In the autumn of 2014, I flew from New York to Simferopol, Crimea, to meet with activists who had been driven from their homes in Ukraine by far-right, racist, anti-communist mobs and politicians, much like those homegrown neo-Nazis who attacked the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, on behalf of Donald Trump.

The exiles I met and spoke with — socialists and communists, labor organizers and community leaders, even elected officials — had fled the country under threat of arrest or death. They had seen their offices raided, their neighbors beaten down and their comrades murdered because of the language they spoke, their political beliefs, their religious views or what part of the country they grew up in.

I went to meet them and report their stories. My motivation wasn’t only solidarity and human empathy for their plight. It was also because I knew what most people in this country were unaware of — that the U.S. government, including both of the dominant political parties, had a big part in helping the fascists overthrow the Ukrainian government, take over the streets and start a war in the eastern part of the country.

Prominent Republicans like Sen. John McCain and Democrats like Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, on behalf of Congress and the Obama administration. They pledged Washington’s support and monetary aid to the alliance of pro-Western politicians and fascist gangs that took power. Sometimes, they were photographed shaking hands with known neo-Nazis.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden served as the U.S. government point person on Ukraine. He delivered orders from Wall Street and the Pentagon to the compliant politicians in Kiev on matters like raising utility rates on workers, privatizing the economy and selling it off to Western businesses, and having NATO train Ukrainian troops for a potential war against neighboring Russia.

I felt a responsibility to report these facts to workers and the people’s movement here.

‘Raise the alarm, organize, defend yourselves’

I’ll never forget the plea I heard from one exiled Ukrainian activist. He had a warning for us.

In its desperation to dominate the globe economically and militarily, the U.S. is spreading fascism around the world, he said. And this will come back to haunt the workers in the U.S. 

When the fascists raise their heads here, he said, don’t hesitate. Raise the alarm, organize, defend yourselves before it’s too late. 

“We wish we had known,” he said. “We wish we had done more. Now we know what happens if you don’t.”

He knew what he was talking about. Some of his friends and comrades had been killed in the massacre at the House of Trade Unions on May 2, 2014, in the city of Odessa. 

On that day, a fascist mob violently drove progressive activists from a public square into the trade union building. Then they set the building on fire. When people tried to flee the blaze, the mob shot and beat them. At least 48 people died.

I couldn’t help thinking of those events, and that activist’s warning, on Jan. 6, when I saw a lyncher’s noose prominently displayed outside the Capitol and white supremacists with sidearms and zip ties leaping through the chambers where Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib had recently stood.

The far-right coup in Ukraine had also started with protests and the invasion of government buildings targeting “moderate” politicians from November 2013 to February 2014.

Then came raids on the offices of workers’ organizations. Right-wing militias patrolled the streets of the capital and other cities, looking for people speaking the “wrong” language or expressing the “wrong” views, much like the Proud Boys who attacked Black churches and burned Black Lives Matter banners in D.C. in December.

And then, just a few months later, came the massacre of progressive activists in Odessa and the start of a bloody war in the Donbass region that has cost more than 13,000 lives and continues to this day.

Fascism is not to be debated, but smashed

Today, six and a half years after that trip to Crimea, I remain in touch with many of the activists I met there. Almost all remain exiled from their homes. They have had to build new lives, away from friends and family, often under harsh conditions. 

A few have returned to Ukraine but face the constant threat of repression. Some have spent time in jail. All continue their political work as best they can.

“Fascism is not to be debated,” goes an old slogan. “It is to be smashed.” 

The terrorists of Azov, C14 and Right Sector in Ukraine, like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other MAGA goons in the U.S., will not hesitate to murder, lynch and repress oppressed people and workers when they get the chance. 

The centrist and liberal capitalist politicians — who rely on fascism to advance the interests of U.S. bosses abroad — won’t mount an effective fight against them at home, even if their own necks are threatened. 

It’s up to us — the workers and oppressed communities — to get organized and prepare to defend ourselves and our organizations, to defend the people’s basic democratic rights and win the masses of people to struggle for the only system that can destroy fascism at the root: socialism.

After a fascist mob was allowed to take over the U.S. Capitol, Trump’s attempts to overturn the election can’t be dismissed as a clown show. It should have been obvious weeks before.

Wisconsin showed how serious it was. Trump lost the state by just 20,682 votes, a little more than six-tenths of a percentage point. It was still a significant victory against racism.

Trump’s campaign was nonstop racism. It spent millions on racist Facebook ads attacking the Black Lives Matter movement. 

The ads targeted both Minnesota and Wisconsin, where two of the biggest anti-racist rebellions took place. Minneapolis exploded after the police torture murder of George Floyd on May 25.

Demonstrations began in Kenosha, Wis., after Jacob Blake had been shot at seven times by policeman Rusten Sheskey on Aug. 23. The unarmed Black father was shot while getting into his own car. Some of Blake’s children were in the back seat.

Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley outrageously announced on Jan. 5 that no charges would be brought against Shesky, who left Jacob Blake paralysed.

Trump himself came to Kenosha. He didn’t visit Blake’s family or offer condolences. The White House klansman spewed hate at a racist pep rally instead. 

Trump’s supporters defended Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two anti-racist activists in Kenosha. YouTube ads ran claiming “lawless criminals terrorize Kenosha.” 

Trump lost Wisconsin, but he didn’t give up. The Trump campaign spent $3 million on a recount only to see its margin of defeat increased.

Despite this recount, Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court voted on Dec. 14 by just a 4-3 margin to uphold the election results. 

Three of the justices wanted to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes in Milwaukee and Dane counties. (Dane County includes the state capital of Madison.) 

More than three-quarters of the state’s Black population live in these two counties.

The deciding vote was cast by a right-winger, Brian Hagedorn. He’s such a bigot that he founded an anti-LGBTQ2S private elementary school, the Augustine Academy in Waukesha. 

Hagedorn wasn’t seeking redemption. The judge’s decision was on behalf of the national ruling class, most of whom think it’s politically dangerous to throw out so many votes. 

They feared millions of people taking to the streets as over 20 million people did during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. 

That prospect didn’t prevent three state Supreme Court justices from wanting to overturn the election results and declare that Black votes don’t matter.

Racism and union busting

Behind the three judges who were willing to risk another people’s uprising were a series of Badger State billionaires. 

Among them are Richard Uihlein and Elizabeth Uihlein, who together own the nonunion Uline business supply outfit. They gave nearly $40 million to racist candidates in the 2018 elections. 

Liz Uihlein claimed “the media is overblowing COVID-19“ in a March 13 email. Eight months later, both the Uihleins contracted the coronavirus.     

Then there’s the Kohler family’s $8.3 billion toilet-making fortune. It took over 60 years for Kohler workers to get a union.

An 1897 strike was smashed. So was the 1934 strike in the family’s company town of Kohler ― just west of  Sheboygan ― where two workers were killed. 

Only after a strike starting in 1954 and lasting more than six years was Kohler forced to sign a union contract with Local 833 of the United Auto Workers. Two members of the Kohler strikebreaking family were Wisconsin governors.

Milwaukee was the last big manufacturing city in the U.S. that the Great Migration of African Americans came to. By 1970, many of Milwaukee’s factories were dependent on Black labor.

Among them was A.O. Smith, which manufactured a quarter of the auto frames used by General Motors. The 360-acre facility was known as “the plant” in the local Black community because so many African Americans were employed there.

Capitalism’s need for Black workers didn’t prevent Milwaukee from being the most segregated city in the United States. Every year, Vel Phillips, the first Black member and first woman member of Milwaukee’s City Council, would introduce a fair housing ordinance.

