The Biden-Harris administration is opening multiple detention camps to warehouse migrant kids. Thousands of unaccompanied children will go to military barracks at Fort Bliss, as the president seemed proud to announce to the press. The McAllen border patrol outpost where the Trump administration infamously separated families is currently closed—but not forever. For renovations.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has custody of 11,800 minors, at more than 100 sites nationwide. HHS receives children from the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a component of the Department of Homeland Security. The HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement quarantines unaccompanied minors, and then holds these kids until they turn 18 or are deported, unless relatives or other sponsors can be found to house them for the duration of their immigration court cases.

The HHS website claims: “Every effort is made to ensure minors can communicate (via telephone or video) at least twice per week.” To whom? To a child, the wait must seem interminable. In FY 2020, migrant children waited, on average, 102 days.

Amnesty International USA asks the administration to use only licensed sites. The group’s tepid prose says “it will take time to move away from the system” that Joe Biden “inherited” from others. Donald Trump used notorious scare tactics that included wresting kids from their parents and depositing them in cages. But Trump’s spite for migrants went as far as it did because an established system allowed it.

An Abridged Timeline of Migrant Detention in the United States

In 1892, Ellis Island Immigration Station, Upper New York Bay, established a migrant detention site. Today, the U.S. migrant detention network is the world’s largest. Here’s a timeline of its recent years.

1979-1982: The Carter administration sets out to repurpose the Fort Allen Naval Base in Puerto Rico for “boat people”—Haitian refugees. Under Reagan, Haitian refugees are also housed in squalid conditions in Florida, New York, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Texas. A 1982 letter to Ronald Reagan appears in the New York Times. Signed by 38 Haitian refugees at Fort Allen, it says: ”This is a cry of despair…”

1985: In Laredo, Texas, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the first private-prison firm, gives the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service its first site with cribs in the cells. Asylum seekers will linger for years and endure systematic abuse at sites run by CCA (now called CoreCivic).

1993: Esmor Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) wins a contract to detain migrants in Elizabeth, New Jersey. After a detainee uprising shuts the site down in 1995, the INS finds signs of severe abuse by underpaid guards. Stuart Gerson, Acting Attorney General under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, becomes CSC’s board chair in 1994. CSC will later be bought by Wackenhut/GEO.

1995: Muslims are suspected first for the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The Clinton administration responds with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, implementing “mandatory detention” for noncitizens (including permanent residents) with old convictions (including suspended sentences).

2001: Under George W. Bush, the INS begins rounding up thousands of people for attack on the Twin Towers — a crime of prodigious proportions, which none of them committed.

2002: George W. Bush’s VP Dick Cheney (former chair and CEO of Halliburton) and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld call for indefinitely holding “enemy combatants” from around 40 countries at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay. Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root starts building detention camps at Guantánamo. (The Guantánamo detention site, which has been widely condemned for human rights violations including torture, is still in operation.)

2002: Congress abolishes the 110-year-old INS. Immigration and naturalization are shifted to the new Department of Homeland Security. Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, who signed more than three dozen crime bills into law, is named to head the DHS. Immigration attorneys who once assured clients “The S in INS stands for service!” now find it stands for security. Under Bush, the USA-PATRIOT Act expands migrant detentions by scrapping the need to show a detainee presents a danger or flight risk.

2002 – 2003: To comply with a new policy announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft, all male foreign visitors to the United States, aged 16+, from (largely Muslim) specified countries in Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East must appear for Special Registration. The chaotic task is assigned to law enforcement personnel trained to avoid racial or ethnic profiling. Thousands of people are detained. Wackenhut (now The GEO Group) forces detainees in Queens, New York to work for $1 a day.

2009 – 2017: The Obama-Biden administration, in office for eight years, leaves the Department of Homeland Security in place, and does not restore the INS.

2018: Trump begins separating children and babies from migrant parents, and the “tent city” at Tornillo becomes “a focal point for critics of the Trump Administration’s inhumane border policies.”

2019: Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly joins the board of Caliburn, owner of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates the notorious camp at Homestead, Florida—then the country’s largest holding site for unaccompanied migrant children.

2021: In the midst of a global pandemic, Biden’s administration deports hundreds of migrants, including refugees, but holds unaccompanied children. In March, children held near the border report going days without a seeing outdoor air or bathing, mental health experts are nowhere to be found, and some of the minors test positive for Covid-19.

Warehousing Migrants for Profit

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) section of the Department of Homeland Security warehouses families and adults, with daily management often supplied by corporations. The D.C.-based Private Corrections Research Council touts its industry’s experience: “Around half of all immigration detainees are held in privately operated facilities, which assists the federal government in fulfilling its obligation to enforce national immigration policies.”

We’re supposed to think some people are fit to be caged. “The majority of BOP inmates in private prisons are sentenced criminal aliens who may be deported upon completion of their sentence,” states the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In the immigration law context, many minor infractions are defined as crimes. These “criminal aliens” might be better described as a perennial crop of manageable incarcerants to warehouse for profit.

As for the kids, more than 16,000 are in federal custody as of Spring 2021. The Biden administration is planning to award another contract at Homestead, Florida—a place cited for severe child abuse under past management. As grotesque as that is, it’s unsurprising, given private corporations’ history of battering detainees.

Migration generally poses challenging issues, yes. But warehousing people is not the answer. And detaining children should be completely out of the question. We have got to stop letting borders turn governments into monsters.

End Contract Prisons—For Everyone

Joe Biden has directed the Department of Justice to stop renewing commercial prison contracts. But corporate warehousing of noncitizens is done under the Department of Homeland Security, an invention of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft crew. The Biden administration ought to end it, and dismantle ICE. Making the S stand for Service again would be one key step in the pursuit of decency.

Joe Biden and other Democrats have accepted money from the border security industry. A lot. Even more than Trump and the Republicans. Research exposing this comes from the American Friends Service Committee, the Transnational Institute, and Mijente. AFSC thinks the border security industry “pivoted towards Democrats in the election year of 2020…to try and prevent policy changes from any incoming administration that could affect a lucrative industry worth $55.1 billion between 2008 and 2020.” The key companies in the border-industrial complex are GEO Group and CoreCivic, plus Deloitte, Elbit Systems, General Atomics, General Dynamics, G4S, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, IBM and Palantir.

Why the last two? It’s border tech. So-called virtual walls and smart borders will advance government and corporate control over people’s mobility and the courses of our lives.

Breaking Down the Culture of the Cage

Central American migrants are fleeing political unrest, natural disasters, climate disruption, food insecurity, and crushing poverty. Migration itself often kills, and more deaths occur in U.S. custody, after the border is crossed. Consider McAllen, where a sick teen put into quarantine died writhing on a concrete floor in 2019—in one of deaths of six young children in DHS custody in less than a year.

It’s not enough to call, as Amnesty International does, for better, more humane, or “licensed facilities.” Prison reform in the criminal justice context, writes Angela Davis in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, “has always only created better prisons. In the process of creating better prisons, more people are brought under the surveillance of the correctional and law enforcement networks…”

Our culture of detention is deeply ingrained. National boundaries are a macro element of this culture. We seem unable to imagine life without them. And we appear to accept that exclusion is fair and right, even when it’s fatal.

Laudably, Biden and House Democrats want to offer a path to U.S. citizenship for undocumented U.S. residents. It’s a popular idea. Yet we also must dig down to the root, and examine the U.S. policies that lead to tension, violence, and poverty that causes people to cross the borderlands, even if it means exchanging a known devil for a new one. Biden acknowledged as much during the presidential candidates’ debates.

Bigotry shows up in the fantasy of rapacious migrants bearing down on the border, on a mission to cast illicit votes in federal elections. In reality, some 8,000 migrants have been found dead near the U.S.–Mexico border since 1998. Crossing the southern U.S. border without advance permission is an act of desperation and we need to stop reprehending the people who do it. It’s time to resume this public conversation now.

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With existential national security threats from floods, droughts, wildfires, water pollution, sea-level rise, and peak oil,^[1] the US Air Force, the Air National Guard and nuclear weapons manufacturers could do crucial defense work in the US heartland by building, installing, managing and expanding renewable (wind and solar) electric power systems — instead of polishing their 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, and preparing to welcome an astronomically expensive replacement missile dubbed Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. Call such a switch a “Climate Defense Initiative” since it would constitute deterrence against actual threats.

But no. Congress’s “ICBM Coalition,” missile contractors Lockheed Martin, GE, Northrup-Grumman, Boeing, and United Technologies, hundreds of subcontractors, their lobbyists, and public relations departments have conjured implausible but scary sounding reasons for paying an estimated $264 billion for yet another new rocket system. Since 1955, the nuclear-armed rocket gravy train has invented reasons for Atlas missiles, Titan missiles, Minuteman I, II and III missiles, and even a few dozen Peacekeepers.

The proposal to replace today’s 400 land-based ICBMs is so unsound and unpopular that even centrist organizations and individuals have condemned it (most for the wrong reasons), among them the editorial board of Bloomberg News, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Arms Control Association, Defense News, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and a handful of retired military commanders.

Six years ago, the Bulletin referred to “the significant number of ‘expert’ studies that have appeared over the past five years suggesting that the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad should be deactivated”.^[2] Gen. James Cartwright, a former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chaired a 2012 study group whose final report — co-signed by then Senator and later Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel — said in part: “No sensible argument has been put forward for using nuclear weapons to solve any of the major 21st century problems we face …. In fact, nuclear weapons have on balance arguably become more a part of the problem than any solution.” Secretary Perry warns at his website, in speeches and in his memoir that ICBMs, “are simply too easy to launch on bad information and would be the most likely source of an accidental nuclear war,” and he says the ICBM system is “‘destabilizing’ in that it invites an attack from another power.”

All these critics point to these same fundamental failures and risks of ICBMs: they are redundant; they turn their sitting duck locations in five states into national sacrifice zones; and they robotize military commanders by pushing them to launch “on warning” without knowing whether the warning signals are misreads, mistakes or miscalculations.

Don’t mention the drug busts

Still, the mainstream critiques of the new missile program have ignored the scandals that have rocked the Air Force over the last 15 years^[3] resulting in hundreds of demotions, firings, courts martial and forced retirements. Officers among the 9,600 people in the Minuteman III missile system have been punished for sexual assaults, spousal abuse, distributing illegal drugs, violating safety and security rules, failing and/or cheating on exams, sleeping at the controls, and even illegally flying nuclear-armed Cruise missiles cross country. In 2014, the AP referred to, “a flagging sense of purpose”, “stunning breakdowns in discipline, training, morale, security, leadership”, and “a decrepit Minuteman III missile force that few airmen want to join and even fewer view as a career-enhancing mission.”^[4]

Missile field duty is understood by those assigned to it as a career cul-de-sac, plagued by years of isolation and boredom in rural outbacks, and haunted by high-level discussions of eliminating the missiles. Lacking a mission beyond sitting in place at attention or rehearsing doomsday drills, and overshadowed for promotion and commendations by warzone colleagues in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, missile crews can feel left behind. The variety and depth of staff scandals in the missile fields appears to demonstrate a broad-based disillusionment.

In 2007, three full Colonels, a Lt. Colonel and dozens of low-level personnel at Minot AFB in North Dakota were demoted or sacked after they allowed the fantastically dangerous loading and cross-country air transport of six nuclear-armed Cruise missiles.^[5] The nuclear weapons, each holding up to ten times the force of the Hiroshima bomb^[6] were flown 1,542 miles from Minot to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana the US staging area for its Middle East wars and an operational bomber base with 44 B-52s.

In 2008, three of the four on-duty Air Force missileers in a Minot missile launch center fell asleep at the con­trols of a com­po­nent that holds launch codes. Rules require at least two crewmembers to stay awake while on alert. They were im­me­di­ate­ly barred from missile duty and were later dis­charged from the ser­vice.^[7]

In October 2010, a computer glitch knocked fifty Minuteman missiles offline at F.E. Warren AFB in Wyoming “for longer than an hour.” Five launch control centers lost all contact with the fifty far-off Minuteman III missiles they normally control. Most unintentionally, the Air Force’s response to the temporary disarmament demonstrated the missile system’s obsolete and useless status. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dirk Jameson told press that the electronic shutdown had “no real bearing on the capabilities of our nuclear forces.”

In 2013, Air Force missileers, two at Minot and two at Malmstrom AFB in Montana, were reprimanded for leaving blast doors open at missile launch control centers in violation of strict protocols. The lapses were described by former missileer Bruce Blair as having enabled potential saboteurs to access super-secret missile launch codes. Understandably, the blunders were attributed to a lackadaisical mindset among the missileers.

In 2014, two missile launch crew administrators at Malmstrom were accused of operating an illegal narcotics distribution system across six Air Force bases, allegedly sending messages to eleven others, three of whom were members of launch control crews. According to Lt. Gen. James Holmes’ 268-page report on the scandal, the messages mentioned “specific, illegal drug use … [including] synthetic drugs, ecstasy and amphetamines.”

Separately, Gen. Holmes’ investigation uncovered widespread cheating by missileers on launch procedure exams. Consequently, a total of 92 missileers at Malmstrom’s 341st Missile Wing were suspended, decertified, and barred from launch control duty. A total of nine missile field Colonels and Lt. Colonels at Malmstrom, nearly the entire chain of command, was removed from duty for failing to detect the mass cheating.

Damn the torpedo makers

How do the ICBMS survive the corruption, accidents, “stunning breakdowns,” and high-level condemnation? One answer is in a February 9 report by William Hartung of the Center for International Policy, titled “Inside the ICBM Lobby: Special Interests or the National Interest?” Hartung details the huge sums lavished by weapons contractors on lobbying and campaign contributions in order to buy votes from lawmakers in states that host the missiles, air bases, or the contractors themselves (Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming), even though, as the report notes, there is “no militarily sound reason to build a new ICBM.” The report says that Northrop Grumman and its major subcontractors have given $1.2 million to the current members of the Senate missile coalition since 2012 and over $15 million more to members of key Congressional committees that help determine how much is to be spent. In addition, the top eleven contractors working on the new missile spent over $119 million on lobbying in 2019 and 2020, and employed 410 lobbyists.

How can the weapons industry seem to smash or buy off everything standing in its way, whether it’s reason, precaution, or spending limits? Part of the answer is in Mussolini’s definition of fascism as the merger of state and corporate power, and in Eisenhower’s farewell warning against the same.

