cannot be separated from the broader crisis facing the entire ruling class. With the support of both parties, the corporate and financial oligarchy has utilized the coronavirus pandemic to hand trillions of dollars to itself. It is now implementing a homicidal back-to-work policy that will ensure a massive expansion of cases and deaths.

Already more than 100,000 people in the US have died from the pandemic, while more than 30 million workers are unemployed. The pandemic has triggered growing opposition within the working class to social inequality, of which the mass protests against the murder of George Floyd are an initial expression.

If demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd are illegal, how will the government respond to strikes and demonstrations of tens of millions of workers that threaten the survival of capitalism? It was the growth of the class struggle that Trump had in mind when he told the governors that protests movements must be suppressed before they get worse and worse.

There can be no greater mistake than believing that Trumps threats are not for real, that the crisis will quietly fade away, and that everything will return to normal. In fact, this crisis is just getting started.

American democracy has exhausted itself. It cannot be reconstituted on the basis of the existing capitalist social structure.

Trumps threats must be countered by a massive movement of the working class. It is clear that the fight against police brutality, inequality and authoritarianism is inseparable from a fight by the working class against the government. As the WSWS wrote in its June 1 statement, Trump incites violent police rampage against protesters:

The working classupon which the functioning of society dependshas the power to stop the assault on democratic rights, create a massive political movement to drive Trump from power, break the back of the corporate-financial oligarchy and begin the restructuring of economic life on a socialist basis.

Moreover, the power of the working class in the United States is vastly augmented by the opposition of the international working class to the Trump administration, which is seen as the unvarnished expression of the brutality of American capitalism. During the past week, there have been mass protests around the world over the murder of George Floyd. Trumps attempt to establish a dictatorship in the United States will vastly expand the scope of international working class protests.

The Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality have immense confidence in the power of the American working class. We will continue to provide working people with the information, analysis and perspective they require in developing a strategy to defeat Trumps bid for dictatorship and advancing the fight for socialism.

Statement of the Socialist Equality Party (US)

Receive daily updates from the World Socialist Web Site.

';var pos = Math.floor($('#content > p').length*2 / 5);$('#content > p').slice(pos,pos+1).before(html); } };

View post:
Coup d'tat in Washington: Trump declares war on the Constitution - World Socialist Web Site

Merlin Chowkwanyun, The Washington Post

COVID-19 stimulus bill by the numbers

As the Congress and Senate reach an agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus bill amidst the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, Stacker looked at news and government reports to provide a by-the-numbers breakdown of how those funds will be allocated. Click through for an explanation of notable inclusions in the historic relief package and updates as they come in.

This slideshow was first published on theStacker.com

COVID-19 stimulus bill by the numbers

As the Congress and Senate reach an agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus bill amidst the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, Stacker looked at news and government reports to

Photo: Chip Somodevilla // Getty Images

COVID-19 stimulus bill by the numbers

As the Congress and Senate reach an agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus bill amidst the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, Stacker looked at news and government reports to provide a by-the-numbers breakdown of how those funds will be allocated. Click through for an explanation of notable inclusions in the historic relief package and updates as they come in.

This slideshow was first published on theStacker.com

COVID-19 stimulus bill by the numbers

As the Congress and Senate reach an agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus bill amidst the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, Stacker looked at news and government reports to

Accusations of socialism have lost their bite

Recently, Joe Biden declared that any future stimulus would need to be a "hell of a lot bigger" than the $2 trillion Cares Act. He isn't alone. On Tuesday, House Democrats proposed a coronavirus rescue bill that would appropriate more than $3 trillion for health agencies, state and local governments, an extension of unemployment benefits and a second round of stimulus checks to Americans, among other components. Other prominent Democrats are pushing for even more, like monthly $2,000 payments.

Proponents of these and other measures do not seem afraid of being called "socialist," and many of them have historically leaned toward the center, not the left. That's obviously because of the moment. But it may also be among the legacies of Sen. Bernie Sanders' historic run in the Democratic Party primary. In unapologetically embracing the "democratic socialist" moniker, Sanders, I-Vt., dulled the socialist label's stigmatizing power and may have even normalized the term. In turn, it's expanded the universe of policy solutions to support Americans during the pandemic - and beyond it.

That's striking, given McCarthyism's effect on American politics over the past 60 years. Most know McCarthyism as driving loyalty oaths and investigative boards throughout the 1950s that scrutinized people for associations with communism or broader left-wing sympathies. But its residual effects endured long after the House Un-American Activities Committee closed up shop. They're on display any time an ambitious domestic policy proposal is denounced as "socialist."