It would be voted down unanimously. Father Jim Groppi led nightly “open housing” marches in 1966 and 1967, some of which were violently attacked by racists.

The local fair housing law was only passed after Milwaukee’s Black rebellion in 1967, in which four people were killed.

Destroying jobs and filling prisons  

The big Allen-Bradley plant on the city’s South Side refused for years to hire Black or Latinx workers. That’s the reason super racist Lester Maddox came to campaign there when he ran for president in 1976.

Maddox had closed his Atlanta chicken shack so he wouldn’t have to serve Black people. The fascist handed out ax handles to his white customers to attack Black people.

The Bradleys sold their electrical controls company to Rockwell International in 1985. Much of the proceeds went to the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which now has over $800 million in assets.

All of it is used to promote hate. Among its recipients is Charles Murray, co-author of “The Bell Curve,” which claimed there were differences in intelligence between Blacks and whites.

This is Hitler stuff and Murray got a $250,000 prize from the Bradley Foundation for it in 2016. Harry Bradley was a founding member of the John Birch Society, whose headquarters are located in Appleton, Wis.

Between 1977 and 1992, 55,000 factory jobs were destroyed in Milwaukee County according to the Census of Manufactures. Most of them were union jobs.

But there was an increase of 66,000 manufacturing jobs in the rest of the state, which is overwhelmingly white. Big capital wanted to get away from Black workers and unions.

Instead of Black workers getting jobs in the big plants, they were being railroaded to big prisons.

The 53206 ZIP code touches the now-closed A.O. Smith plant where over 7,000 workers used to be employed. Sixty-two percent of the Black adult men there are either incarcerated or have been in prison. 

In 2010, slightly more than one in 25 Black people in Wisconsin were locked up. Billionaire families like the Uihleins and the Bradleys have increased the prison population by eight times since the early 1960s.

This is the viciousness that was rejected by poor and working people in Wisconsin.

Jail Trump, his fascist mob, and killer cops 

The storming of the U.S. Capitol by white supremacists incited by President Trump, which temporarily halted the certification vote, had to have the collusion of multiple federal police agencies. It is implausible that there was no preparation when these very events had been telegraphed for months by Trump himself. “Civil War January 6, 2021” was printed on the MAGA sweatshirts; this was no secret. The only way that the racist mob could freely occupy the Capitol is if the police made a deliberate decision to let them.

The world watched while armed fascists carrying Confederate flags and metal battering rams breached metal detectors, held Congress hostage, took over offices, smashed windows, openly carried ladders to scale the Capitol, posed for selfies with police and were eventually escorted out of the building without initial arrest. 

Two pipe bombs were confiscated, along with weapons and ammunition, and five people are reported dead. A KKK-inspired noose was erected on the west end of the Capitol.

This was reminiscent of how the Alabama authorities allowed the Klan to attack the freedom riders in Anniston, Ala., on May 14, 1961, nearly killing several people. Local police did nothing for at least 15 minutes.

The storming of the Capitol was consciously in the tradition of the previous overthrow of the democratically elected, majority-rule Reconstruction governments in South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and the rest, which culminated in the coup and massacre in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898.

Contrast this with Kenosha, Wis. In anticipation of community anger at the refusal to indict police in the shooting of Jacob Blake, streets were shut down and the National Guard was mobilized in advance of the acquittal. 

What happens next, is the danger over?

Biden’s extremely weak response is deeply problematic in terms of pushing back the fascists and what it means for the future. Rather than making a call for disbanding the fascist thugs, the racist mob or arresting Trump, Biden called for unity. 

Unity with who and for what?

Here was an opportunity for Biden and the Democrats to strike a definitive blow against Trump and the movement he has spawned. He could have called for Trump’s arrest or made an appeal for people to mobilize against the racist and reactionary threat. He didn’t. 

In many respects it was a betrayal of the Black voters, especially in Georgia, who courageously resisted racist threats to vote against racism and reaction. 

The timidity of Biden and the Democrats is not surprising. 

What underlies these developments and girders the fascist reaction is the contraction of the capitalist economy and the deep decay and crisis of the system. While seemingly hidden, it supersedes the will of capitalist politicians who attempt to represent one section or another of the ruling class. 

It is an important lesson. The capitalist class, regardless of its divisions, has no will to put these racist scum in the dustbin of history.  Like the bankers and businesses that were financing Hitler up to the last bullet, they are hedging their bets. They are reluctant to crush them.

Danger of imperialist war in the next 14 days 

We would be seriously amiss to not state the obvious threat of imperialist war most immediately aimed at Iran, but ultimately — regardless of which administration is in office — directed at any country that seeks to chart an independent course from imperialism — whether it is Venezuela, China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cuba or Zimbabwe. See the call for emergency response actions.

There are still over a week before the Jan. 20 inauguration. Just as we demand the jailing of killer cops, we must mobilize the movement to call for the immediate arrest of Trump and stop the white supremacist mobs. 

Trump should not only be arrested but also extradited for war crimes. Trump is now wanted by Iraq for ordering the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani and Iraqi Commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis; Iran has also issued an arrest warrant through Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization) for the same crime.

The antidote to fascism is workers’ solidarity and socialism

While billionaires are raking in unprecedented profits, cashing in while the deaths of COVID victims piles up, the vast majority of the people are finding themselves living in deeper misery. Capitalist governments have not been able to stop the COVID pandemic and have failed miserably at providing health care for the vast majority. Widespread unemployment threatens not only low wage workers but also the middle class. Millions are facing evictions, foreclosures and utility shutoffs.  

Traditionally it is the middle class, the small business owners, and others like them who are isolated and in despair, who are duped by fascist ideology. It is only a strong, united anti-capitalist and anti-racist working-class movement that can pull them away from such an destructive dead end.

“Such a situation can only exist in periods of extraordinarily acute social crisis when the capitalist state is so torn by accumulating inner contradictions and weakened by its inability to overcome its social crisis that it inevitably gives way to extra-parliamentary, extra-legal forms of rule,” Sam Marcy said of the struggle against fascism. 

It will take the organization of the broad working class and the leadership of its most oppressed, Black, Brown, Latinx, Indigenous, Arab, Asian, women and LGBTQ2S people, to both develop a defense of its own class interests and place socialism on the agenda.

Many organizations participated in the Dec. 12 International Human Rights Day: Uniting Beyond 2020 webinar, with speakers addressing the need for continued political struggle against policies of war and poverty promoted by both the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S. and for international solidarity with working and poor people around the world in their struggle against imperialism. The event was organized by Anakbayan LA, CISPES LA, Students for Justice in Palestine/UCLA, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Unión del Barrio, the African Peoples Socialist Party, Bayan-SoCal, the Socialist Unity Party, the Student Labor Advocacy Group and others.

Following is the talk given by John Parker, representing the Socialist Unity Party, who spoke on Biden’s proposed cabinet and administration and its essentially pro-business, pro-war, pro-cop, anti-worker character.

Sometimes the ruling class will use the real issue and need for representation of the oppressed in a cynical way to further more oppression and exploitation against our class. That’s what’s going on with regard to Biden’s new cabinet picks. 

Records are being broken in his selection of the first Black woman as vice president, Kamala Harris, who is so pro-cop she’s against even the most minimal demands to end police repression. And then there are cabinet appointments, including the first woman to run the Treasury Department, the first Black deputy treasury secretary and the first Black chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).

The fact remains, however, that the capitalist state needs repression to maintain inequality and exploitation of our class and, with regard to economics, their goal is to maintain profits and the exploitation that keeps us in poverty for the sake of their profits.

