The first debate of the presidential election campaign takes place under conditions of growing crisis, both at home and abroad.

More... (http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/09/26/pers-s26.html)

I still disagree with the idea that the US is bent upon general warfare, in the WWI-WWII sense, with China and Russia. This only because policy goals might be met by other means, not for any consideration of humanity. The saber-rattling and show deployments in Europe lack the meat to be taken seriously. The European 'allies' are in no way 'gunned-up' for fighting Russia. Which does not mean that lots of people will not continue to die all over the world as victims of US imperialism.

It seems that one goal of the US is to humiliate Russia, the purpose of which being a change to a government even more pliable to US interests than the current one. Meanwhile the Putin government does just enough to present a facade to it's people while prostituting itself in the conference room. Selling your country pennies on the dollar without rousing the people is hard work.

The US will not go to war with China unless China calls in the debt.

The Trump hearts Putin bullshit derives from the shallowness of Trump's mind and I can't think that serious policy people take it seriously, the 'concern' is showbiz. What the RC consensus doesn't like is his unpredictability. In any case I still strongly suspect that Trump's purpose, like Sander's, is getting Clinton elected. She has lifted every rock to make it so.

Spinning Liberal Tales
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
It comes as no surprise that The Nation magazine endorses Hillary Clinton for President (10-24-16). As the leading left-liberal publication, The Nation huffs and puffs high-minded principles before surrendering to the Democratic Party establishment. Nonetheless, it’s always interesting to see how they arrive at their submission.
Of course, it’s all about Trump. He’s not on our side. As a statement of the obvious, that conviction is unmatched. But is Clinton on our side?
The Nation’s editors assemble a tortured list of Clinton positives and Trump negatives that stretch the truth, shrug off uncomfortable facts, and hail irrelevancies. She exhibits “grace under pressure,” they tell us. She has been a “forceful advocate of health-care reform” since 1992. And for wild-eyed fantasy: She “is running on the most progressive platform in the modern history of the Democratic Party.”
Trump’s charge that the elections are “rigged,” on the other hand, is “an assault on the very basis of democratic governance itself.” So the elections are not rigged in favor of the rich, white, and powerful?
With amazing audacity, the editors simply dismiss Clinton’s obscene bond with corporations and foreign tyrants, a bond that is sealed with tens of millions of dollars of barely-concealed quid pro quos. They assert that “progressives will have to continue to push her” away from these rich and powerful benefactors.
As for her super-hawk foreign policy, The Nation concedes that Clinton is wrong on everything from Palestine to Russia and Syria. Though she is seemingly “intent on deepening a New Cold War,” we are invited to “break her hawkish habits,” as though her role in killing tens of thousands is akin to curbing a smoking habit or losing weight.
Presidential candidate Jill Stein is the fly in The Nation’s ointment. She is all the progressive things that Ms. Clinton is not. She stands against the corporate, war-mongering tide and not with it. Here, The Nation engages in a remarkably clumsy dance around the Stein option, laying alleged failings of the Green Party at her feet: “…her cause has not been helped by the Green Party’s reluctance, or inability, to seek, share, and build power, with all the messy compromise this often entails. Instead of the patient– and Sisyphean– task of building an authentic grassroots alternative, the Greens offer a top-down vehicle for protest.”
But isn’t building an “authentic grassroots alternative” exactly what the Stein candidacy is all about? Isn’t Stein reaching out to The Nation readers, Sisyphus, or anyone else interested in changing the bankrupt political scene in order to build precisely the power that the editors claim to want to see? The apparent truth is that The Nation would like Jill Stein to go away and take her principled positions with her, clearing the way for a heavy dose of lesser-of-two-evil scare tactics.
The most-tenured Nation columnist, Katha Pollitt, bats clean-up on the magazine’s Hillary team. She relishes the opportunity, entitling her column The Case for Hillary. In offering her brief, she gives a list of 12 reasons, beginning with reproductive rights: “I’m putting this first because they’re crucial to everything you care about…” [my italics]. Everything we care about? As important as reproductive rights are, does Pollitt really believe that reproductive rights trump all concerns? Did she consider African American mothers whose sons have been murdered by police? Did she even weigh the daily slaughter of hundreds if not thousands throughout the world at the hands of US weapons or the weapons of its surrogates? Does poverty, lack of health care, and inferior education count in her reproductive-rights calculus?
Pollitt, like far too many upper-middle class white liberals, is blind to class and race. Those from other classes or races are not part of “us,” and the concerns of the “other,” though real, are not significant barriers to the “simple human happiness” that she argues flows from reproductive rights. Like the Evangelicals standing on the other side of the abortion barricades, she is incapable of imagining anything more important to others than that battle. She, like the right-wing fanatics, trivializes all other wrongs.
Against the Big Lie
Pollitt’s defense of Ms. Clinton reaches disturbing dimensions when she raises oft-repeated lies about Communist sectarianism leading to the empowerment of Hitler. She references a supposed moment when “…German communists scorned the weak-tea socialists in the 1932 election with the slogan ‘After Hitler, us.’” Like other similar red-baiting slanders that circulate on the left in every election cycle, this one bears little or no relation to the truth. Defenders of lesser-of-two-evilism assert that the German Communists stood in the way of working class anti-fascist unity, that they welcomed Hitler’s rise, that they spurned joint action. These charges are meant to apply supposed lessons from history to the politics of our time, suggesting that independent militancy and principles stand in the way of unity against the specter of extremism. If disaffected voters would throw their votes at the feet of the slightly-lesser-evil, like the German Communists should have done, we could avoid the specter of a greater evil.
While there are many for-hire historians who will affirm these claims, they are based on fiction.
