The Dark Future of the USA

March 2024 Forums General discussion The Dark Future of the USA

Viewing 15 posts - 61 through 75 (of 230 total)
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  • #225784
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Many maneuvers that have been done by Trump to be elected were also done by the Kennedy family, and the father was a crook like Trump’s father and grandfather who run a prostitution ring, therefore, it is not an exclusivity of the Republican Party. and Donald Trump originally was a democrat

    #225785
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    ome background reading

    https://www.nationalmemo.com/republican-efforts-to-restrict-voting

    When the Republicans win both houses in the 2022 Midterms, we can expect a sea-change in US politics with Biden depicted as an autocrat as he tries to use the presidential veto to hold back Republican policies.
    ——————————————

    Most of the times in the USA midterm election are won by members of the opposite party, it also took place during Trump’s presidency and Barrack Obama and Obama spent most of his presidency emitting executive orders which can be easily eliminated by another president as Joe Biden has done. The Baseball players always take their own terms, it is like an endless cycle and workers oscillate from one party into any party, the peoples who elected George Bush were the same ones who elected Barrack Obama, and so for, there is no conscience of political party affiliation.

    #225881
    alanjjohnstone
    Keymaster

    ANONCRACY

    She has been referred to previously. Barbara F. Walter — author of “How Civil Wars Start, and How to Stop Them” — served on an advisory panel for the Central Intelligence Agency, she helped CIA agents identify signs that a country is facing serious political instability and the potential for widespread conflict.

    The modern-day Republican Party, Walter explained, is obsessed with White “identity” politics rather than “ideology,” and White Americans on the far right fear becoming a minority in the future.

    America’s democracy is declining. They are being led, unaware, into a downward spiral of instability, in which extremists and opportunists spread fear — and then grab power by force.”

    In an op-ed published by the Washington Post on January 24, she compares the political tensions in the U.S. to what she observed in other countries in the past.

    “Anocracies are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic,” Walter explains. “Their citizens enjoy some elements of democratic rule, e.g., elections, while other rights — e.g., due process or freedom of the press — suffer. In the last weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, the respected Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) calculated that, for the first time in more than two centuries, the United States no longer qualified as a democracy. It had, over the preceding five years, become an anocracy…Anocracy, not autocracy, is our most immediate threat,” Walter warns. “Anocracy is usually transitional — a repressive government allows reforms, or a democracy begins to unravel — and it is volatile. When a country moves into the anocracy zone, the risk of political violence reaches its peak; citizens feel uncertain about their government’s power and legitimacy. Compared with democracies, anocracies with more democratic than autocratic features are three times more likely to experience political instability or civil war.”

    https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/expert-on-civil-wars-warns-that-the-u-s-is-facing-a-downward-spiral-of-instability/

    #226037
    ZJW
    Participant

    sshenfield wrote:
    ‘There will still be elections but they will be held in conditions that ensure Trump can ‘find’ the votes he needs to win (like Putin in Russia). Vigilante terror will neutralize ‘enemies of the people’

    This is something like a mirror image of the nightmare 10,000-year Reich of Democrat rule that is in the minds and media of Republicans: the Democrats remain in permanant power — carrying out their program of quotas, wokeism, censorship-of-the-right, statue-destruction, transism blah, blah, blah — through ‘imported’ voters (legal immigrants plus non-citizens) and vote-rigging. As for the military, just the reverse of what’s in the quote, up high it gets filled with those loyal to the Democrats’ program.

    #226045
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    https://www.newsweek.com/california-dream-universal-healthcare-crushed-democrats-1674828?utm_source=PushnamiMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=automatic&UTM=1643720689257&subscriberId=60ebe8fe94bbe71ea0bca852

    The Democrats in California did not pass a bill for Universal Health Care, therefore, the problem is not the Republicans only, the Democrats are also part of the problem, all those conspiracy theories applied to the Republicans can also be applied to the Democrats, the real dark future of the USA is the capitalist class and capitalism, it is not fascism, it is capitalism. In California, both chambers are controlled by the Democrats and the governor is a Democrat, Sinema and Manchin are not the only ones opposing their own party

    #226047
    sshenfield
    Participant

    Not ALL the ‘conspiracy theories’ applied to the Republicans can also be validly applied to the Democrats. Neither are willing to introduce universal healthcare, but that is not the issue we are discussing here. There is ample evidence that the Republicans and not the Democrats are working to undermine and weaken the democratic elements that currently exist in the political system. We can argue that the Democrats help create the conditions that make this possible, but that is not quite the same thing. There is a real difference. Does it really not matter? And why should there be only ONE ‘problem’? There are many problems, even though most are subordinate to the general problem of capitalism.

    #226048
    alanjjohnstone
    Keymaster

    We should remember that it is key Republican states in the Electoral College that are actively trying to bring back variously gerrymandered ‘Jim Crow’ ballot rules to discourage African-American voting.

    Making Washington DC a full state or inviting Puerto Rico to become a state is seen as a Democratic Party ploy to rig the system in its favour, not as welcomed constitutional reform.

    The polarisation of US politics has not dissipated through time as I think we all half-expected with the Biden victory. Scratch any debate and the race issue will be revealed.

    If you are Black or Hispanic in a conservative state that already limits access to abortions, you are far more likely than a white woman to have one.

    I have visited US conservative discussion lists and otherwise reasonable participants genuinely believe in some sort of white race replacement theory and the Supreme Court is about to make affirmative action unconstitutional to reinforce that belief.

    Opposing CRT does mean re-writing history class curriculums and the conservatives have groundswell support in many school districts for a censored textbook selection. They are manipulating the decentralised school board democracy.