Biden made that clear during a campaign event to rich donors in the summer of 2019, where he said that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.” At an event by the Poor People’s Campaign that he attended, he said the opposite.

With regard to war, Biden’s pick for U.S. secretary of defense is retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, who led the U.S. Central Command from 2013 to 2016 under Obama. Austin would be the first African American secretary of defense.

Austin was in the U.S. military when, as reported by the Council of Foreign Relations, the U.S. dropped an average of 72 bombs every day — the equivalent of three an hour — in 2016. The council admitted that these numbers were low. Around the same time, a report from military officials admitted that twice as many civilians were killed as previously reported.

Austin is on the board of Raytheon, one of the country’s most powerful defense contractors. Last year, Raytheon received more than $16 billion in federal government contracts, the fourth-most of any company.

Imperialist war, however, is also a domestic war, and this may be why Susan Rice, former national security adviser under Obama, was chosen as Biden’s pick for White House Domestic Policy Council. The job is supposed to, among other things, help fight racial injustice. However, Rice, along with another Biden pick, John Kerry, pushed Obama toward bombing. And, as national security adviser under Obama, Rice was an integral part of Obama’s use of drones for assassinations and admittedly pushed Obama toward the war against and destruction of Libya.

According to an article in the Guardian, Obama increased drone strikes by ten times from the preceding former president Bush. To attempt to justify this legally, they categorized all males of military age in these regions as combatants, “making them fair game for remote-controlled killing.”

If Rice was part of and encouraged this type of racial profiling with the use of military weapons, why would Rice be opposed to the profiling and frequent assassinations of Black and Brown children “of military age”? The extrajudicial killings and bombings that occurred during the Obama administration occurred largely in countries around East Africa, including Somalia and Yemen, and ignored mounting numbers of civilians killed on the African continent by U.S. terrorism. Again, if Rice couldn’t see the racial injustice of U.S. imperialist war, why would Rice see it in Black and Brown occupied communities?

Regarding climate change, unfortunately it’s business as usual with the appointment of John Kerry as the head of Biden’s climate change effort. Kerry told National Public Radio that he was relying on the market — the same market that failed miserably in supplying health and safety equipment during this pandemic.

The market is in search of profits, not the saving of humanity. And the two goals are often irreconcilable. The ruling class is willing to run humanity over the cliff of nonexistence with its irrational allegiance to capitalism and profit. This explains Biden’s cabinet, which will be predominantly made up of the enablers of capitalism’s many diseases, along with war criminals who belong in a jail and not in office. Therefore, it will take a unified movement of our working class to promote and fight for a society that puts the control of the resources and the land and factories in the hands of the people, not the profiteers. That’s why we must fight for socialism.

Donald Trump was the biggest loser in the November election. 

In a record turnout of the voting-eligible population, 51.4% of the vote went to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Donald Trump and Mike Pence got 46.9% of the vote. It was the biggest voter turnout percentage-wise since 1908, with more than 66% of those eligible voting.

Trump had made racism the core of his campaign, and the vote was mostly seen as a rejection of Trump and racism. 

The U.S. consistently has nearly the lowest voter turnout of all the industrialized countries in the world. This is due, in part, to the extensive voter suppression in the U.S. — including poll taxes, registration fees and “literacy tests” — and the many undemocratic measures that prevent participation in the elections, such as holding voting only on work days. 

There are also millions who are blocked from voting because they are immigrants or were formerly incarcerated. Also, the unofficial — but strictly enforced — rule that only a Democrat or Republican can be president discourages a great many voters. 

This election year had unusual complications because of COVID-19, which made voting at traditional polling stations dangerous. As a result, many voted by mail. Voting by mail is not only safe, it is democratic, removing some of the restrictions that prevent people from voting. Trump, therefore, has made a special issue of opposing voting by mail.

Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to vote in person, while the anti-Trump voters generally voted by mail. Since in-person votes were usually counted first, Trump racked up huge initial leads in most of the swing states as returns were reported on the evening of Nov. 3. At that point, Trump declared victory. 

However, by the following day, as the mail-in votes were counted, Trump’s large leads in those states disappeared. By Friday, Nov. 6, it was clear that Biden had won the Electoral College as well as the popular vote.

However, the Associated Press, which unofficially declares the president-elect, held out for another day. On Nov. 7, AP finally declared Joe Biden the president-elect of the United States.

This unusual delay gave Trump and the Republicans a considerable head start in their campaign to steal the 2020 election. The archaic U.S. Constitution, written in 1787 — modeled on the slave-holding Roman Republic’s government, with its senate and single consul (president) with supreme command of the army and the civil administration which was chosen by something like the Electoral College — provides many ways to disregard the majority vote against Trump.

First, Trump demanded recounts and looked for evidence of voter fraud. By voter fraud, Trump does not mean the suppression of the Black, Brown and Indigenous vote. Trump says there was ballot-box stuffing, with Democratic voters sending mail-in ballots and then voting in person, noncitizen immigrants voting, ballots sent in the name of dead people, and computerized voting machines programmed to flip a certain percentage of Trump votes to Biden.

If Trump could block the votes in a few key cities — Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta were particularly targeted — he could shift the Electoral College vote enough to claim victory, even though he still would have lost the popular vote badly. The trick was to shift just 4 states so that Trump would have 269 electoral votes, causing an Electoral College tie that Congress likely would have decided in his favor. 

According to the Constitution, if no candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College, then Congress decides, using a unique formula for its decision. Each state’s delegation gets one vote, so that a state with a majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives will be expected to vote for the Democratic candidate, and likewise for majority Republican states. 

On that basis of one state, one vote in the current Congress, which has been heavily gerrymandered, the Republican candidate would win.

So challenging the vote in just four states had the possibility of gaining an Electoral College victory or pushing it into a selection by Congress.

A Trump coup?

Almost 90% of the Republicans in Congress have refused to acknowledge the winner of the popular vote. Top officials in 18 states and more than half of House Republicans supported a lawsuit trying to reverse the result through the Supreme Court and the Electoral College. The court turned down the challenge on Dec. 11.

Getting an Electoral College victory was one of Trump’s strategies from the beginning of his campaign. He never tried to win the popular vote. The Electoral College is designed to block democracy and provides many avenues for special interests to manipulate the outcome. 

The Constitution allows states to select their electors any way they want. They are not required to choose the winner of the state’s vote. 

A state could decide to select its electors based on what they declare would best serve the national interest. Or a state legislature could step in after an election and select the electors, claiming that the will of the voters was unclear. (For more on the anti-democratic Electoral College, see Jesse Wegman’s book, “Let The People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College.”)

Trump might be counting on creating constitutional and legal chaos, including large-scale violence by Trump supporters in the streets, as a basis for declaring martial law. During his first “debate” with Biden, Trump had told the fascist Proud Boys to “stand down and stand by.” 

On Dec. 12, two days before the Electoral College vote, fascist Proud Boys wearing “MAGA” hats were recorded on video burning a Black Lives Matter banner at the Asbury United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C., an action widely characterized as “reminiscent of cross burnings.”  A similar attack took place at the nearby Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. 

In Olympia, Wash., at a pro-Trump rally at the state Capitol, a counterprotester was shot; police reportedly removed a bomb found at the site that, had it detonated, “could have caused significant injury.” 

Trump’s shakeup of the Pentagon leadership has certainly fueled speculation, and his attempt to remove civil service protection from most federal employees, making them political appointees to be hired or removed at the will of the president, makes little sense for a president that will be leaving office in less than two months. 