The “1932 election” that Pollitt cites was, in fact, five critical elections: a first-round presidential election in March, the second and final round, the important Prussian Landtag election in April, a Reichstag election in July, and another– the last relatively legitimate Reichstag election– in November.
One surely unimpeachable perspective on these elections was that of journalist Carl von Ossietzky. Ossietzky was a prominent and respected left-wing commentator associated with the left wing of social democracy and often critical of the Communists (KPD). From a family of fallen aristocrats, Ossietzky’s anti-fascist credentials and integrity were impeccable– he received the Nobel Prize in 1935 and died in a Gestapo prison hospital in 1938.
In his newspaper columns in Die Weltbühne, Ossietzky tells a story far removed from the fantastic anti-Communist narrative. In the lead-up to the first round of the Presidential elections, the Social Democratic Party, despite being Germany’s largest party at the time, chose not to run a candidate against both the reactionary incumbent President, von Hindenburg, and Adolf Hitler. It argued that the party’s stance was not pro-Hindenburg, but anti-fascist, a splitting of hairs that did not impress Ossietzky: “It is not that fascism is winning, but that the others are adapting it… A passing insult tossed by the demagogues of the Berlin Sports Palast jerks ten Socialist deputies from their seats, and forces them to prove themselves as fatherland-lovers… the initiative lies with the right.” Ossietzky writes: “Readers continually ask me for whom one should vote on March 13th. Is there really nothing better, they ask, than pursuing this fateful and discouraging policy of the ‘lesser evil’?”
He goes on:
As a non-party man of the left I would have been happy to vote for an acceptable Social Democrat… Since there is no Social Democratic candidate then I will have to vote for the Communist… It must be emphasized that a vote for Thälmann means neither a vote of confidence for the Communist Party, nor major expectations. To make left-wing politics it is necessary to concentrate strength where a man of the left stands in the battle. Thälmann is the only one; all the others are various shades of reaction. That makes the choice easier.
The Social Democrats say: “Hindenburg means struggle against fascism.” From which source do the gentlemen draw this knowledge?
It is nonsense to describe Thälmann’s candidature as simply a gain of numbers. Thälmann will probably receive a surprisingly high number of votes… The better that Thälmann does, the clearer it will be what a success could have been won with a united socialist candidate…
Within a week of his election, Hindenburg– designated the “anti-fascist” candidate by the Social Democrats– called for the banning of all left-wing party-affiliated mass organizations. Before nine months passed, the Reich President had appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor and handed rule to the Nazis. Ossietzky knew at that time what a colossal mistake it was for the Social Democrats to refuse to run a candidate, to support Hindenburg, and to refuse to support Thälmann: “Invisible hands are at work in the web and woof of official policy, trying to bring Hitler, thrown out through the front door, in again up the back stairs.”
In January of 1933, immediately after von Schleicher was deposed as Chancellor and prior to Hindenburg appointing Hitler, the German Communists suggested a united general strike; the Social Democrats rejected the offer to collaborate.
Ossietzky urged unity between Communists and Social Democrats as early as April of 1932. After the Nazis made major gains in the important Prussian Landtag election, Ossietzky saw only two effective responses: either the Social Democrats invite the KPD into the existing Prussian government (something that they had refused to do) or the two parties form a united front. The KPD had already raised the second option one day after the election. The Central Committee called for “mass meetings of the workers in every factory and every mine… in all trade unions…[to] compile a list of joint demands, elect action committees and strike committees composed of Communist, Social Democratic, Christian, and non-party workers…”
Despite the negative portrait painted of KPD tactics by liberal commentators, the German people showed their growing confidence in the KPD in the two Reichstag elections. Of the three major parties, only the KPD made gains in both elections, adding nearly 30% to its deputies while the SPD lost nearly 16%. Clearly, the KPD’s militant anti-fascism was growing in popularity with the working class.
It is probably too much to hope that liberals will retire the red-baiting canard of Communism ushering in fascism, any more than there is hope that partisan Democrats will cease blaming Ralph Nader for their pathetic surrender to the right in the 2000 election.
Clearly, the lesser-of-two-evils approach will not go away anytime soon, though it has failed to halt the many decades of the rightward drift of the political center. Could it be that those who own the two parties are sponsoring this persistent shift to the right in order to gauge just how long liberals, labor, and the left will tolerate it without making a break with the Democratic Party establishment?
One would do well to put aside Cold War textbooks and liberal smugness and take a long look at the dynamics of oppositional politics in the Weimar era leading up to Hitler’s ascension to power. There are lessons from that period beyond desperately collaborating with bourgeois and reactionary parties. The severe economic crisis of that time was only answered by a demagogic and extreme nationalist movement and by the militantly anti-capitalist, revolutionary movement.
The Social Democratic Party chose a different path: it sought to manage capitalism along with its bourgeois parliamentary counterparts. They failed. Disaster ensued.
Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

http://houstoncommunistparty.com/spinning-liberal-tales/

Clinton Might Be Moving Toward Social Security Privatization

Erik Sherman , CONTRIBUTOR
I cover business, personal finance, careers, and the economy.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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wealthyDemocratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton addresses a campaign event, October 22, 2016 at Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. / AFP / Robyn BECK (Photo credit should read ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)

Income insecurity can be an unpleasant feature of old age. That’s why Social Security has been an important aspect of poverty reduction. However, there’s a problem. Current Social Security tax collection has been funding those who are already retired. The question is whether the growth in retirees as the baby boomers age can be met by a smaller workforce with a low participation rate in the labor pool. In other words, could Social Security run out of enough money to keep benefits up?