    WSPUS website has just uploaded an article on the Reconstruction and how the emancipation of the slaves led to another form of bondage.

    https://www.wspus.org/2022/02/solidarity-forged-from-the-chains-of-slavery/

    #226052
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Stefan, the history of the Democrats has shown that they have also tried to eliminate the rights and benefits of the working class many times, try to listen to the speeches of Malcolm X, they have a long history of collaboration with the Republicans. I have read and studied the history of the USA and both parties have always collaborated to undermine the interests of the working class. Other newspapers also cover both aspects of the problem. At the present time, the Democrats are playing the working-class card because they need the votes of the minorities and they know that they can lose the midterm and the general election too. It is little danger to fall into the trap of the lesser evil

    #226057
    alanjjohnstone
    Keymaster

    On the first day of Black History Month and several predominantly African-American colleges are targeted in hoax bomb scares.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/01/hbcus-bomb-threats-class-cancellations-second-day

    The threat of violence may well become an actual atrocity

    #226061
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Everything that we see now, was there hidden or latent, now it is open, black people in the USA have been under threat all the time. The USA used to kill leaders secretly, now it is done with public knowledge

    #226065
    sshenfield
    Participant

    Yes, black people have been under threat all the time, but the degree of threat has varied over time. There was a long period when any black man who was not submissive enough was likely to be lynched or otherwise tortured to death by the KKK and when black communities were subjected to pogroms and ethnic cleansing. In recent decades those things have not happened. Maybe they remained latent, but better latent than actual. Should it be a matter of indifference to us whether or not political forces seeking a return to the old days gain power?

    #226071
    DJP
    Participant

    Not ALL the ‘conspiracy theories’ applied to the Republicans can also be validly applied to the Democrats

    I may have mentioned it before but this recent BBC podcast is very good at explaining how certain conspiracy theories have played a formative role in recent US politics

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001324r/episodes/player

    #226082
    alanjjohnstone
    Keymaster

    State ballot initiatives have expressed people’s power in the US, The conservative controlled Florida had ones that approved the $15 an hour wage and restored voting rights to felonies.

    Now the Republicans are intent upon limiting the power of the people.

    https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/02/02/alarm-grows-florida-gop-advances-plan-gut-ballot-initiative-process

    #226106
    ZJW
    Participant

    DJP wrote:
    ‘What’s with the reluctance to call the storming of the Capital with the intention of overturning an election an ‘insurrection’? ‘

    […]

    ‘Interesting background facts are in this BBC series: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001324r

    1) I wonder if the question was asked before or after reading the Greenwald. I put the word in quotation marks because I agree with Greenwald. And also with the Anarchist Communist Group, which already on Jan 10 wrote:

    ‘The invasion of the Capitol was uncoordinated and there was no united and overall plan to stage a coup, even though some of those who came to Washington were armed. A coup requires some serious planning, as well as a degree of support among the police and military and the ruling class. ‘

    (from: https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2021/01/10/the-bud-lite-putsch-or-the-storming-of-the-us-capitol )

    2) Re the BBC, why should pro-revolutionaries (to use the spikymike and Internationalist Perspective term), who *have no dog in the race* when it comes to taking sides between Republicans and Democrats, necessarily accept the BBC-Guardian-NYTimes-Atlantic …. consortium-of-facticity-and-viewpoint on this or any other matter over that of Greenwald? Greenwald is a longterm left civil-libertarian and opponent of war (in so far as this is at all possible within the limits of capitalism and capitalist political discourse). How does that compare with the record of The Atlantic, Guadian, ….?

    One should should for purposes of comparison read not only the mainstream liberal media but also such sources as, at least:

    https://greenwald.substack.com
    https://www.antiwar.com
    https://consortiumnews.com

    (The latter two, especially the third, will sometimes include content, however, that runs off the rails in the opposite direction (from pro-US/Natoism) to: pro-Russia, pro-Iran, pro-Assad, pro-China …)

    DJP later wrote:
    ‘Maybe it’s partly semantics. […]’

    Yes, maybe so, at one level a matter of semantics. But I don’t think that’s important. What is important then? For purposes of argument, let’s assume that Jan 6 was indeed a failed coup/insurrection by Trump. So what? For *us* what is the objective function of treating this as barely avoided asteroid-collision with the Earth? This: the production of Chomskys, of Klimans, of Peter Harrisons, of Guesdes , of Kropotkins. It results in the Union Sacrée, in the Popular Front. As the ACG wrote in that article, ‘Now the narrative will be centred around the “defence of democracy” and that all good people should rally behind the Democratic Party. ‘ Exactly.

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by ZJW.
    #226108
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Maybe it is a question of semantics but, if you are going to have a meaningful discussion, the terms used do need to be clearly defined.

    There is a whole range of breaches of “law and order” ranging from nation-wide revolution to local riot. Insurrection is near one end of the spectrum while riot is at the other end. In between might be rebellion and revolt.

    A distinction can also be drawn between armed attempts to overthrow the government (revolution) and armed attempts to resist the implementation of a particular law. It seems that at the time of the US Insurrection Act of 1807 the word “insurrection” meant the latter and if the 6 January event had occurred at any time up to, say, the 1850s it could have been classified as an insurrection. In more recent times the Act has been used against riots.

    In Britain the terminology has been different where there were both Insurrection Acts (applied to Ireland, the land of armed conspiracies) and the Riot Act. This suggests that in English law the 6 January event would have been regarded as a riot rather than an insurrection.

    So insofar as semantics are involved maybe it’s the difference between the use of the term “insurrection” on the two sides of the Atlantic? But politics are involved too, with the Democratic Party having an evident vote-catching interest in labelling (labeling!) the 6 January event an “insurrection”.

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