Consider, for example, health care. Every proposed expansion of government-funded coverage has had to deal with the boogeyman of socialism. The Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill in 1947, which would have created national health insurance, was smeared along those lines by opponents such as the American Medical Association, which characterized it as "socialized medicine" and government monopoly on medicine. The same happened with Medicare, though it eventually passed successfully. In 1962, future president Ronald Reagan declared, in a speech for the AMA, that if Medicare were to become a reality, the country would soon "awake to find that we have socialism."

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama's health-care proposals also attracted McCarthyist attacks, even though both relied heavily on private insurance companies and the market. Yet the distance between these proposals and socialism didn't protect them from being attacked as "socialism." Through his time in the White House, Obama constantly fended off persistent charges from right-wing groups that he was a socialist, largely because the Affordable Care Act expanded government intervention in the health-care market.

It's not just medicine, though. Historically, the threat of being publicly labeled a socialist has exerted powerful chilling effects in many areas. Officials investigated by the government during the 1940s, as part of the "federal loyalty program," sometimes dropped out of government altogether or advocated diluted positions to preempt political innuendo and attacks. One former advocate of public housing, Catherine Bauer, subsequently went so far as to repudiate much of the idea altogether by the late 1950s.

Ellen Schrecker has found a similar impact in academia, identifying a de facto blacklist in the 1940s and 1950s, whereby universities regularly denied promotion or nixed the hiring of leftist professors. It affected all fields, even the basic sciences, medicine and mathematics, and led to self-censorship and the marginalization of leftist thinking in the social sciences and humanities. The latter wouldn't be reversed until the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s trickled into the universities and reshaped academic knowledge.

McCarthyism's long shadow is what made Sanders' popularity as a democratic socialist all the more remarkable. Young people, increasingly removed from the Cold War, didn't see his democratic socialism - in reality, a mix of New Deal liberalism and a hodgepodge of reforms collected from Western Europe and Taiwan - as all that threatening. Nor did they seem to care what term he used to characterize his proposals.

Sanders, meanwhile, invoked safe American political iconography, most prominently Franklin D. Roosevelt and major pillars of the modern American welfare state, such as Social Security and collective bargaining. And he consistently connected economic autonomy to liberty and freedom, which historians such as Eric Foner have identified as a core tenet of political thinking during the American Revolution. Sanders' socialism was much more American than Soviet.

This rhetorical strategy bore similarities to that of one of Sanders' heroes: Eugene Debs, who ran for president as the Socialist Party nominee four times, winning nearly a million votes in his last two campaigns in 1912 and 1920. But, Debs consistently wrapped a socialist program in palatable American tropes, and he regularly peppered his speeches with references to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and abolitionists, not to mention Emerson and Thoreau.

Unlike Debs, Sanders didn't run as a third-party candidate; he had a far greater impact and influence, fighting on the turf of the Democratic Party in 2016 and 2020, and both times, came stunningly close to securing the nomination. In the process, he defanged "socialism" of its power as a political epithet.

That matters a lot now. In a coronavirus world, sweeping domestic legislation may be floated over the next couple of years. Its opponents will no doubt open the old playbook and hurl "socialism" its way. Yet I suspect such McCarthyist histrionics will carry less weight than they once did and feel more like relics of a Cold War mausoleum. At a time of near-record unemployment, many are hungry for fresh economic policies and care less about what they're called or what connotations people attach to old labels. That's partly because of Sanders' unapologetic embrace of domestic socialism, his tying of it the United States's biggest social welfare triumphs, and his unlikely emergence as a prominent critic of our modern brand of capitalism with its stark inequalities and fraying safety net.

For decades, the shadow of McCarthyism has lingered and made it easy to marginalize critics with the socialist charge. Sanders confronted it head-on and weakened the tactic's power. Whatever you think of Sanders himself, it's a big reason to appreciate his two campaigns.

- - -

Chowkwanyun is an assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

Read this article:
Accusations of socialism have lost their bite - SFGate

Read: Socialism, but in Iowa

Midwest DSA chapters, too, have seen growing interest in their work. Membership in the Twin Cities DSA has ticked upward since late February by some 200 members, said the groups 29-year-old co-chair Rita Allen. The chapter saw a blitz of new members with Bernie fever in the run-up to Super Tuesday. After Joe Biden regained his lead in the primary, even more people joined the chapter as a way to keep pushing for Medicare for All and other Sanders-backed legislation. Within weeks, the state shutdowns started happening.

Anyone who lives with a little precarity in their life could see that the overall response to the pandemic was completely insufficient, Allen told me. We seized on that moment.

The Twin Cities DSA began calling for an eviction moratorium, for the cancellation of rents and mortgages, and for the state health-insurance provider to extend its open-enrollment period. At the onset of the pandemic, the group began organizing neighborhood grocery runs and created a solidarity fund to raise and distribute cashnearly $25,000to needy community members.