In the current presidential race, both candidates have said they won’t cut benefits. Hillary Clinton has called for lifting the income cap on Social Security taxes and possibly adding additional taxes on investments. Donald Trump has said he wouldn’t raise the retirement age and won’t raise taxes, depending instead on increased employment to funnel in more money.

But everything is still fairly hazy and there have been analyses that suggested neither has articulated a plan that would clearly protect the system. However, when plans are nebulous, one of two things is usually happening. Either politicians have no idea of how to address an issue and don’t want to admit it, or they all plans the public will dislike and don’t want to admit it.

One of the concerns that have crept up about Social Security is a move to privatize it. Although George W. Bush is often associated with promoting the concept, it actually goes back to Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.

At the time there was strong public support, probably because dot com madness was driving leaps in the stock market and everyone and his or her barber suddenly became an expert in investment. Then came the tech crash as people remembered why equity investments can, in the short run, turn on you.

But there’s evidence that Clinton, who seems to be the front runner in the race, at least at the moment (because you never can tell), may be considering a national retirement savings program, according to David Sirota at International Business Times. The report is based on a plan promoted by Tony James, president of private equity firm Blackstone Group, one of Clinton’s top fundraisers, and a leading candidate for Secretary of the Treasury.

The proposal would require workers and employers to put a percentage of payroll into individual retirement accounts “to be invested well in pooled plans run by professional investment managers,” as James put it. In other words, individual voluntary 401(k)s would be replaced by a single national system, and much of the mandated savings would flow to Wall Street, where companies like Blackstone could earn big fees off the assets. And because of a gap in federal anti-corruption rules, there would be little to prevent the biggest investment contracts from being awarded to the biggest presidential campaign donors.

According to an analysis from Yves Smith at the blog Naked Capitalism, the plan would require an additional 3 percent savings on the part of workers, which would be a nearly 25 percent increase over what they pay into Social Security.

The immediate reaction by some is that this is a plan to force funnel more money into the hands of Wall Street because, as James said in a speech, these savings plans would be “invested well in pooled plans run by professional investment managers and earn a solid return, just like pension plans do.”

Except almost no professional investment managers beat the market when you add in the range of fees the programs typically include. It’s why some expert investors like Warren Buffet suggest index funds that follow the equity markets with generally very low fees. You make more money.

Before lighting the torches and dusting off the pitchforks, recognize there is likely another dynamic going on. Yes, Wall Street denizens would love to pull in fees on investing 3 percent of all wages in the country. But for a moment, think about how any pension plan works.

Any retirement system depends on somehow growing the value of payments into the system over time. If not, the system loses value to inflation and the increasing cost of living. This is how many companies screwed up their pension plans and screwed over their workers. They didn’t invest the levels of cash they needed to because they wanted the books to look better and share prices and their own bonuses to be higher. Now it’s too late to catch up and people are finding the promises were made weren’t worth anything.

Social Security is in a particularly painful pickle. The government invest the funds on Wall Street because the amount of money would whipsaw the economic system and put it at the threat of political whims.

You also need something incredibly stable, a requirement of many public retirement systems, as an example. That pretty much means Treasury bills, and they haven’t paid much in interest in a long time. The result is using the money coming in today to pay the debts accumulated from the past.

Those who understand finance must be scared witless over what could happen without growing the Social Security cash base, especially as the Ponzi mechanism of young workers covering the cost of older ones becomes impossible with an imbalance in population. Few want to say it out loud and virtually none want to mention how such an enormous part of the national debt is to Social Security, whose holdings of federal IOUs dwarfs those in the hands of China.

Pushing more individual savings would mean money could flow into stocks and bonds without such potentially destabilizing concentration. At least, that would be the theory. People could be forced to save, get a better return, and take the pressure off Social Security. And saving and investing are good. Nothing wrong with it, so long as everyone is treating it honestly.

Oh the irony. For all the talk about economic insecurity during the presidential campaign, there’s been too little discussion focused on Social Security. That’s pretty incredible given that it is the most important financial safety net in American society and plays a role in the fiscal life of nearly every American.

Perhaps the math explains the silence. Without significant changes to the program, such as raising the age retirees can collect benefits (touted by Republicans, angering Democrats) or taxing higher income earners on wages above $118,500 (proposed by Democrats, angering Republicans,) the cornerstone of many retirees’ financial lives will deteriorate at the projected date of 2034 when Baby Boomer benefit checks overwhelm workers’ contributions. In other words, there’s no easy answer — and who wants to make retirees grumpy right before election day?

Yet the truth is that current retirees don’t have much to worry about. They’re already receiving monthly checks (even if their cost of living increases are painfully small and some are already struggling to make ends meet.) But they know what their living expenses are in retirement.

If anyone should be up in arms about the lack of action it’s Millennials. Millennials should absolutely be paying attention to this issue. When you’re in your 20s or 30s and still at the beginning of a career, it can be hard to think about retiring, let alone accurately projecting what age that will be. But your 20s and 30s are when you can have the most leverage on your ability to live well years in the future, because small financial moves made now will have a huge impact later thanks to the magic of compound interest.

But even if you can’t get Washington to fix Social Security, or even if you assume it won’t be there when you retire, you still need to pay attention to it. “Millennials or anyone who is planning to assume there will be no retirement benefit will be pretty surprised to see what that means for savings,” says Morningstar’s Christine Benz.