NOTES

1. See Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, South End Press, 2002; Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, One World Press, 2008; Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, New Society Publishers, 2005. ↑

2. Adam Lowther, “A Year Later: Responding to Problems in the ICBM Force,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 2015, http://thebulletin.org/year-later-responding-problems-icbm-force7984. ↑

3. AP, “California: Navy Commander Admits Taking Bribes,” New York Times, Jan. 7, 2015; David Sanger & William Broad, “Pentagon Studies Reveal Major Nuclear Problems,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 2014; “Another Charge in Navy Bribe Case,” New York Times, April 18, 2014; Helene Cooper, “Navy Opens Inquiry into Cheating in Reactor Training,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2014; “Fraud in Army Recruiting Bonus Program May Cost Nearly $100 million,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2014. ↑

4. Robert Burns, AP, “Study Finds Troubles Run Deep In Nuclear Missile Force,” Nov. 20, 2013; AP, “Air Force Is Working To Mend Missile Corps,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, June 11, 2014. ↑

5. Sarah Baxter, “US Hits Panic Button as Air Force ‘Loses’ nuclear missiles,” London Times, Oct. 21, 2007. ↑

6. “W80-1 Warhead Selected for New Nuclear Cruise Missile,” Federation of American Scientists, Oct. 10, 2014, https://fas.org/blogs/security/2014/10/w80-1_lrso/. ↑

7. Barbara Starr & Larry Shaughnessy, CNN, “Air Force says officers fell asleep with nuke code,” July 24, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/24/missile.error/index.html. ↑

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In recent years, the United States has once again begun to face a reckoning over its history and practice of white supremacy. In 2020, this reckoning became a raging fire that burned across the nation after Minneapolis police killed a Black man by choking him to death. This latest firestorm led to numerous commissions being formed in cities and states across the land by liberal politicians and an angry outcry from police departments reacting to well-deserved criticism. These commissions seem to have a couple different tasks. The first is to make it look like officials are doing something; the second is to come up with an analysis that acknowledges racism exists, but can be eradicated without changing the system it is the foundation of. This approach is not only advocated by white-skinned liberal Democrats and Progressives, but also by many Black Lives Matter activists and their allies of all skin tones. While their faith in the system is certainly something to behold (and yes, some progress will probably be made), history tells us that it will likely be too little and is already too late for millions.

Naturally, the liberal city of Burlington, Vermont set up such a commission. After a summer of protests against the city’s police department and a couple of its overtly racist officers, Democratic mayor Miro Weinberger spoke the right words at the commission’s founding. His plan had the support of his constituency and most of the citizens to his left. This was in spite of the fact that the study would be outsourced to a company that profits from such things. Then, in what is almost a perfect example of how so many Americans really don’t understand racism in the US, he chose a white-skinned bureaucrat over a Black woman to oversee the study. When challenged, he told critics it was to make sure it was neutral, as if a white man would somehow be more neutral then a Black woman. The mayor was quickly challenged and reversed his decision, calling it a “mistake.” If there is one thing it wasn’t, that would be a mistake. A more accurate definition would be that it is one more proof of how racism works among white people in the USA. It is so pervasive and such a part of the mindset, neutrality is identified with whiteness despite the obvious contradiction. There are now those calling for his resignation. Personally, I don’t think that does a damn thing to address the racism of Burlington’s establishment. The mayor can go and nothing will change except for the face at the top. The issue is much deeper than one politician. The fact that he was forced to reverse his decision puts the anti-racist movement in a good place if they play it right.

Racism in the United States is white people’s problem. They constructed it and they benefit from it. The assumed supremacy of the white-skinned European settler is essential to this nation’s philosophical founding and is the historical foundation of its economy. The mass murder of the indigenous peoples and the destruction of their traditional livelihood and culture was crucial to the early accumulation of wealth by those who colonized what we know as the United States. Likewise, the importation, breeding, and selling of African slaves intensified that accumulation exponentially, even for those who opposed slavery and owned no other human beings. This history and the political decisions that both strengthened and resulted from it are why the US continues to be a racist nation.

It is also why white supremacists still walk this land, parading their symbols of hate, infiltrating law enforcement and the military, and serving in legislatures across the nation. It is indeed true that this country is not as openly racist as it was forty or fifty years ago. Unfortunately, this fact means very little to those who were not alive then. For those US residents who were born after legal segregation was outlawed across the country, the fact that it is illegal to discriminate against people because of their skin color means very little. Why? Because they know—especially those who deal with it every day of their lives—that they are still locked out of many places in US society because of their skin color. One can see this in voter suppression laws in many states that are clearly designed to prevent non-white citizens from voting. One can see it also when they examine the public school systems that find most majority Black, indigenous and Latino being taught in conditions where it’s almost impossible to learn. One can also see the racist nature of the system in the way in which the police enforce the laws. The statistics are clear. Higher percentages of Blacks and Latinos incarcerated; higher percentages of unarmed Black men killed by police, and so on. The reason for this isn’t necessarily because white-skinned people commit fewer crimes, but because the police don’t look as hard for crime in mostly white and non-poor neighborhoods. Indeed, their primary task appears to be keeping Blacks and Latinos contained in their own communities.

We don’t just need to get white supremacists out of power—whether they are in law enforcement, Congress or somewhere in between—we need to change an economy and political system whose founding was informed by white supremacy and whose continued existence assumes it. As this piece points out, that means a reckoning not just with individuals who (consciously or otherwise) maintain and enforce the systems of power, but with the system itself.

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Barack Obama’s new memoir, A Promised Land, came out as the world was looking at the US with anticipation and mistrust. It was published as the world awaited the results of the US presidential elections, between the clownish Donald Trump and the visibly incompetent Joseph Biden. The book trumpets the American model as the “promised land” against the failures of the American system that appeared most clearly in the last four years: a corrupt, populist, and maniacal leader at the top of US executive power; the colossal failure of the US medical system to respond to the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic— even after Obama’s much-celebrated expansion of the healthcare system through the “Affordable Care Act”; and the general deterioration and defunding of the already rudimentary public services sector in the country. The book coincidentally came out shortly before the failures of the American system played out in the circus of January 6^th, when demonstrators, clothed in outlandish costumes and carrying a mesh of medieval, confederate, white supremacist, and Nazi symbols, stormed Capitol Hill to block the ratification of the presidential elections, forcing the world to look at America not as a model but as a spectacle of failures, a farce.

Ideals Against Reality

The book’s readers are thus likely to experience dissonance. On the one side we have the realities, shortcomings, failures, and injustices that characterize the American system and model, and, on the other side the diametrically opposite promised America Obama paints. This dissonance is native to the text of A Promised Land, wherein Obama contradicts his propaganda for the American model with a constant (though generally moderate and shallow) criticism of the American system that did not allow him to implement the change he putatively espoused. Obama resolves this general dissonance through the false dichotomy between the reality of America and American ideals, America “that was promised,” or the American Dream.

This falsification does more than evade criticism. It further mobilizes criticisms of this reality as themselves part of the American ideal and steps towards the deferred realization of the American promise. American history, according to Obama, becomes the stage for “a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be”

This contest, which “has defined the American experience,” according to Obama, is “embedded in founding documents that could simultaneously proclaim all men equal and yet count a slave as three-fifth a man. It finds expression in our earliest court opinions, as when the chief justice of the Supreme Court bluntly explains to Native Americans that their tribe’s rights to convey property aren’t enforceable since the court of the conqueror has no capacity to recognize the just claims of the conquered.” Obama then moves from acknowledging (and arguably belittling) the injustices ingrained within the American system—and somehow endowing these injustices with a duality that redeems the American system and erases the plight of the victims of its injustices at the very moment of its acknowledgement, to mobilizing moments of resistance to the American system as themselves landmarks on the road to the American promise: “It’s a contest that’s been fought on the fields of Gettysburg and Appomattox [i.e. the American Civil War, mythologized as a war to end slavery] but also in the halls of Congress, on a bridge in Selma [i.e. the Civil Rights movement], across the vineyards of California, and down the streets of New York—a contest fought by soldiers but more often by union organizers, suffragists, Pullman porters, student leaders, waves of immigrants, and LGBTQ activists, armed with nothing more than pickets signs, pamphlets, or a pair of marching shoes.”

The trajectory of these movements, however, tell a different story. The American system imposed a ceiling on the successes of these movements; as is the case of the systemic and individual anti-Blackness, especially but not exclusively by a prison system that disproportionately targets Black populations and a police force that assaults Black people with impunity. The American system further mobilized the little successes of these movements to promote further injustice; the election of the first Black president as an alibi for anti-Blackness; the repealing of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy under Obama, thus allowing gays and lesbians to openly serve in the near-genocidal wars of the American empire and market the US military and its conquests as progressive and gay-friendly. The mismatch between the American system and any ideals of justice or radical inclusion is irreconcilable. In a settler colonial context and under the realities of American capitalism and systemic racism, any inclusion is always at the expense of someone else, and any change is mobilized to foreclose change.

The Change to Foreclose Change

In the course of the attempts to posit American ideals as contrary to American reality, Obama asks “Do we care to match the reality of America to its ideals?” Obama’s presidency, however, even according to his memoir, was marked by a commitment to the reality of America even at the expense of these supposed ideals (including the ones that were part of his electoral campaign).

Throughout his apologia, Obama’s repeated and constant failures to implement change, his compromises, his reneging on electoral promises and reform slogans, are themselves marketed as a new kind of politics that eschews the political “bickering” and “partisan food fights” that have characterized the Washington scene, for the sake of new harmonious bipartisanship. In other words, the change Obama enthusiastically sought to introduce is a change that strengthens the forces of the status quo.

Obama’s commitment to resist change was clear from day one of his presidency when he appointed administrators that represented the establishment and the status quo: Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Joseph Biden, and the list goes on. This commitment to the status quo, coded as unity and bipartisanship, extended to Obama’s relationship with Congress, even when both chambers were controlled by a Democratic majority, during the first “mid-term” of his presidency. This was most evidently the case in his administration’s dealing with the healthcare portfolio that led to the issuing of the “Affordable Care Act” (commonly referred to as Obamacare).

The promise to establish a universal healthcare system was one of the prominent items in Obama’s electoral campaign. Whereas the drive to establish such a system would have necessitated the collision with the forces of the status quo (not only the Republican Party and right-leaning members of the Democratic Party or Democratic members of the Congress who answered to right-leaning constituencies, but also the insurance companies and the entire medical-industrial complex), this is a battle Obama could have very likely won—and without even resorting to the arsenal of Trumpesque executive, backdoor, legal, and para-legal practices at the hands of the president, which might have indeed undermined Obama’s re-electability.

An aggressive public relations campaign on behalf of universal healthcare was likely to garner the support of large sectors of the mainstream media, could have won over large sectors of the American public who desperately need affordable medical services, and may have in fact countered the bias many Americans hold against all forms of governmental intervention. At worst, such a campaign could have pressured some of the harsh opponents and critics of universal healthcare into silence. Triumph, to be clear, was not guaranteed, but this was a battle where confrontation was more than likely to prove fruitful. Instead, Obama resorted to preemptive defeat.

Instead of confrontation, Obama made sure to present to Congress a watered down version of the healthcare bill. Whereas Obama’s plan was already based on the Mitt Romney implemented in Massachusetts, Obama made sure that the final version of the bill preemptively appease its critics and detractors: “divisive,” in other words real changes, like the “public option” or the attempt to curtail the power insurance companies hold (effectively over the life and death of the residents and citizens of the US), were completely shunned. Obama only disingenuously engaged the public relations front with timid defenses that failed to offer a clear refutation to outrageous fabrications by the bill’s detractors— including the conservative claim that the bill introduced death panels that would determine who gets healthcare and who is denied life support; Obama lacked the critical courage to point out that under the American regime of undeterred market capitalism, insurance companies already perform this function.

Obama’s failure to shape public opinion on this matter, nay his shunning of any real attempts to engage in a struggle to shape or transform public opinion, is inseparable from his dedication to the American system as it stands: winning over impoverished Americans (many of them right-leaning white working class members) to support the plan to provide them with the healthcare they desperately needed would have required challenging one of the most profoundly engrained mythologies of America: that wealth and welfare are exclusively the product of hard work, that those who worked hard have made it, and that those who lack the means for basic welfare simply need to work harder or else it is their fault. In short, a public opinion campaign on behalf of universal healthcare would have necessarily challenged the American Dream.

The American Dream and the Emperor’s Dilemma

A Promised Land is a lengthy apologia for the American system; a tedious apology for Obama’s failures to implement change. It presents his renewed dedication to the American model, the American system, the American dream, and American exceptionalism. The irony, however, is that the apology Obama presents for his failures is that the American system would not have allowed such changes as the ones he promised and allegedly sought to implement: the same American system to which he renews his dedication and allegiance on almost every page of the book.

Perhaps there will always remain those who look up to the American model and are easily duped by American propaganda, the American media, and the glossy memoirs of hypocritical politicians. There will also always be those of us who are vigilant observers, who refuse to deny or belittle the histories and present of racism, discrimination, genocide, and exploitation that propagandists try to sweep under the carpet of the America Dream; those of us who identify Trump’s presidency as not an exception to but an emblem of the American polity; and those who see, when they look at Washington, not the ambiguous promises of Obama and co., but the Congress and White House that sanction the violence of Empire, and the January 6 circus.

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In recent days, the CPAC conference has brought us a number of most unusual spectacles. It has brought us (1) the militantly tawdry respawning of Donald Trump, (2) the platform constructed using the serif odal rune shape of the SS, (3) the golden calf cult idol (and laughs for all eternity), and (4) the inclusion of a member of Happy Science, a Japanese ‘new religious movement’ whose leader claims to be the incarnation of a 330 million-year-old deity.

The spirit of this deity, it is said, has transmogrified through every other deity known to humankind, and wound up, thanks to some superhuman (and therefore totally not self-serving) coincidence, manifest in the flesh as the founder of CPAC Japan. As another coincidence of mind-melting proportions, this deity is also deeply fiscally conservative and politically reactionary of a bent that views compassion as a weakness. If I didn’t know better, I would think Happy Science (as this ‘new religious movement’ is known) were pulling the entire thing out of their asses, like an even nastier L. Ron Hubbard.