The DSA is interested in recruiting higher-income workers on the front lines of the crisis, too. Through word of mouth, the Twin Cities chapter has reached out to health-care employees who feel like their workplace conditions are unsafe. Bridget Gavin, a 38-year-old Minneapolis nurse, told me that she was alarmed and frustrated by the lack of N95 masks and other personal protective equipment at the hospital where she works. A Sanders supporter in the primary, Gavin was approached in mid-April by a handful of other nurses recruiting for the DSA, and she agreed to join the organization. I feel supported and heard and challenged in a good way, Gavin told me.

If the DSA is smart, it will channel members energy and outrage into electing political candidates and campaigning for its pet legislative reforms, including the Green New Deal, high-quality affordable child care, and universal health-care coverage, says David Meyer, a sociology professor at UC Irvine who studies social movements and public policy. The U.S. government is going to be spending shitloads of money to get the country going again, Meyer told me. The next few weeks and months offer a chance for leftist reform groups like the DSA to get in and decide where that goes and to make claims.

Read: What do progressives do now?

The DSA has faced and will continue to face obstacles in pushing for reforms, given the organizations tiny sizeits way smaller than the major political partiesand the anti-socialist attitudes that are still prevalent in America. But the group has been propagating these ideas for decades, making it well positioned to capitalize on the societal upheaval happening now, Meyer said.

Since joining DSA in late March, Harms has been making 40 calls a week to other laid-off or essential workers, encouraging them to sign petitions, attend DSA meetings, and join Denvers rent-cancellation campaign. Harms is heading back to work at the board-game shop this week, now that Colorado is reopening. But when I asked whether their DSA work will continue, Harms answered with an immediate and definitive yes.

Were going to see real change after this, Harms said. People wont forget what this was liketo not have income and not have a job and still be expected to pay all these different bills.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Read more:
Thousands of Americans Have Become Socialists Since March - The Atlantic

Dear comrades,

Working people of all backgrounds are uniting around issues such as racist violence, health care, climate change, womens reproductive rights, along with labor and immigrant rights. There is widespread opposition to the neo-fascist Trump agenda. At the same time, thousands of young workers and students have taken to online platforms during the Covid-19 lockdown and are demanding socialist-oriented reforms and even going as far as proclaiming themselves communists, socialists, and Marxists, in an effort to fight for a better world. In recent months, the Communist Party USA has experienced an uptick in membership. This growth is occurring as Bernie Sanders has withdrawn from the 2020 presidential race. People are fighting madand with good reason.

Celebrities such as Britney Spears and Chance the Rapper and well-known climate strike activists such as Ilhan Omars daughter, Isra Hirsi, have called for everything from redistribution of wealth to outright communism. In response to Britney Spears who stated, We will feed each other, re-distribute wealth, strike. We will understand our own importance from the places we must stay. Communion moves beyond walls. We can still be together, we agree with you and applaud your enthusiasm and support for a strike wave and the redistribution of wealth. To Chance the Rapper, who asked, When we start over, will we try socialism or communism? we welcome your calls for a left alternative to the current failing capitalist system. To Isra Hirsi, who has organized and led youth climate strikes over the past year, we admire your bravery in declaring yourself a communist publicly on Twitter despite the intense xenophobic attacks on your family from the extreme right. We welcome these radical conclusions.

On a more personal note, I want to express how I am feeling as a Communist living in the middle of New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic. I am angered how health care benefits have been slashed by the Trump administration in the past few years, the same neoliberal presidential administration which denied the existence of climate change and called the coronavirus pandemic a Chinese hoax. I am infuriated at how my partner and I were sick with the coronavirus three months ago and had fevers that reached over 107 degrees with only cold rags to relieve the pain, since our health care plans did not provide full coverage.

I am frustrated with the growing amount of homelessness I see out in the streets. I am enraged at how five CPUSA comrades have passed away in the past two months as a result of the do-nothing policies of our ruling class in the face of this pandemic. I am saddened by the fact that I will never again be able to talk to comrades Frank Sterns or Richard Hoyen about their experiences in Vietnam and Jamaica. I am furious at how the Trump administration continues its efforts to starve Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and others into submission during a pandemic and even remains silent after the recent terrorist attack on the Cuban Embassy in D.C. and the recent mercenary-led coup attempt against the democratically elected president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro. I am outraged at how Bernie Sanders progressive, socialist-oriented platform was dismissed by Republicans and Democrats alike for being too radical.

