Trump campaign presses demands to suppress millions of votes

Patrick Martin

In a further escalation of its open assault on democratic rights, the Trump reelection campaign is now demanding that millions of ballots for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden should be suppressed in order to give Trump the electoral votes of a half dozen states.

These demands make it clear that Trump’s continuing refusal to concede Biden’s victory in the November 3 election is part of a continuing conspiracy against the American people. Side by side with his ongoing silence on the coronavirus catastrophe—Trump has said nothing for the last eight days while more than one million Americans have been infected and thousands have died—Trump is whipping up fascistic forces in an effort to steal the election.

A man voting at a polling place (Credit: Flickr.com)

In Pennsylvania, the most critical state from the standpoint of the Electoral College, since it has the most electoral votes of the six states where the Trump campaign is seeking to overturn Biden victories, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed that 650,000 “unlawful ballots” were cast and counted in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the two largest cities in the state.

He told Fox News that up to 900,000 “invalid ballots” were cast across the entire state, nearly 15 percent of the 6.8 million votes cast in the election. Giuliani did not, of course, provide any evidence of vote fraud, and the irregularities actually cited by attorneys for the Trump campaign amount to only a tiny number of ballots, far below Biden’s margin in the state of more than 50,000 votes.

In Michigan, where Biden won by a comparatively huge margin, 148,000 votes, the Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits seeking an even larger disenfranchisement of the population for having voted the “wrong” way.

A suit filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Michigan, in Lansing, demanded the disqualification of every ballot cast in Wayne County, the state’s most populous, including the city of Detroit; in Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), and Ingham County (Lansing and East Lansing). This comes to the staggering total of 1.2 million votes, or nearly one quarter of the 5.4 million votes in the state. Eliminating those votes would give Trump a margin of 300,000 in the rest of the state and Michigan’s 16 electoral votes.

The principal allegation in the suit is that Republican ballot observers were spoken to rudely or compelled to observe social distancing and kept more than six feet away from the election workers doing the actual opening of mail ballots and their tabulation. No evidence of actual illegal voting or ballot stuffing is provided, only claims based on “expert reports” and data analysis.

“Upon information and belief, the expert report will identify persons who cast votes illegally by casting multiple ballots, were deceased, had moved, or were otherwise not qualified to vote in the November 3 presidential election, along with evidence of illegal ballot stuffing, ballot harvesting, and other illegal voting,” the lawsuit states.

On this threadbare basis, the four plaintiffs propose to disenfranchise 1.2 million people, claiming because in those locations “where sufficient illegal ballots were included” the effect was to cause the ballots of people in other counties to be “diluted.”

A second lawsuit, filed in Wayne County Circuit Court against Wayne County and Detroit election officials, proposes an even more grandiose exercise in disenfranchisement: suppressing the Michigan vote entirely, and ordering the state to conduct an entirely new election.

Whatever the legal prospects for these suits—and every Trump lawsuit but one has been denied or thrown out by the courts, with the exception of a single technical issue in Pennsylvania affecting a few hundred votes—the sheer scale of the disenfranchisement proposed is breathtaking. What the Trump campaign really means is that it should be illegal to vote against Trump.

These suits are being filed even as the scale of Biden’s victory in terms of the popular vote begins to become even clearer. By one measure—the share of eligible voters supporting him—Biden has reached landslide territory, since the voter turnout in 2020 reached records not seen in a century in terms of the proportion of the population voting.

At his current 50.8 percent of the vote, by one calculation, Biden has 34.04 percent of all eligible voters. This is the largest figure since 1972, in Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide over George McGovern. If his percentage increases to 51 or 52, which is quite likely given the delays in counting mail ballots on the West Coast, which is heavily Democratic, he will end up matching the 34.17 percent of eligible voters achieved by Lyndon Johnson in his rout of Barry Goldwater.

While Biden leads by five million in the popular vote, his leads in the six states under challenge are sizeable, ranging from just under 12,000 in Arizona to the 148,000 in Michigan. According to one study of all statewide recounts conducted in the last 20 years, the largest vote swing was less than 2,600 votes, and the average shift was only 430 votes.

Given these figures, the continued refusal of Trump to concede the election and of his campaign to allege fraud become more and more provocative. As the SEP Political Committee warned two days ago, “the working class cannot be indifferent to the efforts to overthrow an elected government by a right-wing and neo-fascist conspiracy.”