A quick example, consider a 30-year-old contributing 10% of her annual $45,000 salary toward retirement savings. She intends to retire at age 62 and anticipates needing roughly 75% of pre-retirement income or about $34,000. (Using Schwab’s retirement calculator, you can run some alternate scenarios yourself changing your social security assumptions, savings rates, etc.)

If you don’t factor any Social Security income into the equation and assume a moderate-risk portfolio (60% allocated to stocks, 35% bonds and 5% cash,) this saver would still face a gigantic shortfall — and need to either more than double her annual savings (not realistic) cut her spending by 45% (also unrealistic) or delay retirement until age 75 (ouch).

By contrast, by counting Social Security she’ll require much more modest alternatives: Saving 28% more, reducing spending by 13% or retiring four years later. (Investment returns incorporate an average annualized stock market return of 9.5% (1970-2015) with the best annual gain of 30.9% and the worst, a 20.9% loss.)

What to do? How should you account for Social Security? Eliminating it entirely from your planning “strikes me as overly pessimistic,” says Benz. And even if you’re really skeptical that Social Security will be there for you, there are better ways to plan. Take your projected Social Security benefit and give it big a haircut, suggests Deena Katz, a certified financial planner with Evensky & Katz Foldes Financial Wealth Management. Experiment with different outcomes, like try estimating a 50% or even 80% reduction to see the effect on your future retirement needs.

And if running retirement calculations triggers the urge to just ignore it (or run screaming,) there is a simpler approach, one that may help overcome inertia and protect you from the vagaries of politics at the same time. Setting a savings goal as a percentage of your income removes the need to set a retirement “target” number that may seem impossibly high. Will $1 million or $2 million kick off enough retirement income in 2048? Who really knows?

Instead, attempt to save 15% to 20% of your pre-tax income, Benz suggests. Find ways to put this kind of plan on auto-pilot. As your income grows, you won’t miss the money and you won’t have to worry — quite so much — about Washington.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2016/10/23/clinton-might-be-moving-toward-social-security-privatization/#72ae82e72f50

Them Forbes readers gotta be jacking off and getting out the vote for Hilary.

"Saving 15-20% of before tax earning"...Ha ha ha ha ha ha...........

The Lords of Capital Sic Crazy Hillary on the World
Submitted by Glen Ford on Tue, 11/01/2016 - 23:10

http://blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-400x300/public/HillaryKissinger_0.jpg?itok=Urbo-Kwa

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
The capitalist ruling class is frightened, for good reason: the empire cannot peacefully contain the rising economic powers of the South and East. “The Lords of Capital know there is no future for them in a world where the dollar is not supreme and where Wall Street’s stocks, bonds and derivatives are not backed by the full weight of unchallenged empire.” War is the only card they have left to play – and Hillary Clinton is their favored dealer.

The Lords of Capital Sic Crazy Hillary on the World
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
“The Lords of Capital are creatures of U.S. imperial dominance; they go out of business when the empire does.”

By virtually every measurement, the United States is in deep crisis, as both a society and as the headquarters of global capitalism. We can roughly measure the severity of some aspects of the crisis with the tools of economic analysis. Such an analysis is quite useful in explaining why Washington is so eager to risk war with Russia and China, whether in Syria or the South China Sea or along the ever expanding borders of NATO. To put it simply, the U.S. and western Europe become smaller, in terms of their economic influence, with every passing day, and cannot possibly maintain their political dominance in the world except by military force, coercion and terror. Those are the only cards the imperialists have left to play. The ruling circles in the U.S. are aware that time is not on their side, and it makes them crazy -- or crazier than usual.

The ruling class’s own analysts tell them that the center of the world economy is moving inexorably to the East and the South; that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future; and that the U.S. is already number two by some economic measures -- and dropping. The Lords of Capital know there is no future for them in a world where the dollar is not supreme and where Wall Street’s stocks, bonds and derivatives are not backed by the full weight of unchallenged empire. Put another way, U.S. imperialism is at an inflection point, with all the indicators pointing downward and no hope of reversing the trend by peaceful means.

Now, that’s actually not such a bad prognosis for the United States, as a country. The U.S. is a big country, with an abundance of human and natural resources, and would do just fine in a world among equals. But, the fate of the Lords of Capital is tied to the ongoing existence of empire. They create nothing, but seek to monetize and turn a profit on everything. They cannot succeed in trade unless it is rigged, and have placed bets in their casinos that are nominally seven times more valuable than the total economic activity of planet Earth. In short, the Lords of Capital are creatures of U.S. imperial dominance; they go out of business when the empire does.

Beat the Clock

The rulers are looking class death in the face -- and it terrifies them. And when the Lords of Capital become frightened, they order their servants in politics and the war industries and the vast national security networks to take care of the problem, by any means necessary. That means militarily encircling Russia and China; arming and mobilizing tens of thousands of jihadist terrorists in Syria, in an attempt to repeat the regime change in Libya; waging a war of economic sanctions and low-level armed aggression against Iran; occupying most of the African continent through subversion of African militaries; escalating subversion in Latin America; and spying on everyone on earth with a digital connection. All this, to stop the clock that is ticking on U.S. and European world economic dominance.

