Another endorsement of Trump from the Left

James Petras is a retired NY Professor of Sociology and as far-Left as you would expect from that.  In his angry tirade below, he says The Donald is just loud and that Hillary is the real criminal.  He has a point. I don't of course remotely agree with him on illegal immigration but he is correct that Trump's foreign policy is isolationist and, as such, well within the American conservative tradition. It's mostly Democrats who have sent America's young men abroad to die.  And I agree with his diagnosis of Hillary as a psychopath, though not, perhaps, for all the same reasons

Introduction: From left to right a raucous chorus has emerged to denounce Republican Presidential primary frontrunner Donald Trump as a ‘fascist’. They cite his campaign promises to build an Israeli-style wall along the US border; his threats to expel eleven million undocumented immigrants; and to restrict foreign Muslims from entering the US, as well as the way his pugnacious face and arm resemble those of Benito Mussolini (’he juts out his chin, he raises his arm’).

They decry his extreme nationalism as ‘resembling Hitler’s policy’, by which they mean his opposition to detrimental free trade agreements and his slogan to “Make America Great.. Again.”

In this article I will critically address the current cartoonish image of fascism with fascism’s historical reality, and then proceed to analyze the so-called “lesser evil” politics behind the re-invention of an American fascist in the guise of billionaire Donald Trump.

Fascism: Fact and Fiction

Historically, fascist politics involved organized mass movements, armed militia and paramilitary groups who assaulted political opponents and violently censored critical speech and suppressed the right to assemble. Fascists scapegoated minorities, especially gypsies and Jews, and burned trade unions and leftist headquarters, assassinating their leaders and beating their members. Programmatically, they attacked pacifists and defended overseas wars and empires in the name of ‘living space’. Evoking a past imperial glory, they were not ‘isolationists’.

Candidate Trump has not organized anything resembling a mass movement, let alone an armed militia. There are no ‘Trumpeting Brown Shirts’. At most, the police and a handful of his (often elderly) white supporters have punched a few KKK-dressed provocateurs who have physically disrupted and threatened Trump’s public meetings and his exercise of free speech. In fact, the ‘fascist’ disruption of democratic freedoms seems to be mostly organized and practiced by his political rivals.

Trump, far from scapegoating the powerful Jewish minority in this country, gave a shamelessly Israel-centric speech and received a standing ovation from nearly 18,000 mostly prominent Jews at the March 2016 meeting of the major pro-Israel lobby (AIPAC).

His rhetoric, concerning the expulsion of 11 million undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America and the building of a border wall, is a far cry from the practice of imprisoning and violently expelling over two million undocumented Latinos under the Clinton-Bush-Obama/Clinton regimes. At its worst, Trump promises to continue the existing federal policy on immigration and not create a ‘fascist’ rupture with past administrations. Is a ‘rhetorical cement wall’ worse than the real wall of armed border police, helicopters and armed carriers that have operated under the Presidencies of Clinton – Bush – Obama/Clinton with its hundreds of migrant deaths in the desert? Are declarations of a repressive immigration policy more ‘fascist’ coming from Trump’s loud mouth than the actual official practice of violently seizing undocumented workers from their homes and workplaces with long-term imprisonment and expulsion? Expelling youth, raised and educated in this country, or violently splitting up productive, well-integrated families and imprisoning their main breadwinners for lack of documents…that’s the official policy of the current and past three administrations.

There is far less of the truly fascist embrace of pre-emptive war and invasion in Trump’s speeches than in the actual policies pursued by the Clinton-Bush-Obama/Clinton regimes. In fact, among Trump’s numerous critics, especially his Republican rivals and the Hillary Clinton camp, we hear the loudest denunciations of his non-interventionist foreign policy (isolationism), which is “out of line” with the interventionist, overseas wars of current and past Republican and Democratic administrations. Trump’s critics and media pundits are ‘horror-struck’ at his apparent willingness to co-operate with Russian President Putin against common enemies, such as ISIS. Is his pragmatic regard of Russia more or less fascist than his rivals’ support for the Ukrainian putsch, orchestrated by the Obama regime in alliance with bona fide armed anti-Semitic Ukrainian fascists? His calls to dump NATO as an expensive drain on US treasure and manpower have the elite howling in outrage!

The propagandists, who paint Trump as a modern American fascist, cite his crude sexist remarks as ‘examples of a misogynist totalitarian’ while pointing favorably to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as potentially the ‘first feminist President’. In regard to his alleged misogyny, ‘the Donald’ pointed to Madame First Lady, Senator and Secretary Clinton’s promotion and critical role in US wars against Libya, Iraq and Syria where well over one million women have been rendered refugees, raped, injured or killed. Which is worse, one may ask: Crude locker room jokes or millions of orphaned boys and girls denied parents, homes, education and any future in the Middle East and North Africa? That is the world Midwife Hillary Clinton had helped to deliver.

Misogyny is the in the eye of the deceiver.

Are Trump’s verbal attacks on the practice of US multi-nationals relocating abroad to avoid US taxes and Wall Street financial houses hiding billions of the US elites’ obscene wealth in offshore tax shelters, more detrimental to ‘American values’ (as charged) than Hillary Clinton’s pandering to Wall Street while pocketing over $300,000 for each 45 minute sycophantic performance (marketed as her ‘policy lectures’), or her decades of actively promoting globalization – including the US job-destroying NAFTA?

Clearly Trump currently lacks program, organization and practice that define a fascist politician. At the very worst, he parrots the general line of attack against immigrants and Muslims. So far he would just bar them from the US but not bomb them ‘to the stone-age’. This should be contrasted with the actual policies carried out by the war-criminals Clinton/Bush/Obama-Clinton. It would be hard for Donald to ‘trump’ Hillary when she threatened to ‘obliterate Iran’ and its scores of millions of citizens because of Iran’s fictitious ‘nuclear program’.

On the other hand, Trump’s own meetings and rallies have been the victim of repeated disruption by organized groups acting like fascist thugs. Role reversal in real life: Trump, the target of rabid sustained mass media attacks, is pronounced the fascist …

Bashing Trump: Backdoor Backing of Hillary the Militarist Psychopath

If the objective case for labeling Trump ‘a fascist’ is weak or non-existent, why do so many prestigious academics and journalists play this stupid game of name-calling?

The commonsense explanation of their ruffled bluster is because they are setting up ‘Trump-the- Straw-Dragon’ in order to promote the poisonous Madame Secretary Hillary Clinton as the ‘lesser evil candidate’ for President of the United States.

No serious observer minimally aware of Clinton’s carnal embrace of multiple simultaneous disastrous and destructive wars in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Libya, could possibly support her – unless if they are convinced that a greater danger looms on the horizon and “we have to defeat fascist Trump at all cost”? No serious democrat or wage and salaried employee can ignore Madame Clinton’s role as Wall Street’s most shameless pimp unless they ‘believe’ that a loud-mouth New York ‘fascist is worse than Wall Street’.

The phony scaremongering about Trump’s “fascism” just serves to cover up Clinton’s most servile promotion of traitorous wars for the benefit of Israel. One should envision the thousands of desperate Syrian refugees clinging to decrepit boats in the Mediterranean when reading excerpts of Clinton’s private e-mails: According to WikiLeaks, Hillary declared that “the best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability (sic) is to help (sic) the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad. … The fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies”. Not a bad thing for Israel – but a cruel and criminal policy against a sovereign nation and multi-ethnic society. Madame Clinton followed through with these demented pronouncements, which can only be viewed as genocidal! Clinton promoted the most violent proxy war, uprooting over half of the civilian population of Syria and killing hundreds of thousands, while shredding a sovereign nation. She thus pandered to her Israeli mentors and Pluto-Zionist funders.

To justify backing a serial war monger, a US Secretary of State who has served Israel’s interests, and a politician who has carnalized her ‘feminist principles’ with Wall Street billionaires, Hillary Clinton’s smarmy supporters have had to invent an opponent who is even worse: Creating and then denouncing “Trump the Fascist” serves as a backdoor justification for supporting a proven political psychopath!

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Want to win in November? Save voters from Obamazoning

Whether you are a presidential candidate or someone seeking an office at the local level, there is an issue that resonates with people across the nation, a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulatory overreach destroys local control of zoning laws.

President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation conditions more than $3 billion of community development block grants on redrawing maps to override local zoning laws using the warped logic that lack of racial and income diversity is proof in itself of racial discrimination.

This is the great sleeper issue of 2016.

Suburban voters work very hard to maintain their standard of living, and choose to avoid the societal dysfunction that is pervasive in liberal-ran urban centers. To arbitrarily export inner city residents to newly constructed government housing built against those communities’ wills violates a sense of fair play, as residents worked hard to form communities without the crime and decay found in the city.

Once informed that these policies will devalue their property and make their community less safe, the issue becomes an existential threat to a suburban community’s way of life, and residents there will support policies and policymakers who will defend their interests.

Westchester County, where none other than Hillary Clinton resides, was the guinea pig for this federal zoning takeover and Republican County Executive Rob Astorino has been attacking it statewide in New York for more than half a decade.  Astorino has won twice in this heavily Democrat county due to his strong opposition to the HUD low-income housing zoning imposition.

Talk Radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have publically inveighed against the HUD rule since 2014, attacking the Obama Administration’s radical restructuring of local zoning laws to move heavily Democrat urban dwellers into suburban communities. Levin has done so as recently as last month, so the issue is ripe particularly for conservative voters who have already been familiarized via media gatekeepers they trust.

What’s more the issue is now percolating strongly in Baltimore County, Maryland where the county is being forced by HUD to build 1,000 low income units under HUD’s twisted legal theory.

But this issue constitutes a real threat to suburban voters beyond just New York and Maryland. About 1,200 counties and cities accept federal community development block grants every single year, all who will suddenly be forced by the feds who tell them where and who to house those who have been failed by liberal urban policies.

This issue is great for contrast, illustrates federal overreach and literally hits voters where they live. It is a motivating issue, and is an opportunity for the candidate or campaign that acts upon it.

The short term solution would be to reject the community block grants that impose this onerous requirement. This will cost lager communities far more than it will cost smaller ones, as the grants range from the thousands of dollars to millions. In the long term, local, state and federal candidates should cultivate voters and put this issue to constituents to achieve a mandate against Washington, D.C. bureaucrats micromanaging their neighborhoods.

No issue is more powerful at the local level than zoning.  All roads, schools and shopping centers are built around planning concepts that are the subject of intense local political debate.  Obama’s HUD rule overrides all those decisions because arrogant officials in Washington are looking at a census map and decide that non-racially and income diverse areas must be racist.

Right thinking candidates across the nation would be insane not to take up this issue. Suburban residents, some of who voted for the very administration that threatens their communities, will be forced to come to terms with the reality of their vote.

In an act of contrition for some and an act of preservation by all, voters should support candidates that will stand against this vile abuse of power by HUD. Candidates on the ballot this November for federal office have never had a better opportunity to stand up for their constituents and stick it to D.C. central planners.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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