Songwriter's Notebook: A Trump Protest Playlist

Songwriter's Notebook: A Trump Protest Playlist: I wrote recently about how to have a good rally (hopefully as a small component of a broader movement that includes lots of other tactics)....

Songwriter's Notebook: Advice from a Protest Singer on Protesting

 Reposted from David Rovics blog, "Songwriters Notebook" on 1/28/17

Songwriter's Notebook: Advice from a Protest Singer on Protesting: Many, many people are hitting the streets in recent weeks in the United States.  For most of them, my guess is they're doing it for the ...

10 ACTIONS IN 100 DAYS RESISTANCE MOVEMENT

IT’S ON! INDIVISIBLE ST JOHNS WILL VISIT SENATORS RUBIO AND NELSON OFFICES TOMORROW, JANUARY 24, 2017 IN COORDINATION WITH THE NATIONWIDE 10 ACTIONS IN 100 DAYS RESISTANCE MOVEMENT.

We will be at Senator Rubio’s office 1650 Prudential Drive Suite 220 Jacksonsville 32207 at approximately 10 AM. We will visit and express our opposition to cabinet nominees, particularly Sen Sessions for AG and Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State. Then we will proceed to Senator Nelson’s office at 1301 Riverplace Blvd Jacksonsville 32207 to do the same. We will be recording our visits and the media has been notified. Please do the following:

Arrange carpools (Publix on SR 16 and Kenton Morrison has been suggested as a safe place to leave your car). 9AM was suggested as a good meeting time.

Know your subject or have a personal story related to either of these nomimees or the ones still in hearings.

Be prepared to speak eloquently to the press if asked.

Bring all the respect and class we showed on Saturday January 21 at our march and rally.

443.858.7273 for emergency calls only. See you around 10!

Global Labour Column: Reflecting on electoral catastrophe: What lessons ...

Global Labour Column: Reflecting on electoral catastrophe: What lessons ...: Peter Evans Trump’s minions have already made it clear that organised labour will be among th...

WE WON’T BE BAMBOOZLED ANYMORE IT ALL STARTS ON MONDAY

In case you missed it, the Republicans have scheduled two days of hearings for Jefferson Beauregard Sessions to be confirmed as Attorney General. Those hearings will be long and contentious but don’t count on your Congress critter to get definitive answers to the softball questions they always ask after they grandstand for the CSPAN cameras. He is totally unacceptable as a nominee: his past racist statements and his antipathy for voter rights and his stance on LGBTQ do not reflect the values we hold as Americans. No.

The schedule for the rest of the week is the real bamboozle: 6 hearings of totally unqualified and in many cases, antagonistic nominees to the departments they’ve been chosen to run. These are being rushed through with little opportunity for meaningful questioning. Some Democrats have already been making their usual mealy mouth appeasement statements saying they “look forward to finding common ground” and “will wait to pass judgment after a fair hearing”. No.

To further bamboozle, Trump has scheduled his first press conference since last July and where do you think the media spotlight will be? (Squirrel!) This is certainly engineered to draw attention away from the clown show line up that’ll be passed on in a flurry of votes. No.

So here’s what we need to do. Start calling Monday. Call both Senators and your representative. In St Johns county you need to know your district, we have 2. Tell them you say  No to Sessions. Ask the staffer what your member’s position is. Write down exactly what they say. It doesn’t matter if they are on the committee or not. They represent you and you have a right to know their position. Be firm but be polite. Then come back to this site and tell us all what happened. Enough bamboozle and we have a story for the media.

By Wednesday you should have it down. That’s when the conga line starts.Call both your Senators and your representative. Tell them NO to all the nominees being pushed through for confirmation. Ask the staffer what your member’s position is on each nominee. Make them tell you for each candidate. Write down exactly what they tell you and again, come back to this site and tell us all what happened. More bamboozle, more fodder for the press. We can make this big.

Here’s the schedule of hearings:

Tuesday and Wednesday, 930 AM Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions for Attorney General

Tuesday 330PM Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Gen John Kelly, USMC (Ret) for Secretary of Homeland Security

Wednesday 1000 AM Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education

Wednesday 1015AM Commerce, Science and Transportation, Elaine Chao (McConnelll’s wife), Secretary of Transportation

Thursday 930AM, Armed Services, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, Secretary of Defense, needs a waiver to be considered since he’s not been retired from active service for 7 years:

Thursday 1000 AM, Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Thursday 1000AM, Commerce, Science and Transportation, Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce

We don’t have time to outline what’s completely wrong with each of these nominees but we’re sure you’re smart enough and have time at work to look them up. Seriously, you will not believe what you will find out. It’s like the old Bizarro world of Superman where everything is backwards. Remember to be nice to the staffers. They’re going to be getting A LOT OF CALLS. Be firm and get answers and tell us how it goes.