Left political analysts that I greatly respect argue that Hillary Clinton and the mob she will come in with in January will pull back from apocalyptic confrontation with Russia in Syria -- that they’re not really that crazy. But, I’m not at all convinced. The ruling class isn’t just imagining that their days are numbered; it’s really true. And rulers do get crazy when their class is standing at death’s door.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

http://blackagendareport.com/rulers_sic_hillary_on_world

Rejection of the “Lesser of 2 Evils” Is Always the Main Issue

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Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton | Photo: Reuters

Published 3 November 2016

Arnold August talks to Arnaldo Perez Guerra about his book "Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion" in the context of the U.S. election.
The Genesis of the Book

The idea for this book arose from my previous experience writing Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections (1999), which concentrated on the electoral process in Cuba. The goal at the time was to respond to the disinformation that there are no elections on the island.

In order to write the text, I carried out my research on the spot. I attended every step of the electoral process, from the municipalities to the national Parliament. For the most part of this more than one-and-a-half-year investigation, I lived in the family home of a municipal delegate to the People’s Power.

Being embedded in this way vastly deepened my approach to understanding the process from within and, along with my photos, allowed me to provide readers with a lively narrative. This work in Havana and in a rural area took place from September 1997 to February 1998. I was only one of two non-Cubans to have had access to the entire electoral process. This unforgettable professional experience resulted in the first book, in 1999.

It was published in English and subsequently very well received through my conferences in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. You can imagine that, especially in the U.S., it raised many eyebrows. In that country, the preconceived view that there are simply no elections in Cuba is very ingrained. Nonetheless, in general, the book developed a following while also providing me with crucial input to further evaluate my analysis. Today, people in the U.S. still comment to me about that publication. However, despite the positive reception, I did notice that the U.S.-centric notion of democracy and elections lingers on, even with some people on the left.

Thus, the idea to write another book began to emerge. In the following years, I further studied democracy and elections in other countries (especially in the U.S. and Venezuela). This was interrupted by the need to study what I call “democracy in motion from the bottom up” in the U.S. (the Occupy movement), the Egyptian Revolution against the U.S.-backed military regime and the Indignados (outraged) in Spain against the two-party system domination. With these unexpected, but welcomed, new events (despite their drawbacks and weaknesses) and with input from readers in the U.S. on the first book, I began to orient myself toward a new approach. It would include an analysis of democracy as a concept, taking into account the above-mentioned experiences, evaluated by critically analyzing U.S.-centrism, especially as it pertains to democracy. The goal was to strongly put forward the view that the U.S. approach to “democracy” is not the only one.

I am certain that readers can appreciate a profound critique of U.S.-centric notions on democracy because of the bitter 1973 experience in Chile and other bloody U.S. interventions in the region in the name of, among other pretexts, “democracy.” Furthermore, there was a need to analyze in detail the real inner workings of elections and “democracy” in the U.S. based on an approach that is unique and therefore necessary. To deepen the concept, democracy is explored with a review of the participatory democracy experiences in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. In addition, there was a need for the Cuban approach to be illuminated through a more critical approach, in contrast to the previous book, so as not to idealize the Cuban political system. I also decided to investigate the actual functioning of the state in Cuba at the municipal and parliamentary levels after the elections, something that I did not do in the previous book.

To conclude my response to your question as to how the idea came about to write my latest book, I consider the publication to be a culmination of my active struggle and political thinking since my university days in Montreal in the 1960s. This involved a loathing of U.S. imperialism while fully supporting the peoples of the Third World against colonialism and imperialism. Thus, the plan for the book was emerging as my virtual political testament. It was published in English in 2013 and in Spanish in 2015.

American Democracy: Neither the Model Nor a 'Bourgeois Democracy'

“Not a bourgeois democracy?” readers may ask — and rightly so. Of course, it is a “bourgeois democracy”; however, the first important aspect of my book is the analysis of how democracy and elections in Cuba’s neighbour, the U.S., really works. Thus, I am not in favour of the popular yet superficial conception that dismisses American “democracy” as bourgeois and the election campaigns as being a farce or a show. It is the easy way out.

This approach avoids scientifically and painstakingly analyzing the inner workings of the system. How the system really operates from the point of view of the grass roots, rather than the stifling straitjacketed vision delimited by the spectacular rivalry of two parties, is bypassed. As will be discussed below, some commentators who relieve their conscience by accusing the U.S. of being a “bourgeois democracy” and a “show” have ended up supporting Clinton against Trump while remaining, consciously or not, oblivious to what is actually happening at the base in the U.S.

My approach is based on an original case study of the Obama phenomenon as a natural outgrowth of the American political system since the seventeenth century. How can one analyze the political process? The role of money in U.S. politics is well known to the extent that this phenomenon has taken its place in the American international public domain. It is no secret to anyone. The same applies to the notorious corruption in the political system and the cut-throat unprincipled competition between the two main parties.

To concentrate on these features is to fall victim to the U.S.’s very own concept of their process. Harping on the issues presents no real challenge to the status quo. The money, corruption and competition are not the main characteristics. Thus, to be attracted to these attributes is to fall into the trap of the U.S.-centric view of their elections as its concept remains within the box delimited by the U.S. establishment. In contrast, I examine the process from the point of view of the base, rather than from the top. The only real issue at this time is the dead end of the “lesser of two evils” option or, rather, the non-option of having to choose one of two evils.

Conclusion: Political Opportunism and Co-Optation

The first aspect of the book that I want to highlight, “American democracy,” one conclusion reached through my Obama case study is that all presidential elections, including the current one, are based on two features.