There were signs Thursday of divisions within the Republican Party over how far to go in support of Trump’s campaign to discredit the election and delegitimize a Biden administration. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine became the first Republican governor of a state won by Trump to admit the obvious, that Biden is the president-elect. Only Republican governors of Democratic states like Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont had made such statements before.

A handful of Republican House members have made similar statements, but the number of Republican senators who have acknowledged Biden’s victory remained at four—Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

However, a sizeable group of Republican senators, speaking individually, announced their support for such token measures as giving Biden access to the Presidential Daily Brief, an intelligence summary, and other materials necessary for a presidential transition.

They cited “national security” concerns, indicating that in the event Biden enters the White House, he should be aware of whom the US military-intelligence apparatus is planning to kill, subvert or overthrow, so that there is no disruption to ongoing operations. Biden is a trusted member of the national-security elite as the former vice president in the Obama administration.

There have also been pro-Biden signals from sections of the Republican media, not merely Fox News, which has openly clashed with Trump, but from the Las Vegas newspaper owned by billionaire Trump supporter Sheldon Adelson, which published an editorial advising the president to accept his defeat, and from numerous Republican pundits.

Leading congressional Democrats continued to downplay the significance of Trump’s refusal to concede the election, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissing Trump’s efforts as “ridiculous shenanigans,” at a press briefing Thursday on Capitol Hill.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking at the same press briefing, made a longer critique of Trump and the congressional Republicans, but without drawing any broader political conclusions.

“This morning I have a simple message for Senate Republicans,” he said. “The election is over, it wasn’t close. Trump lost, Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States, Kamala Harris will be the next vice president of the United States. Senate Republicans, stop denying reality. Stop deliberately sowing doubt about our democratic process and start focusing on COVID.”

He concluded, “Let us bring the country together and get things done,” without addressing the obvious fact, staring the American public in the face, that Trump and his supporters have launched a direct attack on democracy.

From an electoral standpoint, the critical step would be the intervention of state legislatures in the states under challenge, because five out of six are Republican-controlled, and the legislators could potentially take action to hijack the state’s electoral votes. Republican state legislative leaders in Pennsylvania and Michigan, the two largest “battleground” states won by Biden, have said they would not intervene, but they may be challenged by Trump diehards within their caucuses.

From the standpoint of Trump’s preparation of a political coup, the attitude of the military and security agencies is of decisive importance. Earlier this week, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper and three other officials and replaced them with ultra-right loyalists.

On Thursday, the purge extended to the Department of Homeland Security, although here the issue appeared to be simple retaliation against those who had undercut Trump’s claims of vote fraud. Bryan Ware, assistant director of cybersecurity for the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was forced to resign, and his supervisor, Chris Krebs, the director of the CISA, said he expected to be fired as well.

The CISA vigorously combated false claims on the internet that supercomputers were being used to “flip” vote totals during the election tabulations in critical states. On Thursday, Krebs retweeted an election technology specialist who warned people not to share “wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president.”

Growing opposition among educators forces closure of schools as pandemic spreads

Evan Blake

Across the United States, there is deepening anger and opposition developing among educators, parents and students to the homicidal policies of keeping schools opened as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads out of control. With cases climbing in every state, hospitals reaching or exceeding their capacity, and the death toll forecast to balloon in the coming weeks, the growing militancy of educators is forcing school districts to temporarily reverse their policies and switch to online learning.

On Monday and Tuesday, at least a third of all teachers called in sick at Southern Lehigh High School in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. With the Pennsylvania State Education Association doing nothing to organize opposition to in-person learning, it appears that teachers took action themselves and independently organized a wildcat sickout strike. In response to the sickout, school administrators herded all students into the school cafeteria instead of switching to remote learning, creating the conditions for a potential “super-spreader” event at the school. The massive Parkland High complex in nearby Allentown, which serves 32,000 area students, closed for two days.

Virtual learning at a school in Phoenix, Arizona, Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2020 (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

On Thursday, Detroit Public Schools announced the halting of all in-person learning beginning Monday and lasting through at least January 11, in response to a major surge of the pandemic in the city and throughout Michigan. On Wednesday, the state had the fourth highest number of new COVID-19 cases in the US at 6,620.

In recent weeks, outbreaks at K-12 schools in Michigan have skyrocketed, with 44 new outbreaks the first week of November 2 and another 50 new outbreaks last week, including four outbreaks in Wayne County, where Detroit is located. Other districts in the state have also switched to online learning in recent days, including Grosse Pointe, Holly, Huron Valley, Pontiac, Rochester and Utica, while others that began online and had considered reopening have chosen to continue remote learning.