This latter fact in particular must inevitably raise a few questions—principally, whether or not the GOP remains a gaggle of thieves willing to sell each other’s grandmothers out at a moment’s notice to save their own skin politically, an end-of-times spectacle of an increasingly unstable oligarchy too drunk on its own material excess to save itself from its own decadence and corruption? Another question that springs to mind is whether it’s now in fact degenerated even further into something even more horrible again—a raging collective psychosis of pathological entitlement, collective narcissism, hypernationalist tribalism and jingoism, and death-cult supremacism.

For sheer lunacy, the sight of a Trump supporter, flag wrapped around neck, kneels hands-raised to worship the Cheeto God-Emperor, easily contends with the paranoid, sadomasochistic ecstacy of book burnings in 1930s Germany, or the endless thundering applause after one of Stalin’s speeches by terrorised party cadre unwilling to be the first one to stop. Perhaps this new variant on the theme is not yet in a position to be so destructive as some of its predecessors, but the operant word here is yet. If all the spidey senses of history aren’t blaring like an air raid alert, you do really need to read a lot more. We might as well be halfway to sleepwalking your way into the rolling inferno of systemic downward spiral and collapse ourselves.

What is it then, this collective psychosis of pathological entitlement, this rabidly fanatical and militantly ignorant orgy of death-cult supremacism? What does it even mean to be subject to this kind of end-of-days acting out, as the poisonous world you made begins to envelop you like the fires of hell done escaped and you’re dead in every sense bar the biological already?

One might argue that collective psychosis is just that—paranoid delusions that are normalised because everyone inside the cult thinks exactly the same. The truth of an idea is determined by the number of people who believe it, doing what you’re told rather than what’s right is more important than doing what’s right rather than what you’re told, and I’m told that if you think for yourself the terrorists win.

You’re tempted to imagine a conversation between two delegates attending the CPAC conference: —Isn’t it so nice that we can all agree that casting doubt on the allegation that the class interests of transnational corporate oligarchs and the common interests of humanity are the exact same gives aid to the forces of global communism, or muslamic fundamentalists, or witches? —Hang on, I’m confused now. What were we talking about again? Was it what a great substitute the ideological conformity of the ingroup centred around the individualist consumerism and narcissistic culture of the ruling class is for being in touch with who I am and what I’m about as an individual? —I think it might have been, yeah. —Oh well that’s good, that makes sense. If you can’t see what’s good about worshipping money with the fanaticism you problematise in the case of Islamic fundamentalists you’re clearly a communist, whatever the hell that is, so I don’t even need to see you as a human being anymore. —Agreed.

The pathological entitlement on display in the set of assumptions and the value system and its attendant priorities here is impossible to miss—a characteristic feature, one might argue, of a magical universe of ideological fantasy constructed out of a desire to turn the living, breathing world rooted into empirically verifiable causality into a Live Action Role Play simulation, with the most privileged and powerful actors as the noblest and most superior. Privilege and virtue are the same thing, and anyone who says otherwise loves Joseph Stalin.

What is the great value of LARP, its imaginativeness? What if we could weaponise a gaming tool to enforce total obedience and conformity with a performative parody of reality where causality, honesty and human feelings like compassion and empathy didn’t have to matter? Wouldn’t that just be SO much less work? What if we could take healthy and constructive interpersonal and social relations predicated on reciprocal justice, fairness and respect, and crush them with all the prejudice we can muster as threats to power and privilege, but do so with a self-serving fantasy where we could cast ourselves as the heroes rather than the villains?

As long as we have enough people to play the game we can rely on tribalism, groupthink, ostracism, the collective narcissism of privileged ingroups, moral panics and a permanent victim complex to avoid facts that don’t fit the narrative; look at Ben Schapiro, he juggles them all at once. Every self-absorbed, self-centred money cultist is having orgiastic conniptions as they wet themselves.

To a class that has usurped the public realm and reversed the democratic burden of proof on power to justify itself to the individual, a cultish worship of total power and those who wield it is the ideal condition for the maintenance and preservation of the kind of power formerly associated with kings. The transnational corporate oligarchy is, however, more powerful now than medieval kings ever were; their rolling back of the gains of the democratic revolutions of recent centuries a central part of their purposes in constructing a New Feudalism.

Just like the kings of old, the corporate aristocracy abides the entitlement of hereditary power—not primarily political power, in this instance, but economic power. Class power. The corporate aristocracy dances with the corpse of liberal democracy, an entity it owns like any other of its many, many subsidiaries, and claims that the hereditary power of kings is dead, as it is.

At the same time, the infernal dance also serves to hide the hereditary power of inheritance—the death of liberal democracy insofar as transnational corporations have equal rights under the law, as they do. The law cannot serve two masters, a problem it resolves by deferring to the greater power. And the greater power these days is one drunk on its own power, so drunk that it imagines its hereditary class tyranny more important than the freedoms of the individual and human rights.

So drunk is the corporate aristocracy on its autocratic, indeed increasingly hereditary power that it imagines itself entitled to lord over the world with even greater and more total power than even the worst monarch. The consequences, from the increasing immiseration of most of the world’s population alongside unprecedented concentrations of wealth to corporate capture of the political process and the annihilation of the natural ecology, are becoming ever more impossible for them to hide.

And so we find ourselves, as usual, beset with all sorts of phantoms and external threats to society—the defence of which, it is alleged, requires strong leaders, whose class interests, by some incredible coincidence, are the exact same thing. We do not need to tolerate this lie, however, any more than we need to tolerate any of the abuses and harms it serves to hide. We can, on the contrary, identify one another by common class interests and organise to defend rights and advance interests. We can do what’s right rather than what we’re told, and stand in front of freedom and defend it for all, instead of hiding behind it like cowards.

On this basis then, we can organise and right for reforms to ‘expand the floor of the cage,’ while using means consistent with ends (as means determine ends from a casual standpoint) to rise above the supremacist thinking and mentalities that creates all these problems in the first place. But we have to appreciate exactly what it is we’re dealing with first, lest we apply the thinking that created the problem in the first place in the process of trying to combat it, and turn into everything we claim to oppose. If thjngs have been allowed to get this rotten, maybe this has something to do with the reasons why.

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Last Sunday, Marie Franco stood at the rear of a Rhode Island state prison building, cradling the portrait of her son Jose, who died needlessly while incarcerated due to contracting COVID-19. As we consider the well-manicured, PR-friendly profile of the subject at hand, keep in mind that Franco’s death was caused by this politician’s decisions, all of which were formulated through a lens that constantly queried “Will this help me get closer to a DC job?”

President Joe Biden selected RI Gov. Gina Raimondo as Commerce Secretary on January 7, 2021 and she was approved by Congress, after some theatrical and positively-demented anti-Chinese red-baiting from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Cancun), on March 2. This came after being previously mentioned for several other Cabinet positions in the immediate aftermath of the November election.

Thus closes a certain chapter of my journalism career. I’ve been reporting on Raimondo for several years [1] now and predicted almost four years ago exactly in a Counterpunch column [2] her career was far from over.

Despite its reputation as a kind of mutant idiot cousin of Massachusetts, in fact Rhode Island has been a small neoliberal political alcove-cum-policy incubator for decades. Ira Magaziner, the Clinton confidante responsible for the Hillary-Care boondoggle of the early 1990s who later became the Clinton Foundation’s point man for HIV/AIDS, has an estate in the southern part of the state. The late Mark Weiner, a major Democratic fundraiser who cornered the market on presidential campaign merchandise and made a small fortune, lived in East Greenwich. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton’s VP pick Sen. Tim Kaine was in Newport when he was tapped for the spot on the ticket, perhaps at the posh (and racially-segregated) WASP beach resort Bailey’s that RI Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse belongs to. Last summer, a childhood friend living in the flight path of the state airport texted me and said that a large number of federal aircraft were landing that evening. On the one hand, it might have been troops being called in to potentially curtail the protests in Providence [3] responding to the George Floyd murder. On the other, it very well could have been the national Democratic sausage-making assembly line headed to the shoreline.

I think the Rhode Island Democratic Party leadership just let out a massive sigh of collective relief. Raimondo was always an interloper.

When she launched her political career by running for State Treasurer in 2010 (with secret dark money flowing from the coffers of Enron alum John Arnold and hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones), her PR campaign was predicated upon being a young, fresh-faced woman with solid experience in the private sector, a neoliberal feminist wunderkind of the Clinton breed that broke with old school Ocean State politics. Unlike machine Democrats, who pay their dues in municipal offices like School Committee or City Council members, she pole-vaulted over the line using a sparkling media image.

She was a Rhodes scholar, a lawyer, a mom, and came out of the venture capitalist sector that had revived the Commonwealth next door with the so-called “Massachusetts Miracle.” What’s more, she was the kind of Italian that didn’t look, sound, and act like she could have been a bumbling goomba extra in a Coppola or Scorsese gangster film, a hallmark of almost every paisan in the Democratic Party! (Full disclosure: My grandfather was an Italian from Long Island, worth noting because most Americans conflate the smallest state with that suburban strait anyways.)

What’s not to love?

A lot!

Her first major act in office boils down to a combination of late capitalist neoliberal strip-mining of the welfare state combined with shameless old-fashioned political blackmail. The Rhode Island legislature had run the state pension as a bail-out fund for their long-running, infamously corrupt, and utterly inept political schemes that would probably, under normal circumstances, have put a few former Treasurers and Governors (not to mention still-sitting legislators) in the dock for gross financial impropriety. The John and Laura Arnold Foundation (restructured as Arnold Ventures LLC in January 2019) hates public pension funds and conned the voters, in the aftermath of the 2007-09 crash, into believing there was a nationwide, systemic “pension crisis.” Paul Tudor Jones in turn loathes public education and is a big charter school funder. (Raimondo’s husband Andrew Moffit likewise is deeply enmeshed in the charter school project, working for the vile McKinsey & Co, the wretched hive of scum and villainy that blemished the record of Pete Buttigieg during the 2019-20 primary race and where Raimondo worked as a Summer Associate in 1995.)

So Raimondo used a lot of highfalutin mathy-math talk to trick the voters into endorsing her investment of the pension into hedge funds that back charter schools. Now every week public school teachers see a payroll deduction that finances the busting of their own union, a Kafka-level contradiction.

What’s worse, Raimondo’s claim that the investment would follow a dog-leg curve, with losses for the first few years followed by upwards tick and high returns, never happened, resulting in her “reform” being the largest loss of capital in state history! As a result of no uptick, pensioners have spent almost a decade without an annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) thanks to a legislative maneuver that barred any future COLAs until the pension reaches a forever-unreachable threshold caused by the advantageous “service fees” imposed on it regularly by the hedge fund managers. This equals dire economic consequences because, since the Rhode Island economy is heavily reliant upon retail and service industries, it reduces crucial levels of demand in the economy that retirees are reliably known for having as a result of their monthly pension checks. In essence, Raimondo has played a major role in keeping the economy depressed for over a decade so to bail out Wall Street. She also did herself one better by investing part of the pension in her own (actually not very) blind trust of assets that was created when she entered Treasury, showing that her instinctive Italian roots still know when and how to take a cut.

Rather ironically, in 2014, third party candidate Robert J. Healey, a longtime Libertarian-inclined local political celebrity, scored 21.4% of the vote as a result of a political campaign including a gubernatorial debate where he expressed the most left-leaning rhetoric in challenging Raimondo over her education privatization agenda! [4] “I’d really like to know [if] Treasurer Raimondo’s husband, Andy Moffit, is engaged in the business of privatizing public education, and I just wonder what deal was probably talked about or cut with the NEA [National Education Association of Rhode Island] when they supported her position on education in her campaign… She tries to portray him as a schoolteacher, but he is involved in the movement to privatize the public schools… It’s more than pro-charter. He works for a company for the purposes of making money off [public schools],” he said.

Part of the Democratic Party leadership’s annoyance with her stemmed from her being a motivated woman in an old-boys club, composed of the second- and third-generation alpha males that exited the ethnic mob enclaves for the greener pastures of political office after suburbanizing following World War II with the GI Bill.

But part of it was because of how she broke with the old-fashioned corrupt patronage and nepotism networks that define Southern New England’s particularly weird (in a truly Lovecraftian sense) social democracy. Raimondo’s career microcosmically functions as one of the last battles between the old-line New Dealers of the postwar era and the Democratic Leadership Council brand of neoliberals hatched in the rubble of George McGovern’s Quixotic 1972 presidential campaign. This should be of particular note to Washington watchers who will be monitoring the efforts of social democrats like Bernie Sanders and the Squad during the Biden administration.

It has become very apparent that Biden is not behaving the same way Obama did in his first months. Obama was a far more dogmatic neoliberal and utterly cynical, steamrolling everyone by smiling in the camera and saying “This grin will hypnotize you into allowing me to get away with murder, now watch as I bail out Wall Street for eight years and do nothing for Main Street.” It took three years until Occupy when we saw a significant mass-mobilization (leaving aside the blatantly-reactionary Tea Party) reach levels that we saw under Dubya. Biden by contrast knows who butters his bread and is acting accordingly. He is clearly aware that his domestic agenda has to grant some leeway or things could boil over quickly. While still instinctively-conservative, there also much seems to be an inclination towards some style of coalition building within this administration. This could be a point of pressure for both DSA and third party activists if they target people like Raimondo.

From there onwards, Raimondo’s career has been nothing more than opportunism, austerity, privatization, and place-holding. Her quirky public-private partnership economic policy slogan was a perpetuation of “meds and eds,” expanding two nonprofit industries in Providence that subtract significant capital from city tax revenues annually by absorbing high-value properties. This aura of an expanding neoliberal humanitarianism therefore reduces funding for public schools, which in turn is a major engine feeding working class BIPOC students into the abominable school-to-prison pipeline.

She always had her eyes on Washington and treated the Governor’s office as a stepping stone upwards, the working class and poor of Global Southern nationalities be damned because they would never vote for the troglodyte Republicans that steadily converted from neoconservative to outright white nationalist politics simultaneous with her political career. A union official wrongfully predicted for me in early 2017 that her goose was cooked because she has failed to deliver a swinging victory for Clinton in both the primary and general elections.

I never doubted the opposite for a minute.