First, there is the insatiable individual political opportunism of a presidential hopeful. Second, as a precondition to being nominated and eventually elected, this person must firmly have demonstrated the capacity to co-opt sections of the electorate. This talent, linked to being endowed with personal characteristics (e.g., being black or a woman) must be sufficiently evident to the ruling circles not only to win enough votes, but to also effectively co-opt after the elections. The overall goal of the establishment is to avoid a revolt against the system by the people, first and foremost by African Americans, who are traditionally the most left-wing and revolutionary force in that country.

During the course of the electoral campaign, based supposedly on the capitalist motto of the “invisible hand of the free market” as applied to politics, at a certain moment the majority of the U.S. ruling class makes their choice. Following this, the “invisible fist” interferes in the “invisible hand of the free market” by taking action to assure the victory of their preferred candidate. In the case of Obama, at the point when Obama fully reassured the ruling circles (as fully documented in my book) that he was their man, immense funds flowed into the Obama coffers from the military, health insurance corporations and pharmaceutical companies, not to mention Wall Street. This support was fully backed by the majority of the main printed news media (in reality, part of that same corporate elite) as well as university student publications endorsing Obama.

In the 2006–08 period, the U.S. ruling circles were facing a major credibility gap domestically in the face of African-American resentment and anger as well as internationally in the wake of the Bush era. In terms of foreign affairs, Latin America’s growing left-wing movement, fomented by the Bolivarian Revolution, was of particular concern to important political figures who supported Obama in the 2006–08 period. The concern about all of the domestic and international credibility gaps indicated that Obama came in handy. He was not an innocent bystander, since he consciously flashed the right signals to the ruling elite. The decision to support Obama was surely the correct decision carried out by the ruling circle, as one can easily imagine how woeful the situation would have been for U.S. interests if John McCain/Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan would have won.

Conclusion: Rejection of the “Lesser of Two Evils” Is Always the Main Issue

This brings us to the second conclusion in this section. The corporate media and their two main parties use the election campaign to promote the two-party system as the only choice. This goal is sacred, since its objective is to suffocate any burgeoning struggle for a left-wing progressive alternative. As a corollary, the U.S. implicitly or explicitly promotes “lesser evilism,” as it is very well known in U.S. progressive circles. The logic is that even if electors hate both parties and their respective candidates, they should vote for the “lesser evil.” As I was writing my book, I came across an analysis by Black Agenda Report, a website based in the U.S. They wrote that Obama is not the “lesser of two evils,” but the more effective of two evils in administrating the program of the U.S. ruling circles.

Let us take foreign policy to elaborate how “lesser evilism” operates. In the text, I provide the example of Honduras: Obama, the new face of imperialism, successfully carried out the coup d’état in 2009 soon after being elected for his first term in 2008. He was directly involved with Hillary Clinton in executing it, profiting from the illusion being propagated about a new U.S. diplomatic foreign policy combined with Obama deftly using verbal subterfuge as no McCain/Palin team in the White House could have done.

The Honduran resistance was, of course, in a very difficult position from the beginning. However, the White House bought valuable time for itself in the international arena. It drew out the suspense by falsely claiming that Washington opposed the coup. Some governments in Latin America were also infected by illusions about Obama, thus depriving the heroic Honduran resistance with the regional support it so badly needed.

Then came the Paraguay parliamentary coup. The book also shows the hand of Obama immediately after the April 14, 2013 Venezuelan Presidential elections in order to destabilize the country. Obama was interfering in Venezuela right up to 2015, when the Spanish edition of the book was published. There was resistance in the region, but it perhaps would have been far stronger if it had not been contained to a certain extent by U.S. imperialism’s new Obama approach.

Domestic Scene: Co-Opting and Pacifying African Americans

The most important of Obama’s legacies has been his relative capacity to co-opt some sympathy from African-Americans, who were feeling assured with a black person in the White House. As documented in my publication, his overture to blacks was skilfully written into both of his books (2004 and 2006) and two important 2012 campaign speeches dedicated to the race issue. While feigning empathy for blacks, he also sent the appropriate buzzwords to assure the ruling elite what they wanted to hear: the U.S. is a “post-racial society,” that there is not a white America, a black America or a Latino America, but the United States of America. This startling illusion could only be uttered by the first African-American president as “proof” that the American Dream is more alive than ever.

It is as if to say, “Look at me, I made it!” — conveniently overlooking the fact that his relatively privileged upbringing leaves the vast majority of African-Americans in the dust, to deal with poverty, discrimination and the racist violent state. Obama jumped into the White House on the trampoline of unbridled individual opportunism. His image, as documented in my book, was carefully groomed by a white Chicago political consultant who specialized in getting blacks elected to positions with already five victories to his credit at the time. Obama sat on the hairdresser’s chair gleefully allowing the master to shape and camouflage his image to satisfy the needs of the ruling circles. This came in handy, for example, at the very beginning of the second Obama mandate in 2012, when young Trayvon Martin was assassinated by an armed vigilante in Florida. Obama went on TV to openly use the race card to try and co-opt the outrage among blacks and pacify them and their many allies.

This approach was combined with the subtle pursuit of impunity. For example, since the publication of the book, Obama’s Department of Justice cleared the killer of Trayvon Martin and let him free. This de facto institutionalized impunity gave the green light to more police killings, as the world is aware.

Obama is the worst phenomenon to ever happen to African-Americans. For example, he and Hillary Clinton used the outrage of black mothers whose sons or daughter were killed by police to speak at the July democratic convention in support of Obama’s heir Hillary Clinton rather than supporting the Black Lives Matter in the streets in front of the convention venue. One of the mothers was Trayvon Martin’s. We can thus ask the question: would this have happened if the president were a Republican? No. This seemingly paradoxical situation goes to the very heart of the dead-end nature of “lesser evilism.”