But if the U.S. capitalist ruling class, including the military brass, allows a Trump coup that way, they will lose the crucial legitimacy that 231 years of uninterrupted constitutional rule has given them. Would they do that just to keep out Joe Biden? 

While a declaration of martial law is unlikely to get support, it shouldn’t be completely discounted.  

Many capitalists prefer Trump

As is always the case in U.S. presidential contests, the big capitalists differ among themselves as to which Democrat or Republican candidate should be president. While many capitalists preferred Trump, others backed Biden. 

The argument for Trump is that as a big capitalist and landowner, he is one of their own and understands their interests. Over the last four years, Trump has run the most “pro-business” U.S. administration in history. He won over to his side many originally skeptical capitalists.

Trump first sabotaged the Affordable Care Act, trying to drive tens of millions of people off health insurance and reducing coverage for those who have it. Trump moved to dismantle public education with devastating funding cuts to the Department of Education, starving public schools and pushing privatization schemes.

Trump gutted regulations designed to protect workers and the environment. Along with the congressional Republicans, Trump pushed through a massive tax cut for the rich in 2017. He has consistently opposed any policy to combat climate change and took the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement. 

Then during the COVID-19 pandemic, he pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization. Trump has also filled the federal judiciary from the Supreme Court down and the National Labor Relations Board with pro-business and anti-labor judges.

But even those capitalists who hoped for “four more years” of this may not now support the attempts of Trump to go beyond the law and tradition in order to cling to office. That could do far more damage to their class interests than will any slight moderation of Trump’s “pro-business” policies by Biden.

The Nov. 23 New York Times reported, “Concerned that President Trump’s refusal to accept the election results is hurting the country, more than 160 top American executives asked the administration on Monday to immediately acknowledge Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect and begin the transition to a new administration.”

Signers of this letter “included the chief executives of Mastercard, Visa, MetLife, Accenture, the Carlyle Group, Condé Nast, McGraw-Hill, WeWork and American International Group, among others. They included some of the most important players in the financial industry: David M. Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; Laurence D. Fink, chief executive of the asset management giant BlackRock; Jon Gray, Blackstone’s president; and Henry R. Kravis, a prominent Republican donor who is the co-chief executive of KKR, a private equity firm.” In other words, a representative group of the ruling capitalist class.

The ruling class

Since Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, the ruling capitalist class has been strongly divided on Donald Trump. Who are the people that collectively make up the U.S. ruling class? 

The capitalist class is not just 647 billionaires. Though that is how it is sometimes seen, that’s not how Karl Marx defined it in his writings. The 1% percent or even 0.001% doesn’t really define it.

The ruling capitalist class, as Karl Marx defined it, consists of those people who live off profit — banking interest, stock market dividends, business profits and landlord rent. The working class lives off the wages of labor. There is also an intermediate class — the middle class — between the capitalist class and the working class. In the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Frederick Engels, they use the traditional French name for the middle class — the petty bourgeoisie.

As Marx elaborated, if you can live off property income — profits, interest and rent — at a level exceeding that of a skilled worker without having to hold a job, you are a member of the capitalist ruling class.

In the U.S., there are some 20.2 million millionaires, according to the Credit Suisse “Global Wealth Report 2020.”  

Only part of the capitalist class are actually business people, what Marx called “active capitalists.” These include heads of banks and other financial corporations as well as the CEOs of industrial and commercial enterprises. The active capitalists are those people who manage large and medium-sized businesses. 

Small business people generally have net assets of less than $10 million, even if they hire and exploit wage workers. Having $10 million or more in assets should be sufficient to have an upscale living standard without engaging in wage labor. 

Without at least $10 million in assets, small business people can’t retire from the active management of their business and hire professional managers to run it. They must at the very least perform the labor of supervising and managing and are therefore not full members of the capitalist class, even if they exploit hired labor.

At the bottom are the smallest business people, who cannot even hire workers and must depend on their own labor and the labor of their family members. This category of business owners — which includes small family farmers — can swing between the working class, hiring themselves out part time to avoid extreme poverty, to “successfully” moving into the capitalist ruling class.

In large corporations, the CEOs don’t usually own anything close to a controlling interest in the corporation. But if they have net assets exceeding $10 million, they can live quite well even if they lose their corporate positions. They are therefore both active capitalists who represent the owners of the corporation as well as being money capitalists in their own right through their ownership of capital.

The closest allies to the capitalist class are the near-capitalists: the upper middle class. These are the people who have accumulated an amount of capital enabling them to almost but not quite quit working altogether and live off profits, interest, or rents. 

To maintain their upper-middle-class lifestyle, these people still have to work either in high-salaried jobs or as managers in their own businesses where they are not quite rich enough to hire professional managers and still retain their upper-middle-class lifestyle. These candidate members of the capitalist class identify with the class they hope to join as full members.

Some people unrealistically expect to become capitalists in the future and thus identify with the interests of the class they will never in fact join. These range from people doing tech startups to small business people who lack enough capital to hire professional managers and therefore must work hard in their businesses to enjoy a “decent” middle-class lifestyle. 

Another group identifying their interests with the interests of the capitalist class are the local, state and federal police and prison guards — the chief instruments of state power to ensure capitalist class rule. These are the men and some women who do the dirty work of the capitalist class. Virtually all the police “unions” in the U.S. endorsed Donald Trump. 

Still another group in the middle area that identifies their interests with the interests of the capitalist class are the managers and supervisors. In “Capital,” Marx described how the division of labor requires a complex managerial hierarchy: “An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and NCOs (foremen, overseers), who command during the labor process in the name of capital.” They are salaried, with higher incomes. Almost all are white men, as is the capitalist ruling class as a whole. People of color and oppressed genders are a fraction. Racism and sexism are part of the root ideology of the capitalist class.

The working class, those who live off the wages of labor, makes up the vast majority in this country, but not 99%. Based on Marx’s definitions of the capitalist class, the middle class and the working class, the working class in the U.S. makes up 67% of the population, according to one estimate. 

If there were real democracy in the U.S., the rich would have been voted out of power years ago. But that’ll only come with socialism.

If the treatment for a symptom exacerbates the underlying illness, unleashing far more dangerous symptoms, then that “cure” would be considered a failure — especially if it accelerates the death of the patient.

The disease of racism, capitalism’s primary tool to keep our class divided, has many symptoms. One of these is the lack of representation by oppressed peoples in all aspects of leadership in society. This is most glaringly seen in Washington, D.C., where people of color and women make up a small percentage of those in the highest offices of government compared to the dominance of white men.

That’s the symptom in government. The capitalist establishment’s preferred way of treating this symptom is like the pharmaceutical companies that gave us Oxycontin, now considered the source of the current opioid epidemic: combating the symptom of pain related to an illness even though it would exacerbate the underlying illness with a deadly addiction.

For the sake of profit, the ruling class uses the symptom of exclusion and lack of diversity — which it is responsible for, and which must be taken on — in a way to actually erode working-class solidarity and unity, so that the capitalist system and imperialist war can continue, with no threat to the flow of profits derived from increased exploitation of our class here and abroad.

That’s what’s going on right now in regards to President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet nominees. From the pages of the same book that saw the selection of the likes of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Barack Obama in the U.S., we again see the necessary fight against exclusion used cynically by capitalist politicians to advance the interests of the ruling class.

Role of capitalist state

Biden is breaking many records in his selection of the first Black woman as vice president, Kamala Harris, and in his Cabinet nominations, with appointments that include the first woman to run the Treasury Department, the first Black deputy treasury secretary, and the first Black chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).