What exactly is too radical when it comes to saving workers lives and jobs? To those of you who share my frustrations and angry sentiments, I extend a hand of friendship and comradery in this time of crisis. A better world is possible, but it starts with us getting unified, organized, and radicalized. People come to the struggle through workplace exploitation, student debt, fear of fascists with guns, racist police brutality, corporate greed, the environmental catastrophe, and so on. Therefore, the radicalization process taking place through such issues or brought to light through the electoral campaign of Bernie Sanders or reading Marxist literature on ones own is welcomed by our Party. We all start somewhere, and collectively learn to be productive, militant Communist activists in the wider struggle for democracy and socialism.

Its also important to note that communists and socialists understand the meaning of collectivity. Marxists should be in touch with the working-class struggle and belong to a Communist Party in order to play a role in the collective. Before there was a united communist party in Russia, there were Marxist study groups and a factionalized Russian Social Democratic Labor Party to which Lenin himself belonged. Lenin wrote in 1902 that,

in order to unite all of these factions into one whole, in order not to break up the movement while breaking up its functions, and in order to imbue the people who carry out the minute functions with the conviction that their work is necessary and important, without which conviction they will never do the work, it is necessary to have an organization of tried revolutionaries.

In other words, YES, leftists need to unite and work together. But left unity must be built on working-class unity. Otherwise, what is the point of a mass movement for socialism that is not worker led? I believe that the Communist Party USA is the revolutionary working-class political party that this country needs to help usher in a better world for people like you and me. We wont do it without other organizations and movements but it also wont be done without a revolutionary working-class party.

I learned this lesson years ago as a young college student and militant of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). The older veterans there did not hold back when expressing gratitude for the CPUSA veterans who fought in the Abraham Lincoln brigade against fascism during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

This is the movement I wanted to join. I invite you to the International Communist Movement as well through membership in the CPUSA.

We are building a mass Party and movement for socialism in the U.S. All independent leftists and progressives out there reading this who feel that they want to be part of a revolutionary, working-class political party are invited to join the Communist Party USA in our fight for a full economic/political democracy, peace, jobs, equality, and green socialism. For too long, the U.S. Left has fallen victim to capitalist individualism inspired by American exceptionalism and right-wing Protestant-like mentalities (We love the left-wing Protestants!). Ill do my own thing because only my interpretation is the purest has led to the formation of thousands of evangelical denominations as well as a handful of middle-class radical organizations.

Our party puts working-class unity around issues as a top priority, since only then can left unity be possible based on ideology. We stand for unity over a factionalism that resembles cell division. All socialist, communist, Marxist, and progressive-minded people interested in fighting for a better world in which democracy and socialism triumph over the horrors we are living now are invited to check out our websites theoretical articles and educational webinars at cpusa.org. Most importantly, you are invited to join!

Historically, only communist parties have ever been able to unite working and poor people together under a common cause and guide them to a revolutionary victory over the capitalists. We invite you to join in this struggle. Together, we can unite and fight against the extreme right and lay the foundations for socialism as a united working-class!

In solidarity,

Comrade Maicol David

Image: Jacob Anikulapo, Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Read more from the original source:
An open letter to all leftists, socialists, and communists - Communist Party USA

May 19, 1972

AID MUST BE WITHOUT STRINGS

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman today declares that Bangladesh needs help from friendly countries but such assistance must be without any strings attached. Speaking at the inaugural session of the convention of National Awami Party (Muzaffar) the prime minister says that they cannot accept any aid belittling of the country's independence.

Bangabandhu further says that economic independence can only be achieved by adopting a socialist economic system. There is no alternative to socialism to save the people of the country, he adds. He urges the members of the NAP and Communist Party to cooperate with the government to build socialism in the country.

Referring to the nationalisation of banks and industries, the prime minister says the government will not allow private ownership of these important national institutions because once it is allowed it becomes really difficult to get rid of such an exploitative system.

The prime minister assures that the government will take serious action against hoarders, smugglers and criminals.

GOVT INITIATIVE TO BRING NAZRUL TO BANGLADESH

The government has taken an initiative to bring rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, along with his family members, to Bangladesh. Earlier, the poet's family accepted the government's invitation to shift to Bangladesh. This year, the poet's birthday will be observed nationally in his gracious presence.

TK 10 CRORE MORE FOR TEST RELIEF

The government will allocate Tk 10 crore more for test relief, informs Relief and Rehabilitation Minister AHM Kamaruzzaman. Earlier, the government undertook test relief programme worth Tk 16 crore under which new roads were built and canals were dug in rural areas. These public works created employment for a large number of jobless people, says the minister. Referring to the food situation the Minister says that the government is trying its best to reach food-scarce regions. He assures that the food situation will improve significantly soon after arrival of food aid from various nations. India tops the list in terms of providing food aid to Bangladesh, followed by the US and the Soviet Union, shares the minister.

SOURCE: May 20, 1972 issue of Dainik Bangla

Read the original:
There is no alternative to socialism - The Daily Star