Her scandals and foibles have been numerous but pale in comparison with the genesis of her career, the pension heist, and the other pillar, seeking to privatize every element of the welfare state that she could. She has worked with Education Commissioners over the past six years to crush the Providence Teachers Union, one of the largest white-collar elements of organized labor in the state, and her recent appointees, groomed by Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, might actually make real headway, thanks in no small part to the disaster capitalism fostered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, she installed a president at the Community College of Rhode Island, a longtime educational entry point for first generation learners from lower income brackets, seeking to bust the professors union under the phony auspices of “free tuition.” The other two major pubic institutions of higher education, Rhode Island College and University of Rhode Island, have not escaped austerity, being slowly drowned by underfunding.

I can imagine that this appointment means she will position Washington to favor the major interests that funded her career. The hedge fund industry will breathe a sigh of relief. Silicon Valley might see a collaboration between Commerce and Education to further de-professionalize and de-legitimize public school teachers via the Trojan horse of “individualized education” delivered via laptops. Hell, she might be crazy enough to try claiming the federal pension system is in “crisis” after the COVID depression and pester Janet Yellen to put that money into hedge funds as well!

The other hub of labor politics to consider is the carceral state. Despite her pretensions to the contrary, COVID-19 policy towards the incarcerated has been Trumpian. For the past year, the Behind the Walls committee of Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), a group led by directly-impacted folx, has participated in a “Knock It Off Gina!” campaign as part of the Decarcerate Now coalition seeking implementation of humane policies that would alleviate dangerous circumstances. Here are demands being read outside the Adult Correctional Institution (ACI) on January 31:

(Video credit: Steve Ahlquist of UpriseRI)

– Halt arrests and grant personal recognizance so that our loved ones are not being held indefinitely at Intake waiting for court hearings and trials.

– Reduce the prison population to control the spread of disease. Restore lost good time. Expedite parole hearings and release all eligible individuals. Utilize medical parole for all terminally ill, elderly, and immunocompromised individuals. Release all other eligible individuals into community confinement.

– Recognize the entire ACI as a priority community for the COVID-19 vaccination, with an informed consent or opt-out process for the population.

– Provide our loved ones with adequate Personal Protective Equipment (masks, soap, hand sanitizer) as recommended by the CDC.

– Regularly administer universal testing across the population, including asymptomatic people.

– Provide transparency and accountability to incarcerated people’s families. Publicly release a quarantine plan for staff and incarcerated people who test positive, as well as a formal process for family members to report noncompliance. Report daily COVID-19 numbers on the RIDOC website and social media.

– End 23+ hour lockdown. It has proven ineffective as a quarantine measure, especially as incarcerated people continue to report that prisoners testing positive are being housed with those who have tested negative. Safely restore time outside cells, including access to yard time outdoors.

A little over a week after that video was filmed, Jose Franco passed away from COVID-19 while incarcerated at the ACI. Here is his mother Marie speaking last weekend at a memorial service held during the weekly Decarcerate Now rally:

(Video credit: Steve Ahlquist of UpriseRI)

In the immediate aftermath of the Trump election, I attended a meeting where one woman described a rather instructive exchange with her neighbor. Querying about marking the ballot for the Donald, she asked:

“Do you hate gays?”

“No.”

“Abortion?”

“No.”

“Immigrants?”

“No.”

“Blacks?”

“No.”

“Then why vote for him?”

“Because Gina Raimondo took away my COLA!”

If this should be an accurate forecast for the next for the next four years, I recall the words of Introduction to Allen Ginsburg’s Howl and Other Poems authored by William Carlos Williams: “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”

NOTES

1-https://washingtonbabylon.com/tag/gina-raimondo/

2-https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/29/91530/

3-https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/26/rhode-islands-gina-raimondo-a-case-study-in-democratic-perfidy-in-the-current-rebellion/

4-https://www.providencejournal.com/article/20141029/news/310299987

The post Biden’s Commerce Secretary is Pure Clintonism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape-recorder that cost him a week’s labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geo-political affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed.

George Jackson, Blood in my Eye, 1972 [1]

Part 1 of this essay presented and criticized 14 interrelated falsehoods whereby intellectuals, commentators, and activists denied that the Trump presidency and Trumpism deserved designation as fascist[2]: (1) the classic “It Can’t Happen Here” claim that American “constitutional democracy” has safely inoculated the United States against fascism; (2) the notion that fascism is purely a 20^th Century (1920s-1940s) European phenomenon; (3) the idea that a handful of selectively tapped “fascism scholars” who happen mostly to be historians of 20^th Century European fascism are qualified to offer “expert” commentary on 21^st Century American politics and American fascism/neofascism; (4) the time-frozen and Eurocentric definition of the only relevant fascism as a fully consolidated fascist regime on the model of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Third Reich; (5) the denial that fascism could arise within and through formally constitutional and electoral institutions; (6) the “old guard” (George Jackson’s excellent description) definition of fascism solely as a corporatist political-economic regime under the command of a single party state and dictator; (7) the idea that Trump’s lack of intellectual and doctrinal rigor and discipline disqualified him and his presidency from being considered fascist; (8) the notion that Trump had/has “no ideology” beyond pure venal selfishness; (9) the idea that Trump was just another “authoritarian;” (10) the claim that Trump was/is a “populist;” (11) the notion that fascism requires a pre-existing revolutionary challenge from a powerful radical Left in order to have any relevant existence; (12) the notion that Trump was/is some kind of anti-imperialist; (13) the idea that Trump’s weak response to the COVID-19 epidemic was non-and even anti-fascist; (14) the idea that Trump’s fascism was merely symbolic, rhetorical, and performative, without serious consequences.

This follow-up essay adds 17 more misleading anti-anti-Trump/anti-anti-fascist narratives. This makes for 31 flavors of American anti-anti-fascism during and since the 2015-16 Trump campaign and the Trump presidency of 2017-21,*up from my originally proclaimed number of 26. Many if not most of these 31 flavors/narratives have been scooped and served (often with considerable disdain) by commentators and activists who identity as leftists. Many of these self-proclaimed portsiders qualify as “Trumpenleftists” – a curious and surprisingly widespread cohort that seeks common ground with neofascism in the name of radical politics. [3]

The Final Seventeen Flavors of Anti-Anti-Trumpfascism

Here are anti-anti-fascism flavors 15 to 31, to be followed with a supplementary reflection on America’s distinctive form of racial fascism, which predates and informs contemporary American fascism (and also predated and informed, indeed inspired classic 20^th Century European fascism):

15. “Trump never had a dedicated and powerful paramilitary wing to enforce his will, so don’t talk about ‘fascism.’” Well, it’s good that Trump never got that, no? He certainly tried to develop one, however ineptly. The special border patrol agents he called in from the white-supremacist southern borderland to unleash on social justice protesters in Portland, Oregon were a federal Trump paramilitary force-in-training. Trump got an antifascist (Michael Reinoehl) killed, death squad-style, as “retribution” by U.S. Marshalls outside of Seattle with a snap of his fingers last September. (The Trump hit was payback for Reinoehl’s killing of a fascist Trump supporter, Patriot Prayer terrorist Aaron Danielson.) He fueled and encouraged the growth of a vast swath of proto-fascist paramilitary sorts like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, various neo-Nazis, the Kenosha Guard (of Kyle Rittenhouse infamy), the Wolverine Watchmen (Michigan fascist militia men who plotted the kidnapping and murder of Michigan governor Gretcham Whitmer) and the like. He cultivated dangerous loyalty from white police officers across the country – a vast army of authoritarian and racist cops (including much of the NYPD, the CPD, and other major metropolitan gendarme forces) who would have gladly and bloodily suppressed urban rebellions against an election he would have stolen if it had been closer. Who knows how many supporters Trump and fascism had/has in the military and among military veterans? Who knows what kind of paramilitary he would have cultivated within and beyond the nation’s armed and police forces had he gotten a second term (which would have happened but for COVID-19)? As Max Berger observed two weeks after the Trump-sparked Attack on the Capitol:

“Trump’s support among enlisted service members was threatening enough to the incoming Biden administration that the Joint Chiefs had to issue a report clarifying they stood behind him. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of current and former law enforcement and military who are devotees of Trump. There is no shortage of veterans or police officers who could be mobilized to violence by white grievance politics and serve as easy recruits for the next fascist leader” (emphasis added).

+16. “The American capitalist ruling class did not support Trump.” Some relevant sections of the ruling class (especially in the fossil fuel and other polluting industries) did back the sloppy orange fascist. Many of those corporate and financial elites who didn’t want the demented monster in the White House in 2017 were perfectly happy to leave him there for a full first term thanks to his tax cuts and arch-neoliberal de-regulation policies. A respectable wealth and power elite that seriously wanted a fascist out could have pulled the plug well before the fall and winter of 2020-21. But this “deep state” coup never took place. If Trump had gotten a second term (as he would have but for COVID-19), many corporate and financial chieftains not on board would have accommodated or re-accommodated to his power. A future fascistic presidential candidate and president who knows how to ruffle fewer ruling class feathers can expect to do much better with the nation’s wealth and power elite. And make no mistake: most of the American corporate and financial elite would have backed Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections had the Democrats run Bernie Sanders, the leftish contender who campaigned in accord with majority progressive public opinion and called himself a socialist. The America ruling class will pick fascism over even mild social democracy ever time.

(Please review the rejection of flavor #4 in Part 1 of this essay: the point is to properly identify, fight, and defeat fascist social and political movements before they hatch full-fledged fascist regimes.)

+17. “The top military brass did not support Trump’s attempt to stay in power.” Who said they did? Thank God they didn’t. Trump clearly tried to enlist the military in service to his efforts to stay in power. After the election, Trump fired his Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who had incurred Trump’s wrath by refusing to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress the remarkable George Floyd anti-racist people’s rebellion last summer. At the same time, some inside the military establishment clearly worried that there was potential Pentagon support for a military intervention in the 2020 election. Fully ten former U.S. Defense Secretaries felt compelled to an issue an extraordinary January 4, 2021 public letter warning military leaders and the acting Secretary of Defense not to get involved in election results. The missive, published in the Washington Post, reflected no small alarm:

“As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, ‘there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.’ Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful, and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic…Acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and his subordinates — political appointees, officers, and civil servants — are each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration and to do so wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.”

For the authors of this letter, there was genuine concern that Miller might work with Trump to carry out former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s delusional plan for a military coup.

It’s good that Trump failed to win the military over. This hardly means there are no fascistic sentiments in the officer corps and command heights for a future American fascist commander-in-chief to tap. A future and, yes (see flavor #7) smarter Republifascist president more attuned to military culture and sentiments could well do much better with the Pentagon.

Again: yes, the U.S. did not become a full-fledged maximal fascist regime under Trump (see flavor #4), but nobody serious has ever claimed it did. The point here is to properly identify, fight, and defeat fascist social and political movements before they hatch such regimes. A fascist having made it into the world’s most powerful office for four years and nearly for (at least) eight was no small fascist achievement.

+18. “Trump’s base is working-class and open to the progressive political and policy agenda of the Left. The Left needs to reach out to Trump’s proletarian base. Calling Trump and Trumpism ‘fascist’ works against that. We can win his backers to the progressive side with a Left policy agenda.” Nonsense. Intimately related to the false description of Trump as a “populist,” the statistically illiterate notion of Trump’s base as proletarian has been discredited again and again (for the latest destruction of the sadly durable Trumpenproletarian myth, see this excellent Boston Review piece). Trump’s base is relatively affluent and petit bourgeois. Trumpenproletarian mythology (remarkably durable among liberal and many left intellectuals) is based on false conflations between education level and class and between region and class.

The main motivation driving Trump base was not economic grievance against the corporate and financial elite but rather white-identitarian authoritarianism and nationalism directed against people of color and a liberal and “Left” elite that is absurdly accused of having let supposedly undeserving nonwhite people “cut in line” ahead of purportedly harder working and more meritorious white “true” Americans.[4] American right-wingers hate socialism. They think Joe Biden is a socialist. The Left will not win them over with Medicare for All.

Much if not most of the nation’s white-nationalist core is simply detached from reality. QAnon is a delusional but dangerous “Nazi cult, re-branded.” Some few people on the right may have “American History X”-like experiences and come over to the side of humanity (super!), but we on the Left do not need to spend scarce time, energy and resources trying to link up with the Amerikaner Trumpenvolk. To the contrary, we need to defeat, marginalize, and indeed crush the nation’s white-supremacist fascists. “Reaching out” to meet them “half-way” is appeasement.

+19 “The ‘Attack on the Capitol’ wasn’t all that big a deal. Geez, some crazy lumpenproletarian working-class Yahoos got out of control, broke some windows, and wandered around like idiots before getting cleared out. Some ‘fascist assault!’” No. Eight thousand militant Trumpist-white supremacists and proto-fascists marched to Congress at the direction of their fascist commander-in-chief, who told them to “fight like Hell” to “take our country back” from “evil” liberals, falsely conflated (in accord with the fascist playbook) with “the radical Left.” An armed fascistic assault broke into the U.S. representative chamber with the explicit intent of halting the certification of a free and fair presidential election. The frothing mob included military veterans and law enforcement personnel scheming to capture and even kill members of Congress and even the insufficiently Trump-loyal Christian fascist Vice President. The event riveted national and global attention for hours and many days afterwards. Five people died. Many more might have easily perished. Fascist quasi paramilitary groups (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and others) were prominent among those who breached the complex. Herr Trump hoped the attack would provoke a crisis he could use as a pretext to declare a state of emergency and martial law, suspending Congressional authorization of Biden’s victory. Triggered by the president’s big fascist election lie (repeated over and over again in accord with the Goebbels playbook), the rioters had allies inside Congress, including at least four Republifascist Congresspersons. Their motives were highly political and driven by Trump’s insane fascistic “great nation stabbed in the back” claim that Biden’s election was fraudulent. Political scientist Robert Pape and researcher Kevin Ruby’s recent detailed analysis of the 193 people arrested in connection with the January 6^th Capitol riot finds that “the attack on the Capitol was unmistakably an act of political violence, not merely an exercise in vandalism or trespassing amid a disorderly protest that had spiraled out of control. The overwhelming reason for action, cited again and again in court documents, was that arrestees were following Trump’s orders to keep Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the presidential-election winner.”

The January 6^th Storming of the Capitol was a really big and dangerous deal and the stormers were heavily petit-bourgeois. Pape and Ruby found that “Two-thirds [of the 193 arrestees they examined] are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed.”