It’s therefore understandable that many will feel hopeful about these appointments. In terms of the war on poverty, the appointment of more liberal figures, like Heather Boushey and Jared Bernstein, proposed as members of the CEA, could be a turn away from the Trump administration — right?

Well, if they are actually interested in making real change, hopefully they won’t wield the same kind of toothless powerlessness that civilian police review boards around the country have.

In that case, the problem arises from the fact that the capitalist state needs repression to maintain inequality and exploitation of our class, so police review boards are a façade meant to appease people, not to have any real control over the police. And the role of the state in regard to economics is to maintain capitalist profits and the exploitation that keeps us in poverty.

Biden made that clear during his campaign speeches in 2019, where he also showed his willingness to lie as blatantly as Trump. Bloomberg News reported that during a campaign event with wealthy donors at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, Biden said that he would not “demonize” the rich. Then he pledged that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”

Worse, he made those comments after praising racist politicians, saying that he reaches “across the aisle” to bring about compromise. The problem is that his reach, in essence, only goes towards the right.

What makes this comment so Trump-like in its dishonesty? Shortly before, Biden had addressed the Poor People’s Campaign Presidential Forum in Washington, saying that economic inequality was “the one thing that can bring this country down.” He listed several new programs to help the poor that he said he would fund if elected.

“We have all the money we need to do it,” he said. 

Inequality and exploitation

Yet Biden’s picks for economic advisers are very diverse. Some are making pledges to bring jobs and make fundamental changes to economic inequality.

Wally Adeyemo, chosen as deputy treasury secretary, was quoted speaking on the importance of combating income inequality. He said his motivation came from his childhood: “In California’s Inland Empire, where I had grown up in a working-class neighborhood, the Great Recession hit us hard,” he said. “We were one of the foreclosure capitals of the United States. The pain of this was real for me.”

However, Adeyemo was also senior adviser and deputy chief of staff during the Obama administration and helped create the Trans-Pacific Partnership proposal, which, like other imperialist “free trade” initiatives, would have increased economic inequality — which is why it was backed by transnational corporations and praised by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Biden’s promise to the rich of no real changes is even being pointed out by business publications like Fortune.com, which had an article Dec. 7 about another Biden Cabinet pick, Janet Yellen. 

“But some argue,” the writer notes, “that in an attempt to pull the U.S. out of its pandemic-adjacent slump, the President-elect’s administration has relied too heavily on the old guard, borrowing heavily from the Clinton and Obama administrations, instead of including new and progressive voices on the team that will shape economic policy for at least the next four years.”  

Yellen is certainly not rocking any boats towards fighting economic inequality. Biden’s pick as treasury secretary was chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018. She was also chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Bill Clinton administration. 

Fortune reports that Republicans have praised Yellen’s qualifications and won the support of almost a dozen GOP senators in 2014, when she was nominated to head the Federal Reserve, an institution that maintained welfare for the banks, with bailouts and low interest for the financial monopolies.

Environmental devastation

Brian Deese, proposed director of the National Economic Council (NEC), is another former Obama economic aide, who helped create the 2009 bailout of the auto industry. In addition to prioritizing monopolies over workers in the bailouts, he and Adeyemo are also associated with BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, according to its website. The financial investment company came under scrutiny regarding its role in enabling climate change. 

In response to news that Deese, then managing director at BlackRock, was a top contender for the head of the NEC under the Biden administration, the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) released the following statement in November: “BlackRock executives like Brian Deese are responsible for financing environmental devastation while profiteering from Black and Indigenous communities,” said Vasudha Desikan, political director of ACRE.

“We are in the midst of a global pandemic that has devastated the economy and destroyed the lives of millions of people. We urgently need diverse leadership at powerful economic institutions like the NEC that is committed to economic policymaking that will prioritize people and the planet. …

“The truth is he was a supporter of fracking and fossil fuel production. Under his watch at BlackRock, the firm paid lip service to racial and environmental justice, while continuing to vote against shareholder proposals that sought to address these issues, especially proposals related to corporate political spending disclosure and oversight.

“BlackRock has a long history of financing climate devastation, like the Amazon fires, and racist institutions like police foundations. BlackRock should not be given any power in economic policymaking by the federal government nor should any investment firm’s executives be considered to lead major public economic institutions.

“We demand that President-elect Biden rescind consideration of Deese and other private sector executives for economic positions, and instead, pull together a short list from the many qualified policymakers of color who will do right by people and the planet.”

The statement recognizes the need, not for corporate-minded people of color to fill those positions, but those who will “prioritize people and the planet” over profits.

Then there’s Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden, Biden’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, who was one of the most vocal critics inside the Democratic Party against the campaign platform of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. 

In 2012, Tanden proposed cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in an interview with C-SPAN: “If we’re going to have a deal to address long term deficit reduction,” she said, “we need to put both entitlements on the table, as well as taxes … Some of our progressive allies aren’t as excited about that as we are.”

Record of war crimes

Like Deese, Biden’s pick for national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, is a veteran of the Obama administration. He was adviser to Vice President Biden during that administration and also deputy chief of staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That means Sullivan worked with two of the most visible forces in the Obama administration that oversaw the U.S.-supported coup in Honduras in 2009 and the 2011 war on Libya, in addition to other war crimes.

Regarding the national security of the ruling class and U.S. imperialist war, Biden’s Cabinet picks include retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin to be U.S. Secretary of Defense. Austin was in the U.S. military for more than four decades and led the U.S. Central Command from 2013 to 2016. If confirmed, Austin will make history as the first African American secretary of defense.

Austin was in the U.S. military when, at the end of Obama’s term, the Council of Foreign Relations reported that the U.S. dropped an average of 72 bombs every day — the equivalent of three an hour — in 2016. The council admitted that these numbers were low since they only had information on Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan. Around the same time, a report from military officials admitted that twice as many civilians were killed as previously reported.

According to an article in Mother Jones, “After retiring from the Army in 2016, Austin joined the board of a defense industry giant, set up his own consulting firm, and became a partner at a private equity firm that invests in defense and aerospace companies. He quickly cashed in, earning at least $1.4 million since he joined the board of United Technologies Corp. in 2016. 

“Earlier this year, UTC merged with Raytheon, giving Austin a seat on the board of one of the country’s most powerful defense contractors. Last year, Raytheon received more than $16 billion in federal government contracts, the fourth-most of any company.” 

Imperialist war, however, is also a domestic war waged against our class by means of economic deprivation. This pays for the profiteering of the military-industrial complex as it furthers imperialist terror around the world. And it pays for the repression necessary to keep our class in fear of the police, discouraging our fight for justice.

The case of Susan Rice

This may be why Susan Rice, former President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations and later his national security adviser, was chosen as Biden’s pick for White House Domestic Policy Council. The job is supposed to, among other things, help fight racial injustice. 

However, Rice, along with another Biden pick, John Kerry, pushed Obama towards bombing Syria. As national security adviser, Rice was an integral part of Obama’s use of drones for assassinations and admittedly pushed Obama toward the war and destruction of Libya. 

According to the Guardian, Obama increased drone strikes by 10 times over his predecessor, George W. Bush. The strategy that allowed this increased use of drones came by categorizing all males of military age in these regions as combatants, “making them fair game for remote controlled killing.”

If Rice was part of and encouraged this type of racial profiling with the use of military weapons abroad, why would she be opposed to the profiling and frequent assassinations of Black and Brown children “of military age” here at home by police using tanks and other military equipment meant for the battlefield?

The extrajudicial killings and bombings during the Obama administration occurred largely in countries of East Africa and West Asia, including Somalia and Yemen, and ignored mounting tolls of civilians killed on the African continent by U.S. terrorism. Again, if Rice couldn’t challenge the racial injustice of U.S. imperialist war, why would she see it in Black and Brown occupied communities?