On Tuesday, Philadelphia School District officials announced that they will delay plans to reopen schools under the hybrid model, which had been scheduled to begin on November 30. The following day, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia urged surrounding districts to switch to remote learning as well, warning of a “catastrophic situation” developing in the region. Pennsylvania recorded 6,023 new cases Thursday, the 13th highest figure in the US, with 1,159 in Philadelphia County.

Per state guidelines, all districts in Philadelphia, Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery Counties should be closed, as there is “substantial transmission” throughout these regions. However, Pennsylvania’s health secretary, Rachel Levine, stated earlier this week that the state will not mandate school closures as it did in the spring.

There is growing pressure among New York City educators to stop in-person learning in the largest school district in the US. Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to make an announcement in the coming days about whether he will abide by his own policies as the infection rate in the city approaches the three percent mark, which would technically require schools to close.

In an effort to forestall the closure of schools, New York Times education writer Eliza Shapiro penned a column Wednesday urging de Blasio to reconsider, writing, “Transmission of the virus in schools has been strikingly low, with a positive-test rate of just 0.17 percent according to the most recent data.” She omits the fact that these figures are based on testing a tiny fraction of the district’s students and staff, and that the test positivity rate among children under four years old in the city is 3.2 percent, while that of 13-17 year olds has ranged from 2.6-3.9 percent in recent weeks.

The Times Editorial Board issued a statement Wednesday urging de Blasio not to close schools. “Ending in-person instruction right now would be a mistake, given the evidence of how little the virus has spread there so far and the devastating consequences that would follow for academic progress as well as for working parents like subway operators and nurses.” The real concern of the Times and the Democratic Party establishment is not the academic progress of the city’s youth—who have long been the victims of bipartisan budget cuts, supported by the Times—but that the closure of the nation’s largest school district would cut across the back-to-work campaign by Trump and both parties and undermine corporate profits.

In contrast to the false narrative pushed by the Times and other major outlets, the reopening of K-12 schools has been an unmitigated disaster which has already caused nearly 150,000 infections and at least 50 deaths of educators and students since late July. These figures are likely significant underestimates, given that there are no national agencies tracking outbreaks or deaths connected to school reopenings.

On Thursday, news broke that 38-year-old Iowa teacher Jason Englert died November 8, three days after testing positive for COVID-19. Last week, five-year-old Tagan Drone, a kindergartener in Texas, died of COVID-19 after being turned away from a hospital. Her death is the latest in a growing number of students that have succumbed to the virus after the reopening of schools, including 13-year-old Peyton Baumgarth of Missouri.

There is a large body of US and international evidence demonstrating the obvious fact that schools are major vectors for the spread of COVID-19. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that in October alone there were nearly 200,000 COVID-19 cases among children in the US. In the first week of November, there were a staggering 73,883 recorded child COVID-19 cases, while there was a 17 percent increase in child cases from October 22 to November 5.

The moves to close schools have predominantly taken place in Democrat-led cities, while Republican-controlled districts have largely opted to remain open, including in states across the South and Midwest that are experiencing the most severe spread of the virus.

The only reason some Democrat-led districts have closed schools is because these officials are attuned to the mounting opposition and determination to struggle among educators, particularly amid the unprecedented political crisis in which Donald Trump is seeking to nullify the elections and establish a personalist dictatorship. The Democrats’ greatest fear is the development of any movement of the working class outside of their control and independent of their allies in the unions.

Whatever their tactical maneuvers, the Democratic Party is equally beholden to Wall Street and will reopen schools as soon as they deem it politically viable, in order to force parents to continue working in unsafe factories and workplaces where the virus is running rampant. On Thursday, the Biden transition team publicly distanced itself from statements made by Dr. Michael Osterholm advocating renewed lockdowns to contain the pandemic, stating that such policies are not “in line” with their program. Osterholm was forced to walk back from his statement.

In order to prevent the future reopening of schools that have switched to online learning and to ensure that all schools and nonessential workplaces across the US close immediately to contain the pandemic, educators and the working class as a whole must take matters into their own hands. That means forming rank-and-file safety committees, which are independent of the unions, which have fully collaborated in the reopening of schools in New York City, Houston and other major urban centers, while pursuing impotent legal appeals in Republican-led states that have amounted to nothing.

Trump’s efforts to carry out a coup, which take place amid a vast expansion of the pandemic, make clear that the public health and political dangers confronting workers are enormous and deeply intertwined. The struggle facing educators and all workers is inherently political and must be animated by a determined opposition to both big business parties.