List of Numbers:

Senator Bill Nelson 202.224.5274

Senator Marco Rubio 202.224.3041

Representative John Rutherford 904.598.0481

Representative Ron DeSantis 904.827.1101

A downloadable/printable copy of this available here

These are hard truths to accept but we have to start with total honesty about how we got here and how powerful the presidency has become. We must be fearless, realistic and strong.

By William I. Robinson, www.alainet.org January 6th, 2017

 reposted from Popular Resistance

Barack Obama declared to CNN this past December 26 that he could have beaten Trump had he the chance to run against the president elect for a third term, but he may have done more than anyone else to assure Trump’s victory.

While Trump’s election has triggered a rapid expansion of fascist currents in US civil society and the political system a fascist outcome is not inevitable and will depend on the fight back that has already begun. But that fight back requires clarity as to how we got to such a dangerous precipice. The seeds of a 21st century fascism were planted, fertilized, and watered by the government of outgoing president Barack Obama and the bankrupt liberal elite that Obama’s presidency represents.

By the final years of the George W. Bush regime, and especially with the financial collapse of 2008, seething discontent burst out into mass protest in the U.S. and around the world. The Obama project was from the start an effort by dominant groups to reestablish hegemony in the wake of its deterioration during the Bush years. Obama’s election was a challenge to the system at the cultural and ideological level that shook up racial/ethnic foundations upon which the U.S. Republic has always rested, although it certainly did not dismantle those foundations.

However, the Obama project was never intended to challenge the socio-economic order. To the contrary, it sought to preserve and strengthen that order, to sustain capitalist globalization, by reconstituting hegemony and conducting a passive revolution against the mass discontent and spreading popular resistance that began to percolate in the final years of the Bush presidency.

The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of passive revolution to refer to efforts by dominant groups to bring about mild change from above in order to defuse mobilization from below for more far-reaching transformation. Integral to passive revolution is the cooptation of leadership from below and the integration of that leadership into the dominant project.

Obama’s 2008 election campaign tapped into and helped expand mass mobilization and popular aspirations for change not seen in many years in the United States. The Obama project co-opted the brewing storm from below, channeled it into the electoral campaign and then betrayed those aspirations, as the Democratic Party effectively demobilized the insurgency from below with more passive revolution even as it resumed and actually accelerated the project of capitalist globalization and neo-liberalism. The mass enthusiasm that the first Obama electoral campaign generated quickly dissipated.

Transnational corporate capital financed both of the Obama presidential campaigns and purchased the Obama presidency. Obama pushed forward the agenda of global war, neo-liberalism, and the drift towards an authoritarian state. He became the corporate bailout president, the mass deportation president, and the drone-warfare president. His government pushed the construction of a repressive police and surveillance state. It authorized the indefinite detention without writ of habeas corpus of anyone the state deems an “enemy,” waged war against whistleblowers and leakers, and defended NSA domestic and global spying. It ramped up the military budget, which had already reached an historical high under the Bush regime. It brokered the Transpacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and the Trade in Services Agreement.

In this sense, the Obama project weakened the popular and left response from below to the crisis, which opened space for the right-wing response – for a project of 21st century fascism – to become insurgent. The Obama administration appeared, certainly in this respect, as a Weimar republic. Although the social democrats were in power during the Weimar republic of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s they did not pursue a leftist response to the crisis but rather sidelined the militant trade unions, communists and socialists, and progressively pandered to capital and the right before turning over power to the Nazis in 1933. Obama’s 21st century Weimar republic generated conditions propitious to the development of neo-fascist forces in the United States.

During the Bush regime, these neo-fascist forces spread throughout U.S. civil society, exhibiting a growing cross-pollination between different sectors of the radical right not seen in years. Right-wing elements among the transnational corporate community broadly funded during Obama’s presidency neo-fascist movements like the Tea Party and neo-fascist legislation such as Arizona’s notorious 2010 anti-immigrant law, SB1070. That legislation sparked “copy-cat” laws around the country and helped spawn a vicious anti-immigrant, border vigilante, and white supremacist movement. The far-right wing billionaire Koch brothers, for instance, were the prime bankrollers of the Tea Party and also of a host of foundations and front organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, and the Mercatus Center.