Business as usual

So far, we see that economic change is unlikely from Biden’s picks, and imperialist war is also on the same trajectory as usual. What about another threat to all of humanity — climate change?

Unfortunately, the same “business as usual” approach — meaning continuing on the road to wiping out humanity — comes with the appointment of former Secretary of State John Kerry as the head of Biden’s climate-change effort.

Biden has already rejected the Green New Deal for changes in the infrastructure to discourage the use of fossil fuels and slow down climate change. So it’s not surprising that Kerry told NPR that he was going to rely on the same force that Trump relied on to miserably fail in supplying health and safety equipment during the pandemic: the capitalist market. 

Trying to reassure the interviewer that things would change in the fight against climate change, Kerry said: “What is clear is that the marketplace itself, globally, is moving in this direction. … I spoke with an airline’s president, and he talked about what his airline is going to be doing — spontaneously, automatically. Real businesspeople, real leaders within the business world understand that this is an imperative. They also understand that there’s money to be made in producing the products.” 

In “Capital,” the historic three-volume work scientifically analyzing the workings of capitalism, Karl Marx quoted economist T.J. Dunning: “Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. 

“With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent certain will produce eagerness; 50 percent, positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.”

The market is in search of profits, not saving humanity. And the two often have irreconcilable conflicts. So you can add to that list of things the ruling class is willing to do: the willingness to run humanity over the cliff of nonexistence with an irrational allegiance to capitalism and profit over people. 

This explains Biden’s cabinet choices — predominantly made up of the enablers of capitalism’s many diseases, along with war criminals who belong in jail, not in office. Therefore, it will take a unified movement of our working class to promote and fight for socialism.

Is there a “deep state” that’s conspiring against Trump? Retired three-star Army Gen. Michael Flynn seems to think so.

The brass hat posted a video on Twitter in July using slogans from the ultraright QAnon movement. This cult believes satan-worshiping members of a “deep state” inside the government are trying to overthrow Trump. 

But who is more “deep state” than Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor? Flynn was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. 

The DIA is just one of at least 17 spy agencies within the U.S. government. Whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed how the National Security Agency snoops on everybody’s social media using its PRISM program. 

These spy agencies spend $85 billion plus per year to spread misery and violence all over the earth. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, on Sept. 11, 1973. More people were killed in this bloody military coup than died in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001 (9/11!). 

It was the CIA and Pentagon that conducted regime change in Dallas in 1963 by killing President John F. Kennedy. 

In 1968, the deep state had the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated. At the time, Dr. King was supporting a strike of Memphis, Tenn., sanitation workers, who were government employees.

Millions of federal, state and local workers teach children, clean streets, work inside hospitals and perform many other necessary tasks. All of them are considered roadkill by the billionaire class.

This was shown during the U.S. government shutdown in 2013 that lasted 16 days. Hundreds of thousands of workers, many of them Black, were laid off.

Mothers who wanted to apply for the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) nutrition program couldn’t do so. Dow Chemical wasn’t sorry that 90% of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board employees were let go.

But none of the concentration camps that incarcerated migrant children were closed. The U.S. Air Force kept bombing Afghanistan. The real state never even slowed down.

Organized violence

The capitalist state isn’t about helping people with Social Security or food programs. It’s cops, jails, brutality and death.  

Frederick Engels ― who with his friend Karl Marx founded scientific socialism ― described this real state as “bodies of armed men.” Every regime of rich exploiters needs organized violence to suppress the poor and working majority.

That wasn’t the case with Indigenous peoples like the Iroquois whose lands were stolen by European invaders. There were no rich or poor in these communities. Armed goons with badges weren’t required to keep a small, wealthy minority in power.

The deep state is just an extension of the police who kill an average of three people every day in the U.S.

Trump ordered U.S. Marshals belonging to the deep state to assassinate the anti-racist activist Michael Reinoehl on Sept. 3. Trump bragged at a rally: “They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him. Fifteen minutes, that ended.” 

Thirty-seven shots were fired at Reinoehl. That’s the tyranny of a police state. It’s applauded by the QAnon followers. 

Yes, there is a deep state with its members worshiping the dollar, not Satan. Michael Flynn is part of it.

On Dec 1, Flynn tweeted his support for the fascist group We The People. They’re calling for martial law to be imposed, the Constitution suspended and a new presidential election held, to be conducted by the military. 

Trump wanted to call out the troops on June 1 to crush the Black Lives Matter movement. Generals in the deep state hesitated to follow Trump because they feared that rank-and-file GIs wouldn’t follow the police state orders.

Trump is now trying to organize a more successful coup to overturn the election. He wants the deep state to organize it and five Supreme Court justices to bless it. The fools in QAnon and We The People are just extras in this plot, like on a movie set.

Eighty-one million people voted against racism and Trump. The power of the people needs to be ready to stop the real deep state and evict Trump from the White House.

On Nov. 19, President Donald Trump’s legal team, led by racist former New York City Mayor Rudy Guliani, held a news conference to discuss the results of the recent U.S. presidential election. What ensued was over an hour of ludicrous conspiracy theories and virulently anti-communist falsehoods aimed at overturning the votes of Black, Brown and other working-class voters.

At the core of the news conference were allegations that Joe Biden’s recent election victory was a fraud perpetrated against the U.S. public. According to Trump’s legal team, the “deep state,” the media, George Soros, socialist countries and the Democratic Party all colluded to steal the election from Donald Trump through ballot machine manipulation. 

Far-right attorney Sidney Powell explained the allegations in depth. Powell claimed the Trump legal team had obtained mountains of evidence demonstrating the “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China” in the recent election. 

In her remarks, Powell traced the origin of this supposed fraud to Hugo Chávez, the socialist icon and former president of Venezuela — who has been dead for seven years!

Powell claimed that Chávez ordered the manipulation of Smartmatic voting machines to ensure that he never lost an election. Dominion Voting Systems, a Canadian-based company that provides voting machines to the U.S., is falsely claimed to be owned by the same company as Smartmatic. 

Accusations of fraudulent elections in Venezuela continue to be made by the U.S. government and right-wing oppositionists even in the face of widespread recognition of their efficiency and validity.

Powell’s conspiracy-laced statement also implicated Jewish billionaire George Soros in this vast plot to rig the election against Trump. Trump’s legal team argued that Soros put his full financial weight behind communist efforts to interfere with the U.S. elections. 

There is no evidence that Soros has relationships with or politically supports socialist countries like China, Cuba and Venezuela. On the contrary, he is a billionaire U.S. imperialist and devout capitalist. 

From the late 1980s up to today, Soros and his Open Society Foundation have poured millions of dollars into supporting pro-imperialist, right-wing “color revolutions” against socialism in former Soviet republics and other countries.

There is significant irony in the Trump team accusing China, Cuba and Venezuela of election tampering. If any country is guilty of election tampering, it is the United States. 

The efforts by U.S. administrations, under both Republicans and Democrats, to subvert democracy and empower right-wing regimes in countries like Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada, Venezuela, Honduras, Burkina Faso, Ukraine and many others, are well-documented. 

Outside of the bold-faced lies and baseless claims, the political lens of the news conference was gravely concerning in its unbridled anti-Semitism. Laying the blame upon the alleged collaboration of a Jewish billionaire and socialist countries smacks of the Nazi theory of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” 

This conspiracy theory was widely propagandized by the Third Reich to shift blame away from the capitalist class and towards Germany’s oppressed Jewish minority and the peoples of the Soviet Union. 