+20. “The ‘fascist’ Trump is gone now and he’s had (as CUNY political scientist Corey Robbin risibly claimed last December) little impact even on his own party, so it’s really time now about Trump and the supposed menace of ‘fascism.’” Nonsense. It’s good that Trump has been removed from the White House, to say the least (a second Trump term would have unimaginably tragic and possibly terminal for humanity), but serious anti-Trump antifascists have never thought the fascist threat in America was or is just about the demented and delusional oligarch Trump. They have always considered the Trump presidency a reflection and agent of a “fascist creep” with a life before, during, and after the tangerine-tinted, Twitter-tantruming tyrant’s presence in the White House. The American fascist virus that Trump channeled and fanned is alive and well. As Max Berger noted in the wake of the January 6^th assault in a chilling reflection titled “Donald Trump is Leaving But American Fascism is Just Getting its Boots On”:

“We must consider the defeat of Trump’s insurrectionary, incoherent fascism not as the end of the threat posed by American fascism, but as the beginning…Whether Trump is a fascist, or merely a pre-fascist, the fact is that he has demonstrated the path to power for future, more coherent fascist leaders to follow…The majority of Republican voters support Trump’s American fascism—even after the coup. According to polling by The Washington Post, 51 percent of Republicans say GOP leaders didn’t go far enough in nullifying the election, 56 percent say Trump bears zero blame for the insurrection, and 66 percent say he has acted responsibly. Trump …[is] still at 60 percent favorability among Republicans and is the prohibitive frontrunner for the Republican Party presidential nomination. Sadly, these numbers are likely the floor, and not the ceiling for these beliefs…The fascist majority within the Republican Party means that Republican office holders can’t break with Trump’s vision of the party even if they wanted to. Democratic Rep. Jason Crow told MSNBC, ‘A couple of [my Republican colleagues] actually broke down in tears talking to me, and saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for [Trump’s second] impeachment.’ Republicans are already talking about primarying the members who supported impeachment and are taking steps to remove Liz Cheney (R-WY) from leadership for supporting impeachment. So long as the majority or even a significant plurality of Republican voters are fascist, it will continue to be in Republican politicians’ interests to support fascism” (emphasis added).

Berger might have added that 70 percent of Republicans believe Trump’s Big Fascist Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him – a great and terrible deception that cannot but fuel more far-right movement formation and violence going forward.

Meanwhile, the Oregon Republican Party has endorsed the insane claim that the Attack on the Capitol was a left wing false-flag deep state operation. The Texas Republican Party has adopted the fascist QAnon (QANazi, frankly) slogan “We are the Storm.” The Arizona Republican Party has become a neofascist Trump cult. A recent New York Times report from Michigan after Trump’s second impeachment trial shows “growing signs of a party not in flux, but united in doubling down on the same themes that defined Mr. Trump’s [unmentionably fascist] political style: conspiracy theories, fealty to the leader, a web of misinformation and intolerance…his party shows little desire to break with him or his grievances” (emphasis added)/

The 2021 Republican House of Representatives contingent contains at least four far-right lunatics with ties to fascist groups: Paul Gosar (Proud Boy ally-AZ), Andy Biggs (Oath Keeper ally-AZ), Lauren Boebert (Three Percenter ally-CO) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (QANazi-GA). The Republican Senate cohort includes the mouth-foaming white nationalist hyena Ron Johnson (Rf-WI), who claims to believe that January 6^th was a false-flag deep state op, and the demented white nationalist Josh Hawley, who joined five other Republifascist Senators in voting against the certification of Biden’s victory on January 6^th, after the fascist assault. Hawley encouraged the attack with a raised fist before entering Congress to try to cancel Biden’s election.

Just seven of fifty Republican Senators voted to convict Trump after House Managers presented a slam dunk case showing beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt that Trump had fueled and sparked the murderous fascist assault on Congress.

The nation’s Trump-fanned Nazi problem could well get worse in the absence of Trump. Terrorism expert Colin Clarke thinks so, noting that the Storming of the Capitol marks “a new era of far-right violence in America”:

“the siege of the Capitol will be framed [on the far right] as a successful demonstration …Almost immediately, images from that day proliferated across [far right] social media platforms…Large segments of the mob that stormed the Capitol were unaffiliated…. these could well be the new foot soldiers of the far right. Some, perhaps many of these new recruits will have military experience or law enforcement training. The infusion of younger members into the ranks of the far right is likely to breathe new life into the movement…References to the date Jan.6 will be just as symbolic for far-right extremists as Sept. 11 is to Americans…[Trump’s] efforts to spread disinformation, undermine longstanding democratic institutions and pit Americans against one another will continue to help propel the far right long into the future…8 percent of Americans …support…the insurrection. …the imager of the Capitol siege …will have enduring resonance…The turbulence of the next several years should not be underestimated…With Mr. Trump no longer in office, a portion of his supporters are vulnerable to recruitment into more extreme networks and, potentially, white-supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations. These groups are energized and confident in their ability to co-opt militant Trumpists…As a result, a larger segment of the far right could come to engage in racially and ethnically motivated violence…the siege of the Capitol…could catalyze an age of domestic far–right extremism.”

Trump’s gone and done with now? Really? In the final week of the month in which he left office after inciting an insurrectionary fascist attack on the Capitol and getting impeached for a second time, the Republican party establishment reconnected with their recently defeated Dear Leader [5]. On Tuesday, January 26^th, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republifascist-KY), who earlier acknowledged that Trump’s sparking of the assault was an impeachable offense, led 43 other Republifascist Senators in embracing the absurd authoritarian “January exception” by voting to declare the coming second Trump impeachment trial unconstitutional since the 45^th president was no longer in office (an opinion rejected by all but a few constitutional scholars). (Hilariously enough, in his prior role as Senate Majority Leader, Malevolent Mitch had refused to permit a trial prior to Biden’s inauguration). Two days later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Republifascist-CA), who said that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack, traveled down to Mar a Lago to make amends with the orange monster.

Trump’s popularity is too strong with the Republifascist Party’s Amerikaner base for GOP leaders to jettison him just for a tiny little infraction like trying to cancel and election and carry out a fascist coup. All ten of the Republican House representatives who had the decency to vote for Trump’s second impeachment are facing a storm of right-wing criticism in their home districts. The same is true for most of the seven Republican Senators who voted to convict.

As this essay nears completion in the last week of February 2021, Trump remains in firm control of the Republican Party base and most of the nation’s state Republican parties. He is scheduled to give a major address to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) – an address in which he will send the message that that he is Republicans’ presumptive 2024 presidential nominee with a death grip on the party’s base. He will be backed by state Republifascist leaders who have led party votes to censure of Republican Senators who had the elementary decency to vote to convict Trump for instigating a fascist assault on the Capitol.

CUNY political scientist Corey Robin’s claim one month after the election (in an interview where he called Trump “almost the complete opposite of fascism” and even denied that Trump was even an authoritarian) that Trump has had less impact on his party[5A] than any other post-WWII Republican president does not jibe very well with what we are seeing so far.

+21. “The Democrats are fascists too. Both of the major parties are the same.” Wrong. Yes, the neoliberal corporate Democrats are a despicable ruling class party owned by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of capital and empire. They have appeased, enabled, and otherwise encouraged the crimes of the Republifascist, Party. They have participated in, profited from, and generally advanced the creation and preservation of authoritarian and oppressive institutions that amount to a type of underlying societal pre-fascism and an on ongoing American racial fascism (to be discussed at the end of this essay) – richly bipartisan affairs. They are a Weimar party, so to speak, in relation to the ever more Nazified Republicans. But no, the dismal Democrats aren’t themselves political and ideological fascists. They do not conduct their politics out of the fascist playbook to anywhere near the same extent as does the contemporary GOP. Proper Left contempt for the Democrats does not require diluting our understanding of fascism so completely as that. And no, the two dominant U.S. political organizations are not “the same.” Part of their hegemonic function is precisely their real differences in the constituency by race, ethnicity, gender, region, culture and more, all reflected in differences of policy and rhetoric that co-exist alongside shared captivity to U.S. capitalism and empire. “Two wings of the same [corporate, financial, and imperialist] bird of prey” (Upton Sinclair, 1904)? Absolutely. “The same?” Sorry, no.

+22. “Our real problem is capitalism; there’s no need to talk about fascism, which is a distraction from the real problem.” This is a false dichotomy. Fascism is, among other things, vicious, arch-repressive capitalism. Fascism is a product of, and subservient to, the modern corporate and capitalist era. It does not overthrow capitalism. Even in its classic historical European and statist form, it never supplanted private ownership of the means of production and investment or bourgeois class rule. Fascism (both as a social and political movement and as a regime) is dedicated to smashing popular resistance to capitalism, among other things. Left anti-fascism is intimately bound up with and all about anti-capitalism.

+23. “Anti-Trump anti-fascism is a liberal Democratic Party thing meant to defend the American status quo, falsely described as democratic. It blames everything on Trump instead of the terrible capitalist, imperialist, neoliberal, and racist social order that produced him.” No. Liberals and Democrats were and remain highly reluctant to use the F-word (fascism) to describe Trump and Trumpism. Many if not most serious anti-Trump antifascists were and are socialists, communists (the present writer), and left anarchists who see Trumpism-fascism as a product of the racist, capitalist, sexist, and imperialist American order. They have no illusions about the U.S. status quo being democratic.

(Antifascist and anti-Trump leftists like myself faced constant idiotic charges of undue sympathy for the corporate-imperialist Democrats during the Trump presidency. As the incisive Salon commentator David Masciotra wrote me last January 29^th: “It was exhausting to deal with the bizarre and disconcerting amount of people on the ‘left’ who were defending or downplaying Trump and acting as if anyone warning of Trump’s danger had somehow co-signed on all the awful Democratic Party policies since the early 1990s. ‘You don’t want Trump to become a fascist dictator? You must love Clinton’s welfare to work program.’ This is a jocular exaggeration, but not too divergent a depiction of what passes for edgy, critical thinking in some of the more embarrassing ‘left’ quarters.” Indeed, the Dem-baiting from Trumpenlefties was incessant and absurd, directed at me even as I published my third book eviscerating Barack Obama and the corporate-imperial Democrats from the radical Left last October).

+24. “Railing against ‘Trumpism-fascism’ gives a free pass to the terrible neoliberal Democrats, so you should stop talking about ‘Trump’s fascism.’” No, it depends on who is doing the “railing.” Denouncing Trumpism-fascism only does that when it is done by people who give a free pass to the neoliberal Democrats. When a radical Leftist like the present writer “railed” (a word choice meant to make serious observation seem unhinged) against Trumpism-fascism, they did so with no love for the dismal corporate and imperial Democrats. Numerous anti-Trump leftists (present writer included) find the Democrats centrally responsible for the rise of Trumpism-fascism – appeasers and enablers of the fascist disease. (See my book Hollow Resistance, written by an antifascist and Marxist Trump critic who has never held back on the corporate, imperialist, white-supremacist, patriarchal, and eco-cidal Democrats.).

+25. “You have Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)!” Anti-Trumpism-fascism activists often got accused of this “hysterical” mental health malady not just by right-wingers but also by oddly Trump-friendly “leftists.” It was a commonly unsupported accusation. “TDS” certainly happened in the mainstream media, which became passionately and commercially fixated on Trump’s every action and tweet. But when hurled at serious Left anti-fascists, the charge of “TDS” was both a bullying smear and incorrect. Those antifascists saw Trump as the reflection and agent of a fascistic movement that had been germinating in the U.S. for many decades and that promised to live beyond Trump’s removal from power. It’s a shame more Germans didn’t develop “Hitler Derangement Syndrome” in the mid-1930s.

+26. “Trump never said he was a fascist and has in fact accused his enemies of being fascists.” So what? Murderers tend not to describe themselves as murderers while trying to murder people. Racists don’t typically identify themselves as racists. Sexists don’t commonly out themselves as sexists. “Fascism” is a very bad word in American (and global) political discourse thanks to the world’s experience with the Third Reich and its Axis allies in the 1930s and 1940s (50 million people died during the global war against fascism, 1939-45), so it is hardly surprising that Trump would not openly identify as a fascist or that Trump would absurdly call Black Lives Matter activists and Portland antifascists “fascists.”

+27. “Leftists and liberals call every political tendency and authority they don’t like ‘fascist.’ When everything is fascist, nothing is fascist.” Insofar as this alleged habit exists (it likely does in some circles), it does not apply to the serious anti-fascist thinkers and activists of the Trump years. Refuse Fascism, for example, was rigorously specific about precisely how and why Trump and Trumpism were/are fascist.

+28. “All the Democrats and their corporate media allies at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC etc. called Trump and his backers ‘fascists’ from the start. That ought to tell you something about how wrongheaded it was/is to consider Trump a fascist!” Incorrect. If the “liberal media” had done that, it would have shown that they get some things right (as they sometimes do for their own reasons, which are the not the same as our reasons on the Left). But that didn’t happen. The corporate non-FOX media have been remarkably disinclined to identify Trump and Trumpism as fascist. Empirical research on mainstream corporate media content during the Trump years will show that American media has been extremely reluctant to see Trump and Trumpism as fascist. (It has been surprisingly hesitant even to use the words “authoritarian” and “authoritarianism” to describe Trump and Trumpism.) The “liberal media” has preferred to run instead with the deceptively democratic-sounding terms “populism” and “populist,” idiotically merging Trump’s hard-right neofascism with the leftish social-democratic progressivism of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It has also habitually and misleadingly described Trump and his backers as “conservative” – a strange term for a wannabe dictator who spent much of his presidency holding mass rallies fomenting racial hatred and political violence and who (as predicted and warned by many, including people from his inner circle and administration) tried to subvert a bourgeois- “democratic” election last year.

+29. “We must stand with Trump and his right-wing backers against censorship and repression in the wake of the January 6^th Attack on the Capitol. The repression and censorship of Trump and Trumpists will blow back and harm progressives and the Left.” This might not sound like fascism denial, but it is. Nazis and their 21^st Century equivalents must always be crushed and marginalized. Fascism is a malignant tumor that cannot be allowed to grow. It is perfectly appropriate for leftists to collaborate with non-fascist liberal and moderate elites in trying to cut out this cancerous, life-threatening tumor from the body politic. Wanting the fascist monster Trump, his Capitol rioters, the Proud Boys and Three Percenters et al. to go free and have full access to giant megaphones like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Parler is to fail to understand these supposed victims of repression and “cancel culture” as lethal neo-Confederate fascists who would like to re-institute Black slavery and replace bourgeois democracy with an authoritarian ethno-state. Do leftists seriously think they are incapable of distinguishing themselves from neo-Nazis and other fascists in making their own case against repression and censorship? It has been depressing to see and hear numerous “leftists” who couldn’t bother to protest a fascist United States president get more concerned about the malignant lunatic Trump’s access to Twitter than they were about his access to the nuclear codes.