These organizations pushed an extreme version of the neo-liberal corporate agenda, including the reduction and elimination of corporate taxes, cutbacks in social services, the gutting of public education, and the total liberation of capital from any state regulation. This neo-liberalism on steroids is precisely the economic program of the incoming Trump regime and converges perfectly with the interests of the transnational capitalist class, even if its cultural and ideological garb is dramatically distinct from that of Obama and the liberals.

Trumpism’ far-right agenda, contrary to superficial interpretations, constitutes a deepening, not a reversal, of the program of capitalist globalization pursued by the Obama administration and every U.S. administration since Ronald Reagan. The crisis of global capitalism has become more acute in the face of economic stagnation and the rise of anti-globalization populism on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. Trumpism does not represent a break with capitalist globalization but rather the recomposition of political forces and ideological discourse as the crisis deepens and as international tensions reach new depths.

Whether in its 20th or its emerging 21st century variants, fascism is above all a response to deep structural crises of capitalism, such as that of the 1930s and the one that began with the financial meltdown of 2008. I have been writing for the past decade about the rise of 21st century fascist currents in the context of the new global capitalism. One key difference between 20th century fascism and 21st century fascism is that the former involved the fusion of national capital with reactionary and repressive political power, whereas the latter involves the fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power. Trumpism is not a departure from but an incarnation of the emerging dictatorship of the transnational capitalist class.

Trumpism and the sharp turn to the extreme Right is the logical progression of the political system in the face of the crisis of global capitalism. The liberal elite and its project of capitalist globalization through a “kinder, gentler” discourse of multiculturalism reached a dead end and led the system into a new crisis of hegemony. To paraphrase Clausewitz’ famous dictum that “war is an extension of politics by other means,” Trumpism is an extension of neo-liberalism by other means.

There is a near-straight line here from Obama to Trump. It was the Obama government and the liberal elite that more fully opened the Pandora’s box of Trumpism and 21st century fascism. As the 2016 elections approached, the question was how renewed mass discontent would be expressed. The liberal elite marginalized Bernie Sanders and lined up behind Hillary Clinton. But unlike 2008, this time it failed in its effort to pull off another passive revolution. By once again quashing a leftist response to the crisis the liberal elite fed the turn to the far right.

The liberal elite’s refusal to challenge the rapaciousness of transnational capital and its brand of identity politics served to eclipse the language of the working and popular classes and of anti-capitalism, pushing white workers into an “identity” of white nationalism and helping the neo-fascist right organize them politically. Alongside voter suppression of largely Black and Latino voters, Trump deftly mobilized a significant portion of the white working class around a demagogic discourse of racist scapegoating, misogyny, imperial bluster and the manipulation of fear and economic destabilization.

Trumpism’s veiled and at times openly racist and neo-fascist discourse has “legitimated” and unleashed ultra-racist and fascist movements in U.S. civil society. These forces seem to be achieving a toehold in the U.S. state through the emerging Trump regime. This regime brings together billionaire bankers and businessmen with politicized warrior generals and neo-fascist activists in a deadly cocktail that threatens to lead us to disaster if the fight back is not able to derail Trumpism.

This is an extremely dangerous moment but it is very fluid. Political and economic elites are divided and confused. Trumpism has further fractured ruling groups and may well be generating a crisis of the state that opens up space for popular and leftist responses from below. A significant portion of the elite opposed Trump during the electoral campaign. Will they accommodate themselves to his regime or turn against it?

We are not at this time in a fascist system and it can be averted if the fight back is expansive, organized, and unified into an anti-neo-fascist front. In order to do that, the fight back cannot turn to the decadent liberal elite organized in the Democratic Party. Foundations and corporations will fund the liberal anti-Trump groups to try and shape the agenda of the anti-Trump fight back. The Democrats and their corporate backers will try to channel the fight back it into the next legislative and presidential elections.

Working class politics must achieve hegemony in any united front against neo-fascism. Trump’s electoral base among the white working class will discover very early on in his regime that his promises were a hoax. How will their rage be contained? Will they be recruited into projects of 21st century fascism or into a popular and leftist project of resistance and transformation? For the latter to happen we need to move beyond identity politics, to reconstruct a working class identity by coupling anti-racism and defense of immigrants with a program of economic and social reconstruction that brings the language of class and socialism back into the vocabulary. Only by building up the organization of the global working class in all its diversity and placing its multitude of struggles at the center of the fight back can we win