In the case of Trump’s legal team, the similarities of their allegations to the Nazi theory are hard to ignore. This is another step by Trump and his administration to muddy the waters and agitate their fascist base. 

While George Soros is no progressive hero, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that associate him with socialist countries are dangerous. They must be condemned and debunked broadly by the working-class movement.

Detroit — On Monday, Nov. 23, the Michigan Board of Canvassers met to certify the votes from the Nov. 3 elections, a necessary step to complete the archaic U.S. Electoral College process. Eyes have been on Michigan throughout the election and after, targeted by the Trump regime’s efforts to overturn the election results. This is the backstory to that struggle. 

Focusing on the question, “Will the Michigan Board of Canvassers certify or won’t they?” obscures the roots and role of the Black freedom struggle in this battle, and the struggle of all oppressed nations inside the U.S. in this election.

The MAGA theme present since before the 2016 election is a not-so-thinly-veiled synonym for “make America white again.” The campaign to disenfranchise, to nullify the votes of Detroiters is as much a part of that campaign as the brutal treatment of migrant families and asylum seekers at the border with Mexico as well as the Muslim ban, or sending body bags to the Navajo nation when they requested PPE.

What are Detroiters to think when accused of “dead” people voting? How many deaths were suffered when the unchecked pandemic swept through the city’s Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities? The traumatized community publicly mourned the dead in a citywide public memorial event with huge remembrance photographs displayed throughout Belle Isle Park. 

Knowing the disproportionate deaths among communities of color, Trump embraced the fallacy of “herd immunity,” accepting the deaths that would come. Genocide? Urban removal through pandemic? 

Detroit is the largest city in the state of Michigan. Although the population declined after the auto industry abandoned the city, Detroit remains the major U.S. city with the highest percentage of residents of African descent, still 80 percent or more. 

Detroit has worn a target since Black workers were decisive in the fight to unionize the auto industry, were a militant force on the shop floor with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, and won a Black political voice with the election of Coleman Young and leftwing militants like Ken Cockrel Sr. 

These political figures resulted from and were lifted by the mass rebellions against police repression and racism that are now, at last, widely recognized as being intertwined with the very foundation of the U.S. 

Cockrel, later elected to the Detroit City Council, famously put Chrysler racism on trial in the successful 1970 defense of Black autoworker James Johnson, who had killed two foremen and a job setter at the plant.

Similar to what Cuba has endured, Black Detroit had to pay for its rebelliousness and struggle for self-determination with decades of economic exclusion and financial blockade. The city corporation itself as well as residents were cut off from loans and financing, or when not cut off had to pay higher rates.

Neoliberalism hits home

A fundamental of capitalist economics is the exploitation of the majority of people by a small handful who gain wealth and wield political power. With the defeat of the Soviet Union and the end of the “Cold War,” neoliberalism’s war against the working class became unchecked. 

A universal right-to-vote would make capitalist rule more difficult and could get in the way of forcing concessions on the “free” working class. So roadblocks and barriers to universal suffrage were invented: poll taxes and so-called “literacy tests” to prevent Black voters in Southern states from exercising that right, backed up by terror and night riders. 

Then in recent times, voter ID laws and the “cleansing” of voter rolls were measures added to existing barriers preventing participation in the elections: holding voting on a work day, limits to mail-in voting, excluding formerly incarcerated people, confusing deadlines for voter registration, and drawing districts after the 10-year census to keep neoliberal politicians in control of state legislatures. 

Further, destroying the organized labor movement was on the neoliberal to-do list. In 2011, a law was being pushed through the Wisconsin state legislature that would require annual membership votes to maintain certification for public workers’ unions. Media reports called it the “Wisconsin Budget Repair” bill. The law pushed the budget crisis — a result of the 2007-2008 “Great Recession” — into the pocketbooks of the working class in government jobs. 

Wisconsin originated public employee unions. What is now called the Wisconsin State Employees Union/Council 24 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) was formed in Madison, Wis., in 1932. Workers in Wisconsin were the first in the country to win full recognition of union collective bargaining rights for public workers. That was in 1959.

From Wisconsin to Michigan

In February 2011, a mass mobilization was initiated by Wisconsin teachers to occupy the state capital with mass marches on the weekends to oppose the “budget repair” bill. The marches drew as many as 100,000 workers. This writer joined in those actions in Madison. 

A Michigan reporter who was also there asked me, a Detroit city worker retiree, why I was in Madison. I told her that if we didn’t stop this steamroller in Wisconsin, it would be in Michigan soon.  

In fact, the very next month, March 16, 2011, in Michigan, the Emergency Manager Law Public Act 4 was enacted by the same kind of pro-business, gerrymandered legislature, giving the governor the power to “declare the city or school board in receivership and appoint an emergency manager to act for and in the place and stead of the governing body … of the local government.” 

In response, a massive mobilization based in the labor movement collected more than 400,000 signatures to put that law — a weapon aimed against Detroit — to a vote of the people. At the next presidential election, Nov. 7, 2012, PA4 was overwhelmingly repealed by the voters of Michigan.

Then the coup began. The lame-duck legislature passed the Emergency Manager bill again on Dec. 26, but with a clause that protected it from repeal by the voters, effective March 28, 2013. Just two weeks earlier, on Dec. 11, 2012, that same legislature struck a blow against the heart and origin of the industrial union movement by enacting a so-called right-to-work, anti-union law — in the home state of the United Auto Workers and the Flint sit-down strike.

The Emergency Manager Law was aimed at Detroit, Flint and Benton Harbor. Detroit is still the largest city in Michigan, a Black and Latinx working-class center that controlled the water supply for all southeastern Michigan, held the gateway to Canada, owned the stellar Detroit Institute of Arts collections and sat on a prime location on the Detroit River, the waterway connecting the Great Lakes, not to mention billions in accumulated city workers pension funds under control of the city administration. 

In the face of the racist ruling-class financial blockade and redlining, the pension fund provided a development lifeline for Black city administrations. Limited only to solutions within the capitalist system, the city administration couldn’t go forward, caught between the needs and demands of the people and an economic and political system designed to exploit the working class.  Responsive to community pressure to say “No,” the city’s elected officials refused to go along with sweeping privatization proposals.

When the Detroit city administration proposed in the late 1970s to close Detroit General, a public hospital, a mobilization opposed the closing, including sit-ins and arrests at City Hall. Detroit General was transferred and renamed Detroit Receiving in 1980, with the promise that it would remain a public facility; that promise held for 30 years.

Current Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan was CEO of the Detroit Medical Center when it was sold in 2010. Today it is part of the for-profit Tenet Healthcare. By 2013, the Detroit Health Department and the Herman Kiefer Health Complex became collateral damage. The Detroit Health Department was completely dismantled except for the few legally required health officials. All other services went to private nonprofits. 

The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic could have been less deadly if robust public health services had remained intact.

On March 14, 2013 — even before the Emergency Manager law went into effect officially on March 28 — the Emergency Financial Manager took over Detroit. By July 18, 2013, the city of Detroit was forced into bankruptcy. 

Fight against bankruptcy

Emergency management dictatorships stripped elected representation from more than half of Michigan’s Black residents in Detroit, Benton Harbor and Flint. In Detroit, the bankruptcy was fought in the courts and in the streets, closing the road in front of Federal Court. In Benton Harbor, community activist the Rev. Edward Pinkney was railroaded to jail. Every step of the way, resistance and protest called out the robbery by the Wall Street bankers.