The U.S. oligarchy repeats the refrain of U.S. exceptionalism. Well, I agree with them on one aspect only: the U.S. is the only country in the West (i.e., North America and Europe) that is based today on a racist violent state as a vestige of slavery. Thus, the U.S. is indeed an exception in this sense. No analyst or political force in the U.S., or internationally, can ignore this historical fact. The Obama legacy of co-opting and pacifying African-Americans, combined with impunity to police violence, is now carrying on into the Clinton campaign. She will win the presidency for one of the same reasons that catapulted Obama into power: Obama was called upon by the majority in the ruling circles to co-opt – or at least neutralize — African Americans.

Therefore, the most important repercussion of “lesser evilism” consists of feverishly delaying forever the struggle at the base by boxing people into the dead-end of voting for one of the lesser of two evils. This perpetual postponement thus blinds the people to the need for revolutionary struggle with the goal of people’s power combined with voting for an alternative on the left of the two-party system.

What Is Happening in Much of the Latin American Press?

To answer this question, allow me to fast-forward to the current situation in the presidential election campaign, as I feel that readers should be aware of one regrettable phenomenon. As I work on this interview, I observe that in the U.S. there is very wide opposition from the left-wing and progressives. I am referring to the Green Party ticket, which has managed to take off after Bernie Sanders supported Clinton’s Democratic presidential nomination. The ticket is now composed of presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka for Vice President. The latter is a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report, mentioned above, as well as to Counter Punch, one of the most important alternative websites in the U.S. that stands against the two-party system. As recently as August 18, 2016, Baraka said in an interview that he aims to continue the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, two of the most important historic revolutionaries among progressive Afro-Americans.

This growing coalition also includes the Black Lives Matter movement, which some commentators in the U.S. say is becoming increasingly socialist. The flow can be observed on the streets via the many thousands of Twitter accounts, hundreds of serious alternative websites in turn supported by thousands of journalists, and self-financed alternative TV and radio programs.

The argument that voting for the Green Party ticket is futile because it cannot win in 2016 does not take into the account the current movement at the base and its future. Once the 2016 elections are over, will the grass-roots motion continue in the streets to put forward its demands, expose the two-party system for what it is and elevate the slogan of People’s Power to a prominent position? Will this groundswell and the further imploding of the two-party system open the path for the left-wing alternative possible gaining more headway? These and other questions should be available to all peoples who are interested in what is unfolding in the U.S.

Unfortunately, in much of the progressive or left-wing Spanish-language press in Latin America and the Caribbean, there are virtually no reports or analysis from this point of view of progressive opposition at the grass roots to the lesser of two evils. It seems that the few exceptions consist of revolutionary blogs, such as in Cuba. I am familiar with these blogs on the island; however, there are surely other progressive blogs in other Latin American countries. Thus, an important part of the mainstream progressive press deals with the situation within the confines of the two competing parties. They more often than not provide a slightly modified version of the U.S. establishment’s views but rendered in Spanish or Portuguese. In this context, the balance is often tipped in favour of Clinton.

However, this optic is also to the detriment of the opposition from the left and progressive forces in the U.S. I am in no way suggesting that the foreign press take a stand on the U.S. elections. However, the way the trend is presently developing is de facto taking a stand in favour of the two-party system status quo. Morphing into the U.S. narrative is detrimental to the opposition that is developing at this time as never before. Yet, this censorship is keeping much of the Latin American population in the dark.

The alternative reporting and analysis in the U.S. is almost exclusively in English, but this is no excuse. In contrast, in my case and that of others, in order to investigate the Cuban political system, I do so in Spanish, in Cuba at both the official local and national levels and especially at the grass-roots level. For those Latin American journalists who cannot go to the U.S., this is no reason for not capturing what is really happening in the U.S. beyond the superficial reports and analyses that censor opposition to the two-party system. I personally do not travel to the U.S. very often either, but the many thousands of daily tweets and hundreds of stories in the alternative media and TV at the base tell the whole story to anyone who masters the English language.

There have been so many decades of opposing U.S. imperialism in the south. Encouragingly, for the first time in decades, there is presently an awakening in the U.S. itself against the interventionist American Eagle that coincides with the electoral process. While this just and burgeoning antithesis to U.S. official domestic and foreign policy is not as radical as some (myself included) might hope for, it is opposed to the deadly U.S. imperialist war machine, the absolute rule of the oligarchy, the racist state violence, Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP, whose opposition to which Hillary Clinton plays lip service while everyone knows that she will push it through) and the violation of the Palestinian people’s human rights — all of which both Clinton and Trump are part.

Many other examples highlight the contradiction between the status quo parties and the opposition. Allow me to provide you with one that could not be more vivid for the peoples south of the Rio Bravo. As all readers are aware, Obama and Hillary Clinton were responsible for the coup d’état in Honduras, the resulting regime and thus the assassination of activist Berta Cáceres. Berta was in the streets of Philadelphia in July in the company of the progressive opposition protesting the Democratic convention. In stark contrast, Obama, Clinton and their seemingly endless line of military spokespeople and sycophants were busy further consolidating the Democratic party of war and foreign interference.

This was carried out through an almost unprecedented four-day spectacle, beating the war drums for stepped-up militarization, aggression, wars and international interference. This dangerous direction serves to pave the way for increased interference in Latin America. All this was staged live in almost 24 hours of TV coverage during four days on CNN to the frightening tune of American chauvinism, which paled in comparison to the Trump Republican convention the previous week. It seems to me that any effective progressive contention of this two-party oligarchy deserves the full attention of the left-wing Spanish-language media in the south.

