Saturday, January 21, 2017

New York Times Equates Muslim Civilization with Islamic Terrorism

Thomas Riggins
A loose cannon is in the White House but the NYT is being irresponsible when it says the following: "And he pledged what would amount to a clash of civilizations in the fight against Muslim extremism."
"The country, Mr. Trump said, would 'unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth.'"
The NYT has here equated "Muslim Civilization" with "Islamic terrorism''! The only way Trump could be guilty of declaring a war on Muslim civilization is if this equality is, indeed, a fact which it is not and Trump's paranoia concerning "Islamic terrorism" is bad enough (excluding Muslims from coming to the US) without the NYT fanning the flames of hysteria which too many Americans are lighting already. Islamic terrorism is a tool of the reactionary elements the ruling classes in Islamic countries which fear the spread of democratic enlightenment and has found popular traction due to the military attacks on the Muslim world orchestrated by the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama presidencies and now looks like it will be continued under Trump. It began when the attack on the socially progressive communist government in Afghanistan and it was over thrown by a combination of US imperialism, Pakistani and Saudi jihadists, which was a continuation of the war waged by the US and its Zionist allies in Israel against the Iranian people (especially since the 1953 coup reinstalling the Shah) and the continuing repression against the Palestinians and the subversion by the US of every truly democratic movement of Muslim people anywhere in the world. The fight against "Islamic terrorism" begins in Washington.
Uncompromising in tone and entirely in keeping with his insurgent campaign, President Trump dispensed with appeals to unity or attempts to build bridges to his…
NYTIMES.COM|BY MARK LANDLER

Thursday, January 19, 2017

The Trap of Western Ideology

Thomas Riggins

Well, we have an "Independent Judiciary" and what do the Chinese see. Our Judiciary run by political appointments from competing interest groups. An independent Supreme Court that gutted the cilvil rights act and set the stage for voter suppression and also turned the election process over to domination by billionaires and the 1%. The US, poster child for Western democracy,  just turned the government over to a person who lost the popular election by almost 3 million votes. We Americans are the ones who should be denouncing the trap of Western ideology. It boils down to the class nature of your society. If your society is ruled by monopoly capitalists exploiting its own working people and engaged in imperialism abroad its legal system will be a reflection of that class power just as in Saudi Arabia, for example, the legal system works to reinforce the power of the fundamentalist monarchy and in Iran the power of the ayatollahs and in Israel it's stacked against the Palestinians. The Communist Party rules in China and that party developed out of the masses of exploited workers and peasants who overthrew the feudal landlord regime represented by the Kuomintang. The Chinese legal system, whatever you may think of it, is basically set up to represent the class interests of masses of the Chinese people. There is no such thing as an "Independent" Judiciary under class rule: our prison population is proof enough of that.

Zhou Qiang denounced the “trap” of “Western” ideology, dismaying some liberal-minded observers of the Chinese legal system who had seen him as an…
NYTIMES.COM|BY MICHAEL FORSYTHE

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Thanking Obama or The best slaves are the ones who thank their masters

Thomas Riggins

As President Obama takes his last lap around the governing field before turning it over to Donald Trump LLC many liberals and some deluded "leftists" have taken to thanking him for his eight years of service to the 1%. The best that can be said from a Marxist perspective is that there have been worse presidents (we are about to get one) and we had four years of hope followed by four years of resignation leaving behind a disillusioned electorate who rejected the establishment presidential candidate in such numbers that even an almost three million popular vote lead could not prevent the White House from falling into the hands of the ultra-right.

Part of the problem was  that Obama failed to put forth a program to seriously challenge the power structure that sustains the Right, Racism and Sexism and the Democratic Party, of which he is the nominal leader put up a candidate agreeable to the 1% when they had a popular leader in Sanders that might have beaten Trump. Anybody who has understood Marx understands that  capitalism fosters the Right, Racism and Sexism and that the Democratic Party is controlled by the ruing capitalist class.  We can thank Obama and Clinton for the loss of the industrial states whose electoral votes should have gone to the DP, for  the destruction of Libya, for the prolongation of the war in Syria, for the coup in Honduras, the death of hundreds if not thousands of women and children throughout the middle east due to drone warfare and support of jihadist groups in Syria and the Saudi attacks on the civilian population of Yemen.

 It wasn't that long ago when liberals who said 'Thank You" to LBJ for his domestic policy -- the war on poverty and the civil rights laws -- had to be reminded by MLK that LBJ was also the president of the most violent and oppressive country in the world. Leftists used to vociferously protest the oppression of third world people by US imperialism ("Hey, Hey, LBJ how many kids have you killed today?" In today's "Thank You President Obama" blogs and tweets dead kids don't seem to bother many people who call themselves "progressives."

His legacy has left the 1% as solidly entrenched as ever and resulted in an ultra-right take over of the government. He also leaves behind a scandalous misuse of the intelligence services of the US in an attempt to engineer a false narrative of Russian election hacking to justify an excuse to start up a new cold war. Whether history will treat him kindly and thank him will depend upon who will be around to write it -- the imperialist state he served or the masses of the third world it oppressed and exploited. 

Obama is not totally responsible. He is after all a capitalist tool. The objective conditions are that the Democrats as well as the Republicans are organic parts of the monopoly capitalist system and contribute to its functioning and maintenance. The context of the  political fight, from a class narrative, is that different factions of the ruling class are not agreed upon the best way to maintain dominance over the working people and to what degree concessions have to be given or to what degree they can be revoked. Both parties serve the interests of Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex. Marxists understand this (at least some do or used to understand) but the masses of working people do not due to the information monopoly of the ruling class. When we are politically active we are supposed to be engendering higher levels of class consciousness in working people and this is not done by deluding people about Obama and Clinton, for example, some how being "progressive" and on the side of "democracy" when they are really just lesser evils from whom we hope to get more open space to organize and get concessions. Thanking Obama for trying his best to further the interests of US Imperialism (TPP, unproven Russian election hacking narratives, military escalations in Africa, Syria and Yemen) and making some reforms to strengthen DP prospects domestically is actually a case of abstracting the entire fight against the ultra-right out of context and prevents people from properly understanding objective reality; this contributes to the victory of the very reactionary alt-right forces we want to defeat and censoring and removing critiques of our tactics, which sometimes happens even in leftist publications, rather that promoting more discussion and analysis and self criticism, only weakens the struggle for democracy.


Wednesday, January 11, 2017

More Unsubstanitated Reports on Russian Election Meddling

Thoms Riggins

Even the headline shows this to be more bogus "spook" propaganda which is more dangerous to democracy than anything Putin is accused of doing. "The material was not corroborated, and The New York Times has not been able to confirm the claims." If the Palmer raids, McCarthyism, and the FBI CONINTELPRO program incuding the murder and frame up of activists, especially the Black Panthers, tells us anything it's that the drive to undermine American democracy is an inside job -- it's going on right before our eyes and we are being told to look at the Kremlin while it all emanates from the J. Edgar Hoover Building, Langley, and Fort Meade. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

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The material was considered so potentially explosive that the intelligence agencies decided that the president and the president-elect needed to be told and that the…
NYTIMES.COM|BY SCOTT SHANE, ADAM GOLDMAN AND MATTHEW ROSENBERG