The liberal media and the left try to paint President Trump as something fundamentally new and different in U.S. politics.

....In comments in India last month, Hillary Clinton picked up on her 2016 campaign remarks that workers who voted for Trump were “deplorable.” She told a meeting there that the president won votes from people in areas of the country that shouldn’t really count. She stressed that she, on the other hand, “won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product.” She and those like her deeply believe that votes in wealthier areas of the country should count for more than those in areas where she derisively said workers were “looking backwards.”

The working class is the true target of liberals’ fury

 

BY TERRY EVANS

In a virtually unprecedented move, FBI agents raided the office, home and hotel room of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen April 9. They were directed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, at the recommendation of former FBI Director Robert Mueller, the special counsel seeking to get the president impeached.

The move is further proof that Mueller’s probe, supposedly into Russian interference in the 2016 election, is in fact a frame-up operation using methods that are dangerous for the working class.

After almost a year of digging around and seeking to stick charges against people around the president to see if he can get one to turn on him, Mueller has produced nothing. The liberals and petty-bourgeois left have hailed the former top U.S. government spy, hoping he can oust Trump from office.

“Are we really in a situation where Bob Mueller is no longer investigating crimes, he’s just investigating people?” asked Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida. But Mueller’s probe, like all prosecutors and grand juries, works by targeting an individual and then searching for a crime to pin on them.

The FBI seized Cohen’s electronic devices, financial records and communications with the president. The raid was given the green light by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller to investigate Trump.

“Attorney-client privilege is dead!” the president tweeted after the raid, adding afterwards, “A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!”

This constitutionally protected privilege flows from the Sixth Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which protects one’s right to trial and “to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.”

David Cole, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union — among the groups for which driving Trump out of the White House comes before everything else — defended the latest steps in the witch hunt and blow to our rights. He blessed the break-in and seizure of private documents as “pursuant to the rule of law.”

Washington’s political police 
Raids like this are part of the methods cops have used for decades to frame up workers in the frontlines of class battles. The FBI’s role is to safeguard the interests of the capitalist rulers. It has organized frame-ups of fighters in the labor movement and for Black rights, opponents of Washington’s wars and communists, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Many of the top officials of the FBI today have been exposed as part of the anti-Trump gang.

The special counsel has a broad reach, immense powers and unlimited time. Mueller isn’t accountable to anyone but himself. His “investigation” undercuts rights and protections won in the Bill of Rights. These will be increasingly important for workers as sharpening class battles deepen in years ahead and the propertied rulers seek to break working-class struggles, bust up unions and frame up those who lead them.

The raid on Cohen was justified by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as part of a previously undercover investigation of his “personal business dealings.” But the entire debate in the bourgeois media focuses on his relation to the president.

Despite almost a year of freewheeling operation, Mueller is no closer to finding evidence that could be used to impeach Trump for collusion with Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election. But the probe just keeps going, with no end in sight.

A fever-pitch hysteria has taken hold of the liberals and the left, as they try and make an amalgam of alleged Moscow connections, tidbits from another former FBI Director, James Comey. They use the slanders and allegations in his new book about being fired by Trump, and lurid innuendoes about the president’s alleged infidelities. In fact, polls show there is growing support for Trump as employment improves and he has made some popular moves in foreign policy, like his effort to reach a deal with North Korea.

The liberal media and the left try to paint President Trump as something fundamentally new and different in U.S. politics. Writing in the New York TimesApril 6, Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state under Bill Clinton and author of the just published book Fascism: A Warning, claims Trump is opening the door to what she says is a worldwide resurgence of fascism.

In reality, the Trump administration, like all those before it, defends the interests at home and abroad of the propertied capitalist rulers.

The dangerous class 
It’s true there is a political crisis in the U.S. today ripping through the rulers’ two political parties — the Democrats and Republicans. Its roots lie in the concerns and fear of the meritocrats and liberals about the working class. That is what they saw as “different” about the Donald Trump campaign — and now, to their horror, his presidency. For them the only explanation is that the working class is becoming more racist, more anti-immigrant, more opposed to women’s rights, and has to be controlled and “taught.”

This political crisis has no equivalent anywhere else in the capitalist world.

In comments in India last month, Hillary Clinton picked up on her 2016 campaign remarks that workers who voted for Trump were “deplorable.” She told a meeting there that the president won votes from people in areas of the country that shouldn’t really count. She stressed that she, on the other hand, “won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product.” She and those like her deeply believe that votes in wealthier areas of the country should count for more than those in areas where she derisively said workers were “looking backwards.”