This is an unabridged English version of an interview that Arnaldo Perez Guerra recorded exclusively with Punto Final (Chile) in Spanish, and which was published by that newspaper in a slightly abridged version.

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Rejection-of-the-Lesser-of-2-Evils-Is-Always-the-Main-Issue-20161103-0009.html

Four videos at link.

Regarding why I'm eager to vote for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday:
First, you can vote however you want. I'm not here to shit on Jill Stein voters or Bernie Sanders write-ins or non-voters or whatever. I may not be persuaded by your strategy for building socialism, but this is not one of the great strategic decision moments for the left. Do you.
Second, after the conventions, I decided not to post online about the presidential election in order to hold myself to my belief that unless an electoral campaign helps grow the left, as Sanders’ campaign indisputably did, it squanders energy. With Standing Rock and whatnot going on, I didn't want my focus on an already too-focused-on race. I got off Twitter and basically didn't watch the debates, and I'm certain my spirit is better off than it would have been.
I'm ending this abstinence a few days early to explain why I will be voting for Clinton, whose politics I find so terrible that I made a meme series entitled “Hillary Clinton’s terrible politics.” I plan not just to vote, but to vote eagerly.
I’ve undergone two shifts in thinking over this long election season that influenced my decision. The first was becoming skeptical of the extent to which I'd bought into an understanding of voting as a self-expressive speech act. The language used in this framework—having a personal responsibility to make your voice heard—started to sound to me like individualistic, sappy liberal bullshit. Voting, I now think, is not chiefly a performance of self-expression, but a stone cold tactic for achieving a political outcome. Better to vote for someone whose politics are terrible, if that accomplishes something good, than to vote for someone whose politics are great, if that accomplishes nothing good, or worse, something bad. In this case, being a New Yorker, whatever my vote accomplishes is negligible: the point is I have shed my aversion to voting for terrible politicians.
I also began to question whether the main consideration for leftists should be which candidate is likeliest to enact our agenda—the lesser evil. The fact is, the left is not yet strong enough to extract major concessions. To imagine what it would have been like had Sanders been elected president (as he surely would have if we’d gotten him nominated), just look at what Jeremy Corbyn is facing in the U.K. and scale it up. With Sanders hamstrung, the country would have decided that it had tried socialism and socialism had failed.
Our most urgent task is growing the left. Our priority, therefore, should not be to elect the leftmost president, but the president under whom the power of the left is likeliest to grow.
Normally, this means Democrats. When Republicans are in power, the left gets subsumed as the left flank of the official opposition, which is led by Democrats. With Democrats in power, though, the left gets to be its own opposition, to draw contrasts between leftism and liberalism—against a Democratic president.
One underappreciated attribute of recent social movements—Occupy, the Movement for Black Lives, low-wage workers, climate justice, immigrant rights, etc.—is the success they have had advancing the left against Barack Obama, who people love and adore. Imagine how much easier it will be against Clinton, who is widely unpopular and distrusted, largely because she enjoys too cozy a relationship with the ownership class. Imagine the boost to militant working-class organizing when the liberal-in-chief lacks a working-class base of enthusiastic support.
It's not that she's the *lesser* evil, though she is; it's that she's the *more strategically useful* evil.
Nelini Stamp’s maxim (https://medium.com/@NelStamp/presedential-elections-are-not-radical-litmus-tests-and-why-im-voting-for-my-opponent-a55a7259d35d#.fwqocwecj) is persuasive: vote for the opponent you want. I'm eager to grow the left against President Hillary Clinton, and with that eagerness I will cast my vote for her.


More... (http://inthesetimes.com/article/19597/i-think-hillary-clintons-politics-are-terrible.-im-voting-for-her/)

What utter muddled bullshit...

U.S. Presidential Elections: Between Scylla and Charybdis


Today, 8th November, the people of the United States of America are voting for the new President of the country. Their choice is between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, two people who express different parts of the american bourgeoisie. Their political and economic proposals reflect the intensification of the contradictions between different portions of the U.S. capital, within the metropolis of capitalism. Like every candidate in the U.S. Presidential Elections, both Mrs. Clinton and Mr.Trump are representatives of monopoly interests and large corporations.

Whatever the outcome of today's elections is, the working people of the United States must have no illusions about the upcoming developments. The future president- either Clinton or Trump- will not hesitate to proceed decisively in order to safeguard the interests of the U.S. monopolies.

The voters in the United States have to choose between Scylla and Charybdis; between two choices which do not represent the interests of the working masses but the interests of the U.S. monopoly capital. Whatever the outcome of the elections, the american people must have no illusions that their lives will improve.

The only real hope for the working people in the United States- as well as everywhere else in the world- lies in the organized struggle against the real opponent; the exploitative capitalist system. The people must concentrate their power in organizing their counter-attack, towards a different way of developments, against the monopolies and their authority. The real solution to the huge problems of the U.S. working class won't come from any Trump or Clinton, but from the struggle of an organized labour movement towards the transformation of society.

Capitalism is a rotten system; it can offer nothing but misery, crises, unemployment and wars. The only hope for the people is not in the ballot box, but in the daily struggle for a society without capitalists and monopolies. For a socialist society with the people in the power. It is in the hands of the people, of the working masses in the United States of America to overthrow this miserable situation.

In Defense of Communism,
8 November 2016.

https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2016/11/us-presidential-elections-between.html