+30. “Trump wasn’t/isn’t a fascist because he increased his percentage support from Black and LatinX voters between 2016 and 2020” I am not making this up. This argument was actually advanced – along with many of the other moronic denialist narratives criticized in Flavors 1 to 29 (including the false claims that to observe Trump’s fascism was to distract from the horrors of capitalism, that Trump’s crimes and fascism were mainly just “symbolic and rhetorical,” and that Trump stood down from military imperialism) – in Samuel Moyn’s January 19th Nation essay titled “Allegations of Fascism Distract from the Real Danger.” The Yale law and history professor Moyn is yet another (see Part 1 of this essay) 20th Century historian masquerading as a contemporary political and neofascism expert. In his Nation piece, Moyn pontificated as follows:

“The same system that often rendered Trump harmless continues to fail most Americans. The most graphic proof of this lies in the latest election returns, which embarrass the fascism paradigm. The most shocking thing about them is that, after four years of de-legitimation, Trump increased his support among the presumed victims of fascism, while the Democratic Party faltered. Biden broke through, thanks to the wealthy and powerful. The state where I live, Connecticut, is among the most unequal, with some of the country’s worst poverty. Biden fared worse among urban workers, including Blacks and Hispanics in my city of New Haven, than earlier Democrats—but far, far better among the wealthy denizens of Greenwich and Westport” (emphasis added).

Beyond the almost unfathomable idiocy of (a) thinking that the super-liberal state and city where one lives are proxies for the entire nation (Connecticut is home to 3.6 million people, 130,000 of whom live in New Haven), (b) calling Black and LatinX people merely “presumed victims” of Trumpism-fascism, and (c) thinking it “embarrass[es] the fascism paradigm” that some wealthy people in liberal Connecticut voted for Biden in 2020 (how so?), Moyn needs to be badly embarrassed by his statement regarding ethnocultural voting patterns in 2016 and 2020. In 2020, Black voters went 87% for Biden, similar to their 88% vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. LatinX voters chose Biden over the “often harmless” (Moyn) Trump 65-32%, similar to their 65-29% break for Mrs. Clinton.

+31 “Trump’s open white supremacism was preferable to the Democrats’ more cloaked white supremacism because the former produces mass protest while the latter puts the people to sleep and keeps them off the streets.” This is something I have heard from numerous Trumpenleft keyboard warriors even after the openly fascist Capital Riot of January 6th. It is richly ironic. There was a fascist in in the White House for four years and the makers of this claim not only refused but actively opposed and mocked the advocacy of mass resistance to him as complicity with the Democratic Party and the capitalist-imperialist system. Now that a Democrat holds the White House, they argue that it would have been better to have a second Trump term because an open white supremacist president is what “puts people in the streets.”

This is bad faith and/or stupidity on steroids. After Trump has left office, Trumpenleftists claim to be what is known on the left as “accelerationists” –radicals who want the system to become more oppressive to spark popular resistance and even revolution. But while an actual fascist, Trump, was in the White House, Trumpenleftists were de-accelerants, deriding anti-Trump protest as complicity with the other, supposedly also “fascist,” major party.

Historically speaking, the claim that right-white Republican presidents push more people into the streets and fuel more popular and progressive social movement activism and radicalism than do supposedly sleep-inducing Democratic presidents is false. If anything, the opposite is the case. The systemic nature of our difficulties and the limits of American major party electoral politics as the supposed solution become more evident and transparent when Democrats hold nominal power. This is part of the dynamic behind the rise of the New Left and poor people’s movements during the 1960s, the rise of the anti-nuclear power movement during the late 1970s, the rise of the global justice movement in the late 1990s, and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement under Barack Obama. The Democrats are best able to deceptively pose as something they aren’t — a popular opposition party — when they are out of office. They are most effectively exposed as captive to concentrated wealth and empire when they hold nominal power and the limits of the change that can be accomplished by voting them back into power are made clear. The realization can lead people into the streets, the public squares, progressive social movements, and radical thinking.

At the same time, and this is no small matter, the Left, such as it is, has more breathing space and freedom to advance its ideas and build its organizations when the most powerful office in the world isn’t occupied by a fascist maniac who rails constantly against the supposed grave dangers posed to the glorious nation by the “radical Left,” falsely conflated with the corporate Democrats. Imagine that!

American Racial Fascism

A final reflection is necessary in response to anti-antifascism flavor #s 1 through 8 and 11. I strongly recommend the cultural theorist Alberto Toscano’s brilliant October 28, 2020 Boston Review essay “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism.” Toscano challenges readers to move “talk of [American] fascism” off the familiar track of “asking whether present phenomena are analogous to those familiar from interwar European dictatorships.” Toscano reminds us that Black American radicals have long identified “a distinctly American” form of fascism understood as “a continuation of colonial dispossessions and slavery” and of “the overthrow of Reconstruction,” which “enacted a ‘racial fascism’ that long predated Hitlerism in its use of racial terror, conscription of poor whites, and manipulation of (to quote the famous definition of fascism by Georgi Dimitrov) ‘the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist sector of finance capital.’” This longtime pre-Mussolini/-Hitler U.S. “racial fascism” hatched the bloody, noose-haunted “slavery by another name” Jim Crow South, the urban Black ghetto, Sundown Towns across America, and racial pogroms in East St. Louis (1917), Chicago (1919), Tulsa (1922) and elsewhere. It currently takes form in the globally unmatched U.S. racist mass incarceration system, a critical arm of the counter- and anti-revolutionary white Amerikaner response to the Black and brown “insurgencies of the 1960s and early 1970s.” As Toscano notes, Black radicals like George Jackson and Angela Davis reasonably saw American fascism not merely by comparison with past “European exemplars” but rather “from within a prison-judicial system that could [can] accurately be described as a racial state of terror.” This enduring American “racial fascism” has proven especially sinister and intractable because it has developed alongside yet largely hidden, rendered invisible, within the sinews of outward “liberal democracy.” “For those [Americans] racially cast outside liberal democracy system of rights,” the antifascist scholars Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials write, “the word ‘fascism’ does not always conjure up a distant and alien social order.” The quote from George Jackson placed as the epigraph to the present essay says it all. Half a century after Jackson wrote it, it offers a powerful retort to those who, like VOX’s Dylan Matthews, can only grasp fascism as “an analogy to a specific moment in European history.” [6]

Endnotes

1. Quoted in Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism,” Boston Review, October 28, 2020. “Recent debates,” Toscano write, “have centered on whether it’s appropriate to compare Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.”

2. Readers interested in a precise “taxonomy” of what I mean by “fascism” may find it useful to review my previous Counterpunch essay “Thirty-One Flavors of Fascism.”

3. For a brief description of “the Trumpenleft” and its beliefs see the last sub-section of my January 15^th 2021 Counterpunch essay “Why There was No People’s Rebellion Against a Fascist U.S. President: Nine Reasons.”

4. David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley, “The Anger Games: Who Voted for Trump and Why,” Critical Sociology (March 2018): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920517740615

5/5A. The 2020 Republican Party didn’t even bother to have a policy platform in 2020! Behold these two key resolutions at the Republifascists’ 2020 convention: “RESOLVED, That the Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention…RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” What did the GOP stand for? The white nationalist cult of Trump. How fascistic was that?

6. The juvenile Caucasian Dylan Matthews (a Harvard political science graduate and former Washington Post blogger) is perhaps more personally responsible for advancing “sophisticated” and “higher educational” Trumpism-fascism denialism than any single individual in the “liberal media.” He spent considerable time in 2020 getting older (often retired) white male historians (including Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, and the truly insufferable Stanley Payne) of 20^th Century European fascism to tell him why Trump and Trumpism aren’t fascist and then reporting his findings in a series of articles on why “the F-word” didn’t apply to Trump era America. He had the chutzpah to persevere in this nauseating endeavor even after the openly fascist Trumpenvolk Attack on the Capitol. Going through and countering Matthews and his informants’ denial narratives and those of numerous other “higher educators” (Corey Robin, Richard Evans, and others) has been a highly unpleasant experience akin to jumping head-first into a giant bucket of steamy human excrement.

The post The Anatomy of Fascism Denial appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The good news is the president takes the climate crisis seriously. The bad news is it’s worse than ever. The climate catastrophe didn’t stop because Trump ignored it. Forests didn’t stop burning because he said it was a raking problem. The polar ice caps didn’t stop melting because the U.S. acted as if that didn’t matter. All that just got worse. For four years the earth continued to do what it was on track to do for some time: it got hotter. It did so because of the millions of tons of carbon that the human race pumps into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. And it will keep getting hotter until (and even after) we stop doing that. It’s that simple.

Within days of taking office, the Washington Post reported, Biden stopped the Keystone XL pipeline, returned to the Paris climate agreement, closed the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling, made climate action a priority for every federal agency, imposed a moratorium on federal oil and gas leasing and more. He also “initiated a process to invest in minority and low-income communities that historically have borne the brunt of pollution.” Biden overturned 10 Trump rollbacks of environmental policy “and is targeting more than 60 others.” He has promised to review more than 100.

He did this in two executive orders, one on January 20, the other on January 27. Biden’s first executive order singles out the Trump administration by directing federal agencies to address actions “during the last four years that conflict” with Biden’s climate agenda. It orders a review of all regulations and policies adopted by Trump on the climate and the environment.

These directives, the New York Times reported Biden as saying, “would reserve 30 percent of federal land and water for conservation purposes, make climate policy central to national security decisions and build out a network of electric-car charging stations nationwide.” The bad news was that Biden qualified all this green enthusiasm by repeating that he wouldn’t ban fracking. And he treads very carefully around the right-wing canard that going green is a job-killer. Indeed, “his order creates a task force aimed at economically reviving communities dependent on the fossil fuel industry.”

Biden has other tools at hand to tackle climate change besides his executive orders, which are just a start. There’s also the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). This commission could put “carbon prices on electricity, propelling a massive build out of high voltage power lines and making it harder to build natural gas pipelines,” Bloomberg reports, before arguing that Biden can’t rely on congress, because it’s so closely divided.

That’s where FERC comes in, and FERC is doubtless not the only federal board or commission Biden can turn to. This is where his long years in congress and bureaucratic expertise could really have some effect. This is different, to say the least, from the wrecking ball that slammed thorough the delicate climate mitigation machinery of regulation during the Trump years.

Among the splashiest headline-grabbing actions announced by Biden on the climate in the January 20 executive order is the one stopping the Keystone XL pipeline. The revocation cites a 2015 review that concluded Keystone did not serve the U.S. national interest. The order argues that we face a climate crisis which requires “action on a scale and at a speed commensurate with the need to avoid setting the world on a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, climate trajectory.”

The $8 billion pipeline, which would have carried 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day to the Gulf Coast from Canada was rejected by Obama in 2015. As NPR reported when Biden nixed it a second time, “construction on Keystone XL began last year and…about 300 miles of the pipeline has been built so far.” Needless to say, oil and gas industry groups screamed at once about “killing 10,000 jobs.” But the pipeline’s owner, TC Energy Corp. told PolitiFact that that number was really 1000. And even those jobs were temporary. The difference is due to how many jobs were projected to be created by Keystone, and that number was 10,400. However, Biden can just as easily argue that more green-energy jobs will be created instead. In fact, Biden’s clean energy plan aims to generate 10 million jobs. When compared thus, the numbers don’t look so daunting.

Bush was the first president to issue a permit for Keystone, in 2008. The Keystone pipeline system consists of four Phases. The fourth is Keystone XL. It proposes a pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta, through Montana and South Dakota to Steele City, Nebraska. Obama rejected the extension over environmental concerns. Upon inauguration, in a body-blow to those who want a livable planet, Trump promptly revived it. Now Biden has axed the pipeline again.

This is a huge victory for the Native people and the environmental groups that opposed the pipeline, but plenty of work remains. Lots of other awful projects wait in the wings. As Nick Estes reported in the Guardian: “In Arizona, where Biden won the Native vote, the Forest Service could, in the coming months, hand over 2400 acres of Chi’chil Bildagoteel, an Apache sacred site, to the Australian mining company Rio Tinto…for a copper mine, which would create a nearly two-mile wide open-pit crater, destroying numerous Native burial sites, ceremonial areas and cultural items.”

Also, there’s still the Dakota Access pipeline. This runs under the Missouri River and, the group Environmental Action charges, is “a spill waiting to happen.” Indian Country Today reports that Biden’s termination of the Keystone XL pipeline has encouraged leaders of four Sioux tribes to ask that he do the same to Dakota Access. “The leaders want Biden to instruct the Army Corps of Engineers to stop the flow of oil through the pipeline,” the publication reports, adding that these leaders cite the Obama administration’s halt for an easement to that pipeline, a decision that Trump reversed at once upon taking office.

Trump also opened the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling. To stop this, Biden’s first executive order issued a moratorium, based on legal deficiencies in Trump’s program, “including the inadequacy of the environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Secretary of the Interior shall…place a temporary moratorium on…the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program.” Biden’s order states that the secretary shall review the program; it cites Obama’s protection of parts of the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea from oil and gas drilling and Trump’s subsequent revocation of that. Biden reinstates Obama’s orders “in their original form.”

According to High North News: “The new moratorium comes only one day after the Trump administration announced that it had finalized their 10-year leases for oil drilling in the northern part of the refuge, the coastal plain.” Trump did this in the teeth of lawsuits against it from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and the Gwich’in Steering Committee. Major U.S., Canadian and European banks “pledged not to finance projects in the Arctic,” according to the Sierra Club’s magazine.

