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Vol. 81/No. 15 April 17, 2017
(front page)
Workers look for road forward amid liberal hysteria, Trump presidency
BY SETH GALINSKY
As the administration of Donald Trump enters its third month, the
“American carnage” being visited on working people he described in his
inaugural address, including “rusted-out factories scattered like
tombstones across the landscape,” continues with no end in sight.
And many in the fractured Democratic Party, liberal bourgeois press and
the middle-class left are stepping up attempts to obstruct Trump in
hopes of forcing him out of office before the end of his term.
“Donald Trump is a despicable man and an awful president who deserves
whatever he gets,” columnist Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times
April 3. “He is crude, a liar, a bully and a cheat.
“It is not clear to me that America — and indeed the world — can survive
a full-term Trump presidency.” The remedy Blow likes? Impeachment.
As part of their stop-Trump-from-being-able-to-govern effort, Democrats
are preparing to filibuster the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the
Supreme Court. This is extremely rare in U.S. bourgeois rule, not used
even when the Democrats bitterly opposed Ronald Reagan’s nomination of
Robert Bork in 1987.
Democrats’ opposition to Gorsuch has nothing to do with his views or his
qualifications. As Politico noted in January before Gorsuch was
nominated, “Senate Democrats are going to try to bring down President
Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick no matter whom the president chooses.”
In fact, many Democratic Party officials acknowledge that as possible
nominees for the Supreme Court go, Gorsuch would be far from the worst.
If the Democrats filibuster, the Republicans, who hold 52 seats, are
expected to take what is known as the “nuclear option” — suspend the
rules and move to confirm Gorsuch with a simple majority.
Sanders seeks to take over Democrats
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had the Democratic Party presidential
nomination stolen from him by the party machine, has been stumping for
his “Our Revolution” campaign. At a Boston rally March 31 he said the
party should be based on the working class, not the “liberal elite.” His
goal is to keep workers bottled up in the Democrats, one of the bosses’
two parties.
Although he called the president a “fraud,” Sanders admitted that Trump
won because Americans are struggling economically, frustrated, angry and
“living in despair.”
“If you sit home and think Donald Trump won because all of the people
who voted for him are racists or sexists or homophobes, I think you got
it wrong,” Sanders said. He won because he “developed proposals” that
addressed the carnage workers face.
But it’s not the class that votes for the party, but the class the party
votes for that determines its character. And the Democrats do the
bidding of the ruling rich.
Bipartisan anti-immigrant policy
For all his demagogic rhetoric, Trump has mostly continued the same
anti-worker policies that were carried out by the Obama and previous
administrations.
But deporting undocumented workers is increasingly unpopular among
U.S.-born workers.
The shift in views among working people and broader sections of the
population comes through in a March 28 article in the Times, “In Steve
King’s District, Iowans Begin to Question His Anti-Immigrant Views.”
Congressman King is notorious for his racist attitude toward immigrants.
But many people the Times interviewed in Sioux County, which went
overwhelmingly for King and Trump in the last election, say they
disagree with King on deportations.
Evan Wielenga, manager of a farm co-op in Orange City, told the Times he
used to believe all the undocumented should be deported, but had a
change of heart.
“Some of these kids were born in the U.S. These families had lived here
10 years, and all of a sudden, Dad’s gone. Mom’s gone,” Wielenga said,
referring to the impact of Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids.
“When you think of it from that perspective, what’s the lesser of two
evils?”
“When our kids are such good friends at school, people are getting to
know each other better,” said Libbie Schillerberg, from Denison.
“They’re trusting each other, wanting to be around each other.”
Despite the fact the Trump administration’s effort to bar visitors from
six majority Muslim nations is bottled up in court challenges, they are
moving forward with planning steps for “extreme vetting” of refugees,
immigrants and tourists, the Wall Street Journal reported April 4. That
would include government access to their email, Facebook and other
social media accounts.
“We want to say for instance, ‘What sites do you visit? And give us your
passwords,’ so that we can see what they do on the internet,” Homeland
Security Secretary John Kelly told Congress in February.
The new rules would apply even to visitors from the 38 countries that
participate in the Visa Waiver Program, which includes some of
Washington’s closest allies, such as the U.K., Japan and Australia.
The White House is planning to put in place an “ideological test,”
interrogating people about their political views. This wouldn’t be the
first time, the Journal said, noting that communists and other
foreign-born working-class militants have been excluded from the U.S. in
the past.
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