But the biggest headline crime was against the people of Flint, home of the sit-down strike in 1934. To cut costs, Flint’s emergency financial manager in collusion with then-Gov. Rick Snyder transferred the public water supply from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department system to the Flint River, an industrial waste dump. 

An outcry began about smelly, discolored water flowing from residential faucets. Ridicule was heaped on the people who protested. They were accused of making up stories, until Flint pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha blew the whistle on the massive lead poisoning of Flint’s children. State officials, including Gov. Snyder, escaped accountability for this crime and the fight continues for reparations and replacement of water pipes.

The Emergency Manager Law couldn’t be repealed, but the struggle isn’t over. 

In 2018, the Michigan Constitution was amended by two initiative petitions to democratize voting in Michigan — each submitting more than 420,000 signatures. Proposal 2: People not Politicians took redistricting out of the hands of the neoliberal state legislature. Proposal 3: Promote the Vote granted that anyone who had not been convicted of a crime and as a result was in jail could register and vote. 

Also provided were automatic and same-day registration, early voting, mail-in ballots without reason, and in 2020, satellite voting stations across Detroit, plus drop boxes for mail-in ballots for those worried about the post office cutbacks. Voting has never been so easy. 

The struggle in Wisconsin was diverted into gathering signatures to recall Gov. Scott Walker. The recall vote failed when the Democratic Party ran the same candidate against Walker instead of the militant leaders of the mass protests. 

This is the backstory to the fight to have the 2020 electron certified. Detroit has fought for the right to vote and will not give it up to slick maneuvers. 

Three hundred people logged on to the Wayne County Board of Canvassers zoom meeting making their voices heard. Hundreds more testified at the State Board of Canvassers meeting on Monday, Nov. 23, speaking for hours even after the Canvassers certified the Michigan election with 3 out of 4 voting for certification with one abstention.

Trump’s campaign to steal the election hasn’t stopped. It still depends on stealing Black votes. His No. 1 thug Rudy Giuliani wants the votes in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia thrown out.

[Trump backtracked on his statement that he would leave the White House if the Electoral College seated Joe Biden. Trump tweeted Nov. 28: “Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous ‘80,000,000 votes’ were not fraudulently or illegally obtained. When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia & Milwaukee, massive voter fraud, he’s got a big unsolvable problem!” – Editor]

All these cities have large Black communities with Atlanta and Detroit having Black majorities. If Trump is able to ditch the votes in these cities, he can overturn the results in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and win the Electoral College.

That’s what Trump supporter Monica Palmer tried to do In Michigan’s Wayne County, which includes Detroit. Sitting on the county election board, Palmer wanted to certify just the votes of Detroit’s suburbs but not those of Detroit itself.

That’s despite the suburb of Livonia having the second highest number of county precincts with irregularities. While Detroit is nearly 80% Black, Livonia is less than 5% African American. Detroit also has large Arab and Latinx communities whose votes would have been thrown away.

It was the power of the people that stopped this outrage. Hundreds mobilized to stop the steal. Local congressperson Rep. Rashida Tlaib — a Palestinian member of “the squad” — denounced the racist attempt to disenfranchise Detroit’s voters.

In Milwaukee, racist Trump supporters are harassing election workers, many of whom are Black, during a recount. “It looks like [Trump is] looking to do pretty much everything he can to disenfranchise voters of color,” said Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the first Black person elected to that post. 

That’s nothing new. After the 1976 presidential election, former Wisconsin Gov. Warren Knowles claimed Black people were being driven around Milwaukee in a school bus and voting a zillion times. 

Then there’s North Carolina. Peaceful marchers, most of whom were Black, going to polls on Halloween in Alamance County were pepper-sprayed and 23 were arrested by Sheriff’s deputies. The Reverend Greg Drumwright and two others are now facing frame-up felony charges.  

Sheriff Terry Johnson, who ordered the attack, is also a notorious anti-immigrant and anti-Latinx bigot. 

Black voting power under attack

It was Black voters who prevented David Duke from being elected Louisiana’s governor in 1991. While 55% of white voters cast their ballots for the neo-Nazi, the Black community, with support from progressive whites, mobilized to stop Duke.

A Black shield stopped the deluge of anti-Jewish racism and fascist violence that would have followed Duke’s election. 

Ollie North wasn’t elected a U.S. senator in 1994 from Virginia because of the Black vote. North helped flood the U.S. with crack cocaine while Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Drug sales financed the contra terrorists trying to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

And it was the Black vote that blocked the super bigot sexual predator Roy Moore from becoming a U.S. senator from Alabama in 2018.

The Black vote was won by Black soldiers during the U.S. Civil War and by bloody struggles during the Reconstruction period that followed. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, was supposed to guarantee the right to vote.

That right was swept away by the overthrow of Reconstruction by Ku Klux Klan terror. Black people fought for decades to defend their right to vote without any support from the federal government.

In 1898, the city government of Wilmington, N.C., was overthrown by a white racist mob. Sixty Black people were massacred in the coup. Within two years the right to vote was stolen from virtually all African Americans in North Carolina. 

People died for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Harriette Moore and Harry T. Moore were bombed in their home on Christmas Day 1951. They were murdered by the Klan for registering Black voters. 

NAACP leader Medgar Evers fought for voting rights in Mississippi and was assassinated on June 12, 1963. The attack on demonstrators in Selma, Ala., in 1965, in which future Congressperson John Lewis was nearly beaten to death by George Wallace’s state troopers, shocked the world.

More than 40 years of political reaction in the U.S. have included vicious attacks on Black voting rights. The voter ID laws passed by over 30 states are deliberately crafted to limit voting by Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx and poor people in general.

The 24th Amendment, enacted in 1964, banned poll taxes. Since photo identification usually costs money, isn’t that a poll tax? Yet the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld almost all these discriminatory state ID laws.

Six judges on that capitalist court threw out the vital enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act in the 2013 Shelby v. Moore decision.

‘We’re not a democracy’

The struggle for Black voting rights empowers all poor and working people. Literacy tests were used to stop Indigenous people from voting in Arizona until 1970. 

One of the enforcers in Arizona who tried to prevent Black, Indigenous and Latinx people from voting in the 1964 election was William Rehnquist. The thug was rewarded for his strong-arming by being made chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Millions of white workers benefited when Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was chair of the Education and Labor Committee in the House of Representatives. The Black congressperson pushed through increases in the minimum wage and extended coverage to millions of low paid workers.

The Trump and Giuliani attack on Black votes is aimed at overturning the vote of 80 million people who voted against Trump. Among them were Asian voters who helped defeat Trump in Georgia.

While the super rich, like Michael Bloomberg, are willing to spend billions to buy elections, they sneer at democracy. Even cockroach capitalists consider it intolerable that the vote of poor and working people should count as much as theirs.

That was Robert L. Bartley’s attitude when he was the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editor. He justified George W. Bush becoming president in 2000 despite getting half-a-million fewer votes than Al Gore.

Bartley did so on the basis that many of the Democratic votes came from “union households” and “Blacks” while Republican voters were allegedly “producers of wealth.” 

Listen up Wall Street Journal: if an election was held of only the essential workers who kept society together during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump would have lost in a landslide. 

Attacks on the idea of democracy used to come from the wingnuts of the John Birch Society. In an Oct. 7 tweet, Utah Sen. Mike Lee declared “We’re not a democracy.”

Lee wasn’t admitting that money talks during capitalist elections. He wants to get rid of any notion of democracy.

Poor and working people will show all the Trumps what real democracy looks like. That includes over two million workers in prison. Evicting Trump from the White House is just the first step.

Only by taking real democracy to the streets will we stop evictions and win compensation for all the jobless. We need to organize and fight more than before.