Apparently, the spectacle of fossil fuel corporations’ depraved assault on one of the worlds’ most pristine wildernesses and the horrendous publicity that would create was too much for some banks. After all, the Arctic Refuge’s species include polar bears, waterbirds, arctic foxes, caribou, moose, Dall sheep, muskoxen and brown and black bears. It is also a wildlife nursery. According to the Alaska Wilderness Society, the Refuge’s “coastal plain serves as birthing grounds for the Porcupine caribou in summer and the most important land denning area for America’s threatened polar bears in winter.” It’s also an avian migration destination: “Approximately 200 species of birds call the Arctic Refuge home at least part of the year, including snowy owls, Arctic terns and golden eagles.” The Society explains that these 19.6 million acres of public land in northeast Alaska include the Mollie Beattie Wilderness, which at eight million acres is “the second largest wilderness area in the U.S.” Indigenous people also live there and don’t appreciate the prospect of their villages polluted by oil drilling and their sacred sites desecrated. There is an Inupiaq village on the Arctic Ocean coast. The Gwich’in people also live in the Refuge.

So saving this primeval wild is a big deal. Just as despoiling it, which Trump did possibly maliciously, also would have been. Trump’s policy offered drilling rights on about one million acres of coastal plain. That included 22 tracts of federal land, about five percent of the Arctic Refuge. But back on January 6, the lease sale only attracted three bidders, one of which was the state of Alaska. Why? Because major oil companies stayed away. But that didn’t stop Trump, determined to desecrate this wilderness. He auctioned off a half a million acres. If not for the pandemic and sagging oil demand, he might have leased much more. The purpose of his unseemly haste with this auction was to lock in as many leases as possible before Biden took office.

This was a very close call. And it may not be the end of the Refuge’s problems. The Republican-led congress approved drilling in the 2017 tax cut act, “requiring lease sales by the end of 2021 and 2024,” reported the Anchorage Daily News. After the auction flopped, “oil production in the refuge, if it ever occurs, is not expected to happen for at least a decade.” Remember, Biden’s moratorium is perforce temporary; he needs congressional action to make it permanent. Those 10-year leases that were issued “create extra legal hurdles for Biden to overcome, but experts have said Biden’s administration has avenues to delay or stop it.”

Unluckily, the coastal plain may contain billions of barrels of oil. That is something senators and other Alaskan leaders find very alluring. They are not concerned with the Gwich’in, who depend on the Porcupine caribou herd for food. Nor are they concerned that burning those barrels of oil would release millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. And now they have a weapon – the leases – and the headaches they create for the Biden administration “if it plans to revoke them” according to the Anchorage Daily News. However, “the federal government has suspended leases before. Former President Barack Obama’s administration suspended oil and gas leases in Montana in an area sacred to the Blackfeet Nation. Federal courts have upheld the decision.”

Biden’s executive order also restores national monuments, specifically Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah and one undersea monument the size of Connecticut, Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Rhode Island. The order’s language focuses on restoring these monuments’ boundaries, which Trump shrank. The review will take 60 days, conducted by the secretary of the interior and also the attorney general, who is involved due to pending litigation. The AG may “provide notice of this order to any court with jurisdiction” over litigation over these monuments and he may “request the court stay the litigation…or seek other appropriate relief.”

Trump constricted the boundaries to open more land for mining. He thus reduced the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears monument by 85 percent, and cut Grand Staircase-Escalante in half. It was a move in keeping with Trump’s aim to promote oil and gas leasing on protected lands, to gut habitat protections for endangered species and to limit drilling regulations.

But then the lawsuits started coming – from Native nations and tourism and environmental groups. According to National Geographic, while the 1906 Antiquities Act gave Obama the power to protect these monuments, “there is no language in the law, however, granting presidents the right to rescind or cut them.” With oil and gas fields on Bears Ears’ boundaries, there loomed the danger of serious pollution. But for both monuments, Trump touted his reduced boundaries as job creators. The coal at Escalante, however, is deeply buried, and the coal market has collapsed, making that extraction less likely.

“No one values the splendor of Utah more than you do,” Trump told a crowd, when he visited the state to announce his monument edicts, “and no one knows better how to use it.” He also criticized Obama’s creation of such large monuments in the first place: “These abuses of the Antiquities Act give enormous power to faraway bureaucrats at the expense of the people who actually live here, work here and make this place their home.” He showed no such concern for the Indigenous people who have made this place their home since long before Utah was even a state.

According to Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye’s written statement: “The decision to reduce the size of the Monument is being made with no tribal consultation. The Navajo nation will defend Bears Ears.” Begaye affirmed that the Navajos would litigate. The statement announced that the Navajo Nation, four other tribes and a coalition of nonprofits and citizens’ groups had rallied to defend the monument. No wonder Biden’s executive order involves his attorney general. Lots of people sued over Trump’s attempt to trash these monuments. And then there could also be lawsuits from the other side, from those who wanted to mine there.

Biden’s executive order also revokes many of Trump’s orders, memoranda and agency rules and actions. Indeed, section two of Biden’s executive order is titled “Immediate Review of Agency Actions Taken Between January 20, 2017 and January 20, 2021.” Clearly Biden tried to undo as much of Trump’s environmental damage as he could in one fell swoop.

Noteworthy in this connection is the preamble to the January 20 executive order. In it, Biden invokes listening to science, protecting the environment, limiting exposure to dangerous chemicals and pesticides, holding polluters accountable and prioritizing environmental justice, among other things. These are the sorts of big claims one associates with campaign promises made to be broken. If Biden does more than a small portion of them, it will be astonishing.

Just take clean water – also mentioned in this introduction. The Flint water crisis began in April 2014, in the Obama years. Obama did not address it in any substantive way, aside from sending in FEMA. Trump certainly didn’t either. So now, in 2021, when Flint finally, allegedly has clean water – guess what? The locals won’t drink it. Would you? If you had brown, lead-polluted water flowing out of your tap for years, courtesy of the state government and they finally claimed they fixed it – would you drink it? Can you blame anyone who wouldn’t?

Flint may now have lead-free water, but plenty of other American cities don’t: Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Newark and Washington, D. C., to name a few. According to Business Insider, Brady, Texas has radium in its water; Baltimore’s cloudy water contains potentially toxic particles; toxic chemicals pollute water in Dos Palos, California; Newburgh, New York had contaminated water last year and Miami tap water contains forever chemicals, PFAS. Trump invoked clean air and clean water, but that was a joke. Now Biden invokes them in his first executive order. If he’s serious, what about all these American cities with dirty tap water? Will he make fixing that a priority? Because he should.

The second executive order, the one from January 27 presents much more of your standard impenetrable government prose, as it places “the climate crisis at the forefront of the Nation’s foreign policy and national security planning,” including rejoining the Paris agreement. In this regard, the order says Biden will host a Leaders Climate Summit, and that the U.S. will reconvene the major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, to pursue “initiatives to advance the clean energy transition, sectoral decarbonization” and more.

The order also calls for integrating climate concerns “across a wide range of international fora,” including the G7 and G10; it announces the U.S. will develop a climate financial plan to help developing countries reduce emissions, protect critical ecosystems, and promote “the flow of capital toward climate-aligned investments and away from high-carbon investments.” The order directs the secretaries of state, treasury and energy to cooperate with the Export-Import Bank and others to help the U.S. “promote ending international financing of carbon-intensive fossil fuel-based energy.”

A major concern is how the climate catastrophe affects foreign policy and national security. Since the U.S. military is one of the world’s biggest polluters, one would expect that to be addressed. Biden does so – but only to a certain extent and in dense bureaucratese. He calls for assessing “climate impacts of their agency-managed infrastructure abroad (e.g. embassies, military installations).” Biden also orders the director of national intelligence to prepare a “National Intelligence Estimate on the national and economic security impacts of climate change.” He directs numerous bureaucratic bigwigs to work together to produce “an analysis of the security implications of climate change (Climate Risk Analysis) that can be incorporated into modeling, simulation, war-gaming…” Just what we need: green war-games. Or maybe Biden is concerned about climate-caused freak typhoons interfering with the U.S. navy war games in the South China Sea. Either way, it’s not hard to brainstorm better ways to focus on the U.S. military’s humongous pollution problem.

In the section on taking a government-wide approach to the climate crisis, Biden cooks up an alphabet soup of departments and advisors, who are to support the Climate Policy Office. Then he creates a National Climate Task Force. Everybody’s on it. As far as I can tell, every secretary, director, chair, administrator in this administration participates in this task force.

Buried in this section is the startling, eye-popping goal of achieving “a carbon pollution-free electricity sector no later than 2035.” This phrase makes struggling through the jungle of bureaucratic terminology worth it. 2035 might not be too late. The climate catastrophe is dire, but if we stop making it worse by 2035, there’s hope for our species – assuming other countries decide to emulate this goal. And then, equally exciting and hopeful, Biden directs various mucky mucks to make sure to end what has long seemed a permanent feature of our government, namely, fossil fuel subsidies – starting with the budget request for fiscal 2022. Reading these executive orders, one could be forgiven for concluding that maybe 2035 for drastically reduced carbon emissions is doable.

Separately from his executive orders, in other environmentally sensitive actions, Biden asked the senate to approve the amendment to the Montreal Protocol of 1987, already ratified by 113 nations. Trump was letting this die on the vine. This amendment phases out heat-trapping hydroflourocarbons (HFCs). These greenhouse gasses are 1000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, regarding global warming. HFCs are used in air-conditioners and refrigerators, but have other uses too.

Originally promoted as substitutes to ozone layer-depleting chlorofluorocarbons 30 years ago, HFCs clearly have their own problems. According to the New York Times, “thanks to well over $1 billion invested in innovation by American companies, alternatives exist.” The Times estimates that U.S. ratification of this treaty would add 33,000 new manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and have other economic benefits. Overall for the environment, this is a huge deal.

As Biden unravels Trump’s skein of environmental abuse, it’s wise not to lose sight of the tremendous tasks that remain: the climate catastrophe itself, the sixth mass extinction and ubiquitous plastic pollution, for starters. Trump did not cause these. Our economic system, also known as capitalism, did that. Massive, even revolutionary, changes in how the supposedly sacred and very unfree free market works will be required to alter the deadly course we are on. It will take a lot more than two executive orders to cure these ills – or even just to tame the illness, currently raging toward a deadly planetary fever.

One small but noteworthy example: Under Trump, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing endangered species act protections from gray wolves in most of the U.S. This is a lousy idea. It has taken years to get a healthy wolf population back in the wild, and now hunters and ranchers will have a free hand to decimate these animals again. This is not how you rescue an endangered species – and globally there are thousands of endangered species. Biden hasn’t waded into the wolf debate, but what more eloquent if understated way to show that the U.S. government takes its own laws seriously? For if the endangered species act means anything, it means that once we’ve rescued a species, we don’t turn around and endanger it again.

Biden has taken some necessary first steps on the environment, but that’s what they are – first steps. He may not be able to get a fully stocked Green New Deal through a closely divided congress, but he should certainly try to do as much as he can to reverse the planetary poisoning caused by the capitalism this country so stubbornly and dogmatically champions. FDR is his role model. FDR said he created his stupendous New Deal social programs to save capitalism (from itself). So, following in FDR’s gigantic footsteps, Biden will doubtless try to save capitalism for a second time. Whether it is possible to do so this time around, and maintain a livable planet, remains to be seen.

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Humanity has precious time to drastically and uniformly act to reduce carbon emissions and eliminate carbon-intensive economic activity before ecological collapse materializes. However, the struggle presented is not that simple. The challenge also requires providing economic relief for workers and recognizing contradictions in the prevailing economic model that created the climate crisis when undertaking a historic societal transition.

While a handful of elected officials recognize the gravity and push for a Green New Deal (GND) — that rightfully strives to curtail carbon-intensive economic growth — it must also be recognized that the GND is only an initial step. The GND hints at contradictions within the U.S. economy and outlines a transition to alleviate some of these contradictions, yet it is a mere jumping-off point and a framework that leaves questions regarding its implementation.

In sum, the current mode of production and distribution — of private ownership motivated by unlimited growth and profits — is incompatible with ensuring the survival of humanity, serving the common interest, and staving off ecological collapse. To effectively limit the destructive tendencies of a system based on carbon-intensive growth, mitigate economic contradictions, and reverse course from impending ecological collapse, a bold conversation offering implementation with explicit class politics is urgently needed from GND champions.

The Green New Deal, A Symbolic First Step

In 2006, the U.S. Green Party launched the GND Task Force, which aimed to provide a solution to economic inequality, creating sustainable green energy infrastructure, and achieving zero carbon emissions by 2030. While GND proposals have existed for over a decade, specifics vary from politician to politician and ideology to ideology. Yet the commonality shared in proposals is modeled after the New Deal’s ideals of bolstering labor-oriented social programs and protecting workers, and making it “green” through the conversion of energy infrastructure to renewables.

Since the GND’s inception, Green Party candidates Howie Hawkins and Jill Stein ran on the framework in elections from 2010 to 2018. While the Greens became early adopters, for a decade and a half the model for a green transition would stagnate in popular discourse. 15 years after the GND’s genesis and being relegated to the fringes of American political life, the public and some Democratic Party officials began to come around.

Amid the 2018 midterm elections, self-described Democratic Socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez adopted the GND and popularized it, including whipping up a 60 percent favorability rating among the public. After an upset campaign that championed a GND, Ocasio-Cortez teamed up with Senators Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders to introduce identical resolutions into both the House and Senate during the 116th Congress.

The current form is a 14-page resolution that sets out to combat climate change over a “ten-year mobilization”. It can be broken down into two parts. One section espouses a series of climate goals, while the second lays out labor-centered benefits.

The first section, where the “green” in its namesake arises, states the impacts of climate change, citing the fiscal cost of inaction, human tolls like mass migrations, and the reality after the destruction of ecosystems. The section also outlines broad goals the U.S. needs to accomplish to mitigate the impacts of climate disaster, such as becoming completely carbon-neutral by 2050 and achieving “global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from human sources of 40 to 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030.”

The second section is the New Deal aspect, which recognizes that current economic precarity has created instability for working people. It calls for redistributive, universal measures, like single-payer health care, a federal jobs guarantee, higher wages, and funding education and training for workers.

While it’s a start, it isn’t the end-all-be-all policy to solve impending ecological dystopia that some believe it to be. It is a meaningful first step; yet, it’s just that: a first step.