Victims of Nuclear Bomb Tests on U.S. Soil 75 Years Ago Continue to Seek Justice

Satya Vatti

“They thought the world was coming to an end,” Genoveva Peralta Purcella explains.

On July 16, 1945, the first-ever nuclear bomb was tested in New Mexico, in the Southwestern United States. The detonation was code-named “Trinity.” It is the day that would seal the fate of many Americans living in the surrounding areas for generations to come.

Seventy miles from what became known as ground zero—the Trinity test site—Genoveva’s family lived on a ranch just outside the village of Capitan in New Mexico. Genoveva was born the year after the blast. Now 74 years old, she solemnly recalls how her family remembers the day that would change their lives forever.

Genoveva’s sisters had come to visit their father and pregnant mother at the ranch. At precisely 5:30 a.m., as dawn broke, the sky suddenly went pitch dark. Having no other point of reference, they mistook the abnormally loud roaring and rumbling in the sky for thunder. The entire house began to shake. Fear-stricken, the family huddled together in a corner.

When the sky cleared, her father stepped outside the house and found himself being showered with a white powder. The powder was everywhere and covered everything around them. Nothing escaped it, not the cows the family had raised, or the vegetables in the garden, or the rainwater they stored in the absence of running water. Like other families who went through this experience, Genoveva’s family also dusted off the powder and consumed their vegetables and the stored water.

The blast produced so much energy that it incinerated everything it touched and formed a fireball that rose to more than 12 kilometers into the atmosphere. The fireball created ash that snowed over the communities surrounding the blast site. The people did not know it then, but this ash that covered thousands of square miles was the radioactive fallout from the explosion.

Dread gripped the communities in Tularosa Basin who either witnessed or experienced the phenomenon they could not make sense of. Meanwhile, the immediate reaction of the staff of the Manhattan Project, which created the bomb, was of “surprise, joy, and relief.”

Paul Pino, Genoveva’s cousin, who was born nine years after the Trinity blast, says that his family, which lived 33 miles from the blast site, was one of many who were unaware of what had transpired on that day. In the days and months leading up to the blast, U.S. government officials did not notify anyone who lived in the region about the imminent nuclear bomb test. Nobody in the Tularosa Basin was evacuated to safety.

In the aftermath of the nuclear test, officials began to cement a false narrative into the consciousness of the nation; the region was remote and uninhabited. Tens of thousands of people, in fact, lived in the Tularosa Basin in 1945. For a long time, the people of the basin believed that the blast was an ammunition explosion. “We were lied to by the government,” said Pino.

It takes 24,000 years for half of the radioactive plutonium used in the Trinity bomb to decay. The people of the region have inhaled and ingested radioactive particles for 75 years because of environmental contamination. Those in power refuse to accept responsibility and take any corrective action. To this day, there have been no cleanup efforts.

Radiation exposure has caused high rates of aggressive cancers, thyroid disease, infant mortality, and other health abnormalities in generations of families in the Tularosa Basin region. The scale of the health impact cannot be determined accurately as long-term epidemiological studies have only been undertaken recently. The findings of the latest research studies by the National Cancer Institute were published in September 2020 in the journal Health Physics.

“There were 10 of us; now only one is surviving,” Genoveva says, speaking of herself. She has lost everyone in her family to cancer.

In a country without universal health care, debt from medical expenses has brought economic ruin to the communities near the Trinity site. “All the pain and suffering we have had to endure, and not a speck of help from the government,” Pino says. “Meanwhile, it has spent trillions on thousands of nuclear weapons.”

Genoveva’s story is not an exceptional one. It is the story of tens of thousands of families in the United States.

More than 1,000 nuclear bomb tests have been conducted in the U.S. between 1945 and 1992. A total of 100 above-ground tests were conducted at the Nevada test site from 1951 to 1962. The winds carried radioactive fallout for thousands of kilometers. Hundreds of millions of people living in the U.S. have been exposed to varying levels of radiation over the years, unknown to them.

New Mexico was downwind of the Nevada test site, and the people living there continued to be exposed to radioactivity for decades after the initial exposure during the Trinity nuclear test.

People from the impacted communities founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium in 2005 to fight for justice for the survivors and their descendants. Tina Cordova, one of the group’s cofounders, was shocked to find out that a few of the impacted states neighboring New Mexico were receiving financial compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act since 1990. The communities in New Mexico, however, were left out of the act.

When asked why, Cordova responds with, “It is the billion-dollar question. I think we are being left out because we are mainly Mexican Hispanics, Natives, and Latinos. We are minorities and we are poