As long as Trump and other leaders walk free, low information voters will conclude that January 6 was no big deal
Author Archive for: Rupture.Capital
Everyone is desperate for signs of life in the American working class, so the breathless talk of a “Striketober” a few months back made sense. But new Bureau of Labor Statistics data throws cold water on that idea: there was no strike upsurge.
United Auto Workers picket signs tossed on the ground outside a strike at General Motors, 2019. (Jeff Kowalsky / AFP via Getty Images)
There was a lot of enthusiastic talk about a wave of labor militancy last year — remember “Striketober”? With the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) preliminary data for December out — it will be slightly revised next month, but not by much — we can now look at the full year in historical perspective. It was a quiet year, even by recent standards.
First, the number of “stoppages” involving a thousand workers or more.*
There were about half as many major strikes in 2021 as there were in 2018 (the year of the teachers’ strikes) and 2019 (which included a five-week strike against GM), and nothing compared to the pre-Reagan decades.
Comparing the number of workers involved in strikes to the labor force yields even less impressive results: 0.02% of total employment, a sixteenth as much as in 2018 and less than a hundredth the average of the 1950s. Even the 1990s, hardly a decade known for class struggle, saw eleven times the share of the workforce walking out.
Yet another view: what the BLS calls, with a touch of moralism, “days of idleness” expressed as a percent of total hours worked. Again, the line is almost indistinguishable from the x-axis, so close it is to 0–0.002%, to be precise.
Here’s a closeup of the idleness measure since 2000 using monthly data. That blip on the right is what was called “Striketober,” even by bourgeois outlets like NPR. Hours of “idleness” during October 2021 were a quarter as many as in October 2019, the month of the strike against General Motors.
I’d love nothing more than a strike wave and an upsurge of militancy. It’s just not here yet.
*Two data notes: First, the BLS combines strikes and employer lockouts into stoppages because exact causes can be hard to tell apart. And second, whenever I write these up, people say there are lots of smaller strikes that fall under the thousand-worker limit. There aren’t really. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) used to publish data on smaller strikes, in an extremely user-unfriendly form. I wrote about that data in 2018 and they followed the same pattern as the larger strikes. The FMCS stopped updating the data in the early Trump years and the historical data has disappeared from their website.
World Bank warns of risk of ‘disorderly defaults’ as pandemic-era relief scheme expires
World Bank warns of risk of ‘disorderly defaults’ as pandemic-era relief scheme expires
To highlight past words often limits substance to what the past emphasized. Why not use our own words? Why not let “dead generations” rest in peace?
A civil war is a class war. Capitalists are few in number but have gathered substantial forces to fight for them. Photo: Neil Jamieson / Forbes
By David Sole
Around the first anniversary of the violent attack on the United States there have been endless commentaries about the continuing “threat to democracy” here in the U.S. Those in the mass media that decry the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021 generally are sincere liberals who are unable to do more than expose the very real dangers of the ultra-right. However, they fail to shed any light on why this danger occurred, why it persists, what class forces give it strength and, most importantly, how to fight it.
The events of January 6, 2021, and the entire Trump presidency, shattered the illusion that bourgeois democracy is unshakeable. What is called “Democracy” is a “form of government in which people choose leaders by voting” (Merriam-Webster.com). But underneath this complex system of government is the foundation of capitalist production. For the capitalist class of billionaires, bankers and corporate bosses the type of government they operate under is subordinate to their goal of always increasing and protecting their profits.
It is now out in the open that the norms of democratic government are not permanent or secure. The clearest warning came out on December 18, 2021 when the Washington Post printed an opinion piece signed by three retired U.S. generals titled “The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection.”
The three authors of the warning were Paul D. Eaton and Antonio M. Taguba, who are retired major generals of the Army, while Steven M. Anderson is a retired Army brigadier general. They point out that 124 other retired military officers signed a pro-Trump open letter “attacking the legitimacy of our elections” back in May 2021.
The three generals conclude that there is
“the potential for a military breakdown mirroring societal or political breakdown…” They “are increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk….it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.”
The warning by these high ranking U.S. military officers should not be discounted because they are loyal participants in an imperialist military machine which has ruthlessly carried out invasions, wars and genocide on behalf of the capitalist class.
Their solution to the very real dangers they expose is that the military apparatus can solve the problem within its own ranks. Putting faith in that would be disastrous.
Civil war, in this era, is class war. It is the expression of the intense and irreconcilable tensions between the broad, exploited working class and the exploiting capitalist class. In the current United States arena it has emerged sharply with the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election and all the lies and propaganda following. It reached the very halls of Congress on January 6, 2021. Rather than subsiding, the conflict is being vigorously pursued by right-wing forces in every state, city, town and rural enclave.
Voting rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, health and science are just some of the issues that are under attack. As in all civil wars the exploiters (the capitalists) are a small minority. According to Forbes Magazine, there are just 724 billionaires in the U.S. They would pose little problem for the workers and oppressed except for their ability to utilize their enormous wealth to mis-educate and misdirect segments of the population to fight for them.
The very existence of the small but powerful capitalist class, along with the very real fears and problems for the many layers of the working class and the middle class, guarantees that white supremacist , right-wing tendencies will continuously be regenerated.
If there were a leadership in the U.S. that put forward and fought for a popular program to solve the problems of working class and middle class people, right-wing support would disintegrate. The Democratic Party often raises popular issues verbally but does not deliver on them – precisely because they are tied firmly to the Wall Street capitalist class.
Just look at the passage of the 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill signed into law November 15, 2021. This finances big construction projects and swells the profits of big business interests. But so far Biden and the Democrats are unable to pass the 1.9 trillion dollar Build Back Better bill which has appropriations for many programs to benefit poor and working people. Wall Street does not want to raise the expectations of the masses.
Voting rights, an issue fundamental to the very definition of “democracy,” is also not secure. The capitalist class does favor “democracy” as a way to control the masses by letting them think they have a say in how they are governed. But Wall Street also worries that voting might get out of their control as economic conditions worsen, threatening their profits and their hidden rule. In that case the super-rich would rather encourage and finance those who are keen on curbing voting by African American and other progressive forces.
It is often said that the whip of reaction drives the revolution forward. Only under intense blows will the illusions of the masses in the United States be shattered, will new, more radical leadership emerge and a strong counter-offensive develop. This is what is necessary to drive back the reactionary forces of racism and oppression. It can also move the struggle forward to overthrow the capitalist class and their system of exploitation.
FLORENCE, Ariz.—Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander in chief. To many of them, he is.
“I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. “This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back.”
Tonight’s rally was Trump’s first public event since July. On paper, the gathering was meant as his response to the anniversary of January 6, as well as an unofficial kickoff for his efforts to support Republicans in the midterm elections. But the event also served as the soft launch of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Although he didn’t say the words, the former president seems poised to run in two years—“Make America great again again … again,” he joked to the crowd—and tonight, his message was as clear as it was dishonest: He didn’t lose to Joe Biden in 2020, and he’ll spend the next year working to elect Republicans who agree.
[Read: Trump’s next coup has already begun]
Trump chose Arizona for this moment for a reason. In this state, the Big Lie thrives. Trump lost Arizona by only 10,000 votes in 2020, giving him and his supporters the space, apparently, to allege that the close outcome was the result of left-wing chicanery, the result of ballot stuffing and interference by Venezuelans, among other false claims. State lawmakers who spent the past year reviewing the ballots ultimately found zero evidence of mischief. But that didn’t matter to Trump’s supporters. GOP politicians across Arizona adopted Trump’s lies anyway. Many of them were guests of honor tonight.
The pre-Trump headliner was Kari Lake, the former TV-news reporter running to replace Governor Doug Ducey; she alleges, falsely, that “bag loads of ballots” were dumped in Arizona last year. (“Kari Lake, she’s been with us from the beginning on the election fraud,” Trump gushed when he brought her back on stage for a cameo during his speech.) Other speakers included secretary-of-state candidate Mark Finchem, who was at the Capitol last January 6 and who often wears a cowboy hat and bolo tie despite being from Michigan; Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, and Debbie Lesko, three Trump-loving members of Congress who voted against certifying Biden’s win in 2020; and Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward, who has embraced numerous conspiracy theories and recently received a cease-and-desist notice from Dominion Voting Systems after accusing the company of changing 6,000 Trump votes to Biden votes last year. Each of these Republicans has repeatedly echoed Trump’s false allegations of election mischief. Of course they have. This is the former president’s new litmus test: You endorse the lie, he endorses you.
Nearly everyone I interviewed at the rally vowed to follow Trump’s lead and support only GOP candidates who endorse the false idea that he won the election. “I watched all those Republican candidates in Arizona right now covering it up,” Julie Stohldrier, who drove in with her sister, Amy, told me. “They’re all talk and no action.” Lake is promising action, so the sisters adore her. The pair would love for Trump to run again in 2024, but they don’t think he will, and they’re not sure he’ll need to: They’re confident that he’ll be reinstated as president sometime soon, after Arizona and other states vote to decertify the election. “I want Trump back now,” Amy told me. “I can’t do another three years of this.”
The Stohldriers’ predictions might seem bold, but the sisters were simply echoing what they’d been hearing from prominent Republicans at the rally. Earlier that afternoon, Ward, the state party chair, had warmed up the crowd by promising that the 2020 election results would soon be overturned. By the latter half of the night, Lake was calling for the arrests of anyone involved in the “shady, shoddy election of 2020.”
[Adam Serwer: Democrats will have to do more to save democracy from Trump]
Everything we know about fundamentals of midterm elections suggests that Republicans will have an excellent 2022. If Lake and the other Big Lie proponents at tonight’s rally can win their primary races, they’ve got a good shot at becoming the Grand Canyon State’s next generation of political leaders. Even with power, though, they’ll still owe Trump a debt of loyalty—one that he’ll expect to be repaid. “Kari will be incredible for election integrity,” Trump said of Lake, just after vowing to turn on her if she didn’t do “a great job.” Election integrity, he added, might be Lake’s “No. 1 issue.”
An hour or so into his speech, Trump turned his attention to January 6, calling the storming of the Capitol an excuse for Democrats to arrest people and abuse them in jail. He mocked the police officer who shot Ashley Babbitt, and the crowd cheered. He suggested that the FBI planted people in the crowd outside the Capitol to incite the riot. “The real insurrection took place on election day, November 3,” he added.
Trump has been broadcasting these messages for more than a year now. The difference is, what he says hasn’t quite permeated the public consciousness the same way it once did. Trump is no longer the president, and he’s been permanently banned from Twitter, which means that his accusations of fraud and tirades against insufficiently loyal Republicans have had to be expressed via emailed press releases. In this way, the former president has been off the grid.
Trump has still been speaking directly to his most dutiful supporters through far-right media outlets, though. (“He’s tan, fit, has lost some weight since he left office,” Newsmax’s anchors, speculating eagerly about a 2024 announcement, trilled as Trump took the stage here. “People forget that The Apprentice was the No. 1 show on NBC.”) Now that the midterm season is fully under way, Trump will be out and about more often, hosting rallies and stumping for the any Republicans desperate enough to lie about the election in exchange for his support. He will in some ways be reintroducing himself to the country: Here I am, America, back after a stolen election, ready to win by any means possible.
I asked a group of older attendees if they were excited to see Trump run again in 2024. They all were. Two of them argued about whether he could take office before 2025. “It’s not possible,” a retiree named Michael, who declined to give his last name, said. “I think it is!” a retiree named Susan Higgins said. “The military has to come in and take [Biden] away.”
By the end of the evening, Trump was having trouble pretending that he wasn’t actively running for president. He previewed his lines of attack on Biden over Afghanistan, immigration, and inflation; recited a litany of policy changes that a Republican-controlled Congress would be able to make; and promised that “in 2024, we are going to take back the White House.” Sam and Dave’s “Hold on I’m Coming” played as he exited, and the song sounded like a promise.
Trump has had a remarkable 14 months. Most losing presidential candidates are forced into quiet retirement by their parties. Trump has bucked the trend, only tightening his grip on the GOP in the wake of his defeat. He has convinced Republican candidates all over the country—including those on stage tonight—to repeat his election lies, and convinced his rank-and-file supporters to treat those falsehoods as holy writ. By this point, those lies have been circulating for what feels like forever. But at tonight’s rally, as Trump’s fans called for the arrests of poll workers and the reinstatement of the rightful president, I got the sense that this might be just the beginning.
Biden hasn’t just embraced the Trump policy of aggressive “containment” toward China — he’s greatly expanded it
The details of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection are gradually emerging into view, thanks to evidence released in the indictments against key players such as Stewart Rhodes and his Oath Keepers. But there are still a number of lingering mysteries still to be resolved—and one of the most pressing is the question: Why was federal law enforcement, particularly the FBI, so utterly unprepared?
Jason Paladino at Grid recently examined all of the FBI’s rationales for its failure to adequately prepare for the siege against Congress, and concluded correctly that all of them fail the sniff test. The only reasonable conclusion—particularly as the evidence is assembled for public viewing—is that federal law enforcement’s cozy relationship with these right-wing extremists blinded them to the reality of the nature of the beast they thought they could use as an ally.
“We are not in this for a moment, but for a movement,” said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. “Our deadline is victory.”