From a technocratic legislative lens, the GND is a Congressional simple resolution (labeled H. Res. or S. Res.), meaning that it doesn’t fund or create new programs and doesn’t possess specific implementation policies. Although legislation, simple resolutions do not have to be voted on by the opposite chamber of Congress and do not have to be enacted by the executive branch. These types of resolutions merely express the sentiments of either body of the legislature and carry no legally binding weight.

In the context of acting on climate change, the GND leaves out implementation details of how to reach the stated sentiments and doesn’t legally commit the U.S. to its goals. Simply stated, the GND is a symbolic first step that expresses Congressional sentiments for the U.S. to strive for climate goals while protecting workers to accomplish the transition.

The resolution is correct to label climate change as an imminent global threat, create objectives to mitigate catastrophe, recognize the need to protect working people, and hint that energy infrastructure — along with other sectors — should be placed under public ownership. Yet, questions remain regarding how the GND, if advanced into more Congressional support and a legally binding structure, would be crafted and implemented.

GND supporters — Congressional, amongst the public, and media — must begin to look at how to achieve the resolution’s goals and consider the ideological framework of the GND’s implementation. With that said, as the clock ticks down and the urgency to correct climate change draws near, the GND’s future implementation cannot rely on rudderless ideological appeasement to the market.

Fighting Fire With Fire

In a 2019 CNN town hall during the Democratic Primary, climate activist and writer Robert Wood asked Senator Elizabeth Warren — a supporter of the GND — to elaborate on her position on the public ownership of utilities and capitalism’s role in exacerbating climate change.

Wood inquired, “Bernie Sanders has endorsed the idea of the public ownership of utilities, arguing that we can’t adequately solve this [climate] crisis without removing the profit motive from the distribution of essential needs like energy. As president, would you be willing to call out capitalism in this way and advocate for the public ownership of our utilities?”

Warren’s response — steeped in ideology — was unsurprisingly familiar and lukewarm at best, telling Wood, “Gosh, you know, I’m not sure that’s what gets you to the solution.” The Senator continued, highlighting her solution, “But for me, I think the way we get there is we just say, sorry, guys, but by 2035, you’re done. You’re not going to be using any more carbon-based fuels, that gets us to the right place. And if somebody wants to make a profit from building better solar panels and generating better battery storage, I’m not opposed to that.” Senator Warren concluded, “But I just want to be clear. We’ve got to have tough rules that we’re willing to enforce.”

Warren, while oversimplifying her plan, revealed her ideological commitment to the current economic order and aptly deflected from the underlying point in Wood’s question. As Wood gets at, the profit motive and private ownership are contradictory for the production and distribution of essential goods and services that virtually every person uses regularly. Wood was also getting at the notion that capitalism created this crisis and is incapable of serving the public interest.

Warren’s response, although expected, is ideologically revealing and paints an idealistic vision of remedying a never-before-seen global challenge like climate change. The Senator’s response demonstrates the halfhearted incrementalism and the “let’s not rock the boat too much” commitments of many leading liberals through seeking market-place solutions, tougher rules, and public-private partnerships.

If only it were that simple! In the fossil fuel corporations’ eyes, they know what the GND signals: an end to business as usual. It’s against their business model to let it come to fruition, let alone liberals’ tepid implementation vision of marketplace reforms to meet the GND’s principles.

As any corporate executive will tell you, the goal of private industry is to remain competitive, gobble up market share, and ensure the financial health of the corporation. The rules of the privatized market dictate that they must increase profitability and are legally obligated (fiduciary responsibility) to protect the financial health of the corporation. That means fighting against “tougher rules”, “telling them they’re done by 2035”, and eating up competitors that threaten their future.

It is also short-sighted to rely on private interests’ incentive to turn a profit in creating renewable infrastructure and technology. Reliance on the market and profiteers to sort out an existential crisis — one which will determine humanity’s prospects for survival — is irresponsible and untimely.

The ideological devotion to the private market when addressing climate does not recognize an inherent contradiction of the problem. The looming reality faced was created by the very system those like Warren seek to employ to cure it. Essentially, the liberal ideological commitment to solving climate change using the system that created it is like using fire to fight fire.

Though Warren and like-minded liberals who support the GND are right to do so, their ideology fails to produce an implementation solution other than tougher regulations and slowly phasing out carbon-intensive corporations through market-place incentives and disincentives. Many of these solutions will be circumvented due to the immense power of corporate America, which is heavily tied up with fossil fuel corporations and banks via the petrodollar. Power, which has been concentrated because of the economic system, must be confronted.

Proper policy implementation of the GND should reflect climate change’s urgency, the contradictory economic system that gave rise to it, and the concentrated private power within energy infrastructure. Rather than relying on competition and profiteering to solve climate change, meaningful solutions reside in collaboration and protecting the common welfare through publicly accountable institutions.

Crises that threatened the U.S.’s welfare and existence, such as the polio vaccination effort, the Great Depression, or the run-up to World War II required vast sums of public investment and ownership over investments. This seemingly lost ideal of common ownership and protecting public welfare in crisis has been left out of American political life. The long term solution to effectively addressing climate change and easing economic misery lies with an American pastime.

Nationalizing Industry In Crisis, An American Pastime

In a Jacobin piece, author Thomas Hanna lays out a brief history of nationalization in the U.S and asserts that democratizing industry is as American as apple pie. Beginning in World War I, with the nationalization of arms manufacturers and telephone and railroad companies, public ownership of industry has been practiced in U.S. governance for over a century.

While the U.S. is often hailed for its free-market and private enterprise system, in times of crisis — like World War II and the Great Depression — the nationalization of industry and funding labor-oriented social programs is how the U.S. has remained afloat during volatile times. In times of lesser crisis, the nationalization of companies and industries has similarly been practiced to meet production and distribution standards while bringing stability through serving the common interest.

In the post World War I environment, a collapse in the capitalist economy led to a worldwide depression — thrusting millions of people into poverty. To jumpstart the economy and alleviate volatility, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) implemented the New Deal and nationalized key sectors of the economy, including gold and silver reserves, and some energy monopolies. While resources weren’t expropriated due to the Takings Clause (a section under the Fifth Amendment that states “private property shall not be taken for public use, without just compensation”), the profits generated by the publicly held companies and industries were used to fund anti-poverty programs in the New Deal.

Shortly after the world economy lay in ruins, fascist barbarism began to storm through Europe, creating the conditions for carnage and the deadliest war in human history. During World War II, the U.S. government went on a nationalization spree. To aid the war effort, FDR’s administration put railroads, coal mines, trucking companies, and even department stores under public ownership. By the time Truman was in office, three months before V-J day — the government was nationalizing one plant or company per week.

Nationalization efforts continued throughout the post-war period when steel mills were brought under public ownership during the Korean War. Following suit, in the late 1970s, the government again nationalized railroads and continued placing industry under public ownership into the 1980s after the savings and loans scandal. In the 2000s, the government moved to place banks and car manufacturers under temporary public ownership.

By placing companies and crucial industries under democratic control, although mostly temporary, past U.S. governments ensured production and distribution standards were met to serve the common good and fend off crises caused by a volatile economic system.

Like the Great Depression and World War II, humanity is facing down an unprecedented and even more dire crossroads. To meet urgent ecological and economic security, Washington’s progressive leaders and climate change coalitions must look to the class politics inherent in nationalization to achieve their goals.

Considering the state of routine economic and political U.S. meltdowns, this is not the political moment for technocratic rules, market-place solutions, or first step symbolic Congressional resolutions to solving any crisis, let alone a historic challenge like climate change. The moment deserves more and the people deserve confrontational class politics.

In short, nationalization brings class politics to the forefront and leaders can articulate that implementing the GND through nationalization would: promote cooperation over competition; create public accountability rather than private control by an unelected few; offer solidarity when unity is scarce; restore a public utility to common ownership; and fund programs and launch initiatives of economic empowerment for all working people. By advancing class politics through the nationalization argument, the American public can better understand what they have to gain when the economy and government serves the masses.

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The rapid rise of Covid-19 has spawned a renaissance in socio-economic thinking about the best way to face the future, as mayors of cities throughout the world search for answers in the face of declining revenues while society demands more urgent help.

Eureka! Amsterdam, the Venice of the North, discovers doughnut economics. With a click of fingers, it abandons the major tenets of the neoliberal brand of capitalism’s insatiable thirst for growth to infinity at any and all costs. This city where capitalism spawned via the Dutch East India Company first issuing shares in 1602 has turned agnostic on 400 years of embedded capitalism.

In the face of a virus that has turned the world to a state of reflection of how to best cope, new ideas bring new hope. After all, the virus has exposed the utter fragility, vast inequity, and incongruity of the engulfing neoliberal machine as conceived under the auspices of Reaganism/Thatcherism over four decades ago. Nowadays, its results are aptly summarized by the universally accepted epithet “The One Percent.”

Meanwhile, Covid-19 has exposed the radical cockeyed dynamics of infinite growth at any and all costs with profits of billions, and even trillions, atop lopsided pyramids of a sick and hungry forlorn bourgeoisie, analogous to late 18^th century France when thousands of aristocrats, holding onto their heads, fled the streets of Paris.

Suddenly, out of the blue, doughnut economics to the rescue, as it levels the playing field, dismantling the wobbly pyramid of growth at any and all costs in favor of learning how to “thrive” rather than grow, and grow, and grow a lot more until ecosystems that support life crumble.

The doughnut economy, in contrast to capitalism, takes its cue from nature. Trees grow to maturity and then thrive for years. Trees do not grow to the top of the sky. Similarly, doughnut economics respects the ecological ceiling by focusing on a reduction of ecological overshoot. It’s a new pathway to a better way of life that blends with nature. At first blush, the Great Doughnut is so appealing that 25% of the world’s economy already has it under consideration as a good substitute for capitalism’s commodification of nature.

Today in central Amsterdam a shopper at a local grocery will find new price tags on potatoes, including 6c extra per kilo for the carbon footprint, 5c extra for the toil farming takes on the ecosystem, and 4c extra as fair pay for workers. It’s the “True-Price Initiative” creating awareness amongst buyers of true ecological costs of products essential to the city’s official adoption, as of April 2020, of doughnut economics.

An all-important aspect of doughnut economics is attention to the needs of all citizens by building a strong interconnected social foundation. For example, with the onset of Covid-19, the city realized that thousands of residents did not have access to PCs needed to connect with society during a lockdown. Instead of dialing up a manufacturer to buy new PCs, the city collected old and broken laptops from residents, hired a company to refurbish, and distributed computers to needy citizens. That’s a prime example of the Great Doughnut at work.

British economist Kate Raworth outlined the theory of doughnut economics in a 2012 paper followed by her 2017 book, Doughnut Economics (Chelsea Green Publishing). It defies traditional economics that she studied at the University of Oxford by focusing on a doughnut symbol of planetary boundaries and social boundaries that define safe and just space for humanity, along with healthy ecosystems, or to put it another way, living harmoniously with nature as opposed to neoliberalism’s indifference and overuse.

According to Ms. Raworth, 20^th century economic thinking is not equipped to deal with the 21^st century reality of a planet on the edge of climate breakdown. Therefore, her theory establishes a “sweet spot” where citizens have everything needed for a good life while respecting the environmental ceiling, avoiding ecological overshoot, like excessive freshwater withdrawals, chemical pollution, and loss of biological diversity to mention only a few.

The doughnut economy is displayed in a visual circular schematic with a green inner circle, which represents a “regenerative and distributive economy that is a safe and just space for humanity” surrounding a list of items that, when in shortfall, need to enter the green doughnut’s “social foundation,” like housing, energy, water, health, income & work, etc. At the outer edge of the doughnut, an “ecological ceiling” lists “ecological overshoots” that threaten the social fabric.

As the world turns, with today’s universality of entrenched capitalism, people in rich countries are living in an ecological overshoot while people in poor countries fall below the social foundation. Thus, both rich and poor are living outside of the regenerative and distributive economy found in the green inner circle of the Great Doughnut.

Amsterdam is working to bring its 872,000 residents into the sweet spot for a good quality of life without putting pressure on the planet beyond nature’s normal rate of sustainability. It’s the Amsterdam Doughnut Coalition as established by 400 locals and orgs within an intertwined network that runs programs at grassroots levels. Thus, the economy sprouts up from ground level rather than dictated from above in lofty boardrooms.

Of more than passing interest, doughnut economics is spreading throughout the world. Copenhagen’s city council is following in Amsterdam’s footsteps. Brussels is following and a city in New Zealand named Dunedin, as well as Nanaimo, British Columbia and Portland, Oregon preparing to roll out their own versions of the doughnut economy. Austin, Texas has the Great Doughnut under consideration.

A sizeable portion (25%) of the world’s economy is already studying what Raworth recognized while studying at Oxford about old school economic supply/demand, efficiency, rationality, and infinite GDP growth but missing a key ingredient known as the web of life. Economists refer to the ecological web of life as an “externality.” Is it really an externality? Such labeling removes the prime source of life from consideration in the fabric of economic development.

Raworth’s theory does not provide for specific policies that must be adopted. That is up to stakeholders to decide on a local basis. In fact, setting benchmarks is the initial step to building a doughnut economy. As for Amsterdam, the city combines doughnut’s goals within a circular economy that reduces, reuses, and recycles materials of consumer goods, building materials, and food products.

In Amsterdam “Policies aim to protect the environment and natural resources, reduce social exclusion and guarantee good living standards for all. Van Doorninck, the deputy mayor, says the doughnut was a revelation. ‘I was brought up in Thatcher times, in Reagan times, with the idea that there’s no alternative to our economic model,’ she says. ‘Reading the doughnut was like, Eureka! There is an alternative! Economics is a social science, not a natural one. It’s invented by people, and it can be changed by people.” (Source: Clara Nugent, Amsterdam Is Embracing a Radical New Economic Theory to Help Save the Environment, Could It Also Replace Capitalism? Time, January 22, 2021)

Of special interest, C40: A Mayors Agenda for a Green and Just Recovery intending to deliver an equitable and sustainable recovery from Covid-19. C40 consists of 96 cities around the world representing 25% of the global economy; it’s a network of megacities. Significantly, C40 has asked Raworth to report on the progress of its doughnut members Amsterdam, Philadelphia, and Portland.

The Great Doughnut overtaking neoliberal capitalism is much more than a simple story. It’s working! It’s brilliant! Yet, the designation doughnut has a peculiar ring that foretells a name change, but maybe not. It’s kinda cute.

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