It’s these “deplorable” workers who are involved in labor battles today in states where Trump won the most votes in 2016 — like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. They are providing a powerful example that is being watched closely by millions of workers across the country today. Through their tenacity, organization and discipline, striking teachers and school workers are demonstrating that it is possible to wage a united and effective struggle against the bosses and governments at all levels that are trying to make working people pay for the economic, political and moral crisis of capitalism.  

http://www.themilitant.com/2018/8217/821702.html

On the “children’s crusade for gun control”

....A steady stream of articles lauding the “children’s crusade for gun control” has filled the pages of the liberal media and the papers of the left since March 24, when hundreds of thousands joined demonstrations across the country. They were demanding a new range of tests and restrictions on gun ownership, following the brutal killing of students at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

Many of these commentators praise the young age of those at the actions. “Students Lead Nationwide Crusade for Gun Control,” wrote the online People’s World, which reflects the views of the Communist Party. That young people would want to take to the streets in the midst of teachers’ protests across the country and protests against the cop killings of Stephon Clark and Saheed Vassell should be of no surprise.

But whether an action advances working-class interests has nothing to do with the age of the participants. That depends on whether it strengthens the unity and self-confidence of working people and points a road forward for independent political action. Protests demanding more restrictions and regulations on our hard-won rights head in the opposite direction.

Liberals have made such calls for years and it is the political outlook of these capitalist politicians that shaped the March 24 protests.

They increasingly see workers as “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton said in the 2016 campaign. She doubled-down on this last month in India, where she said President Donald Trump won support from workers in smaller towns in the middle of the country who were “looking backwards.” She claimed working women turned against her under pressure from their husbands and bosses.

In 2008 former President Barack Obama connected gun ownership with his broader scorn for working people. He described workers who had lost their jobs in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, saying, “It’s not surprising … they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.”

After the killings in Florida, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens called for repeal of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, saying it’s outdated.

He took aim at a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia that confirmed that the Second Amendment says people have the right to bear arms to defend themselves. At the same time, he also said states have the power to establish some restrictions on weapons in places like schools.

What’s important for workers today is not that individuals can get guns to fight the cops and company agents. That would be an adventure and lead to nothing but defeats for the working class.

Lessons from past working-class battles

In the 1930s the explosive growth of the labor movement led to sizable and sharp clashes with the employers and their government — in Germany, elsewhere in Europe and in the U.S. Fearing their rule was threatened, the capitalist rulers turned to rightist thugs and fascist gangs to try to attack working-class struggles and bust up the unions. This isn’t happening today.

“The sharpening of the proletariat’s struggle means the sharpening of the methods of counterattack on the part of capital,” Leon Trotsky, a leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, wrote in 1938. “The bourgeoisie is nowhere satisfied with the official police and army.” As the capitalist rulers turned to armed thugs to attack the workers, Trotsky said, “only armed workers’ detachments, who feel the support of tens of millions of toilers behind them, can successfully prevail against the fascist bands.”

The course outlined by Trotsky is contained in the “Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution,” which was adopted by the Socialist Workers Party.

The leadership of the Teamsters union in Minneapolis responded decisively in 1938 to an organizing drive in the city by the fascist outfit called the Silver Shirts. The goons’ leader, Roy Zachary, called for an armed raid on the union’s headquarters. The union organized a workers defense guard.

“Members of the guard were not armed by the union, since in the given circumstances that would have made them vulnerable to police frame-ups,” explained Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the union and the Socialist Workers Party, in his book Teamster Politics. “But many of them had guns of their own at home, which were used to hunt game; and those could quickly have been picked up if needed to fight off an armed attack by Silver Shirt thugs.”

The emergency mobilization of several hundred determined and disciplined members of the guard convinced the Silver Shirts to back off and leave town.

The workers defense guard grew out of intensified union and social struggles. Union leaders sought to draw into its ranks the widest layer of workers. It relied on battle-tested, disciplined cadre and leaders capable of avoiding provocation.

Today the rulers prepare for bigger struggles to come by seeking to restrict our rights to organize and defend ourselves, including limiting workers access to guns. That’s why workers today need to oppose government measures that restrict workers’ rights, like their right to bear arms. 

Fullarticle:
http://www.themilitant.com/2018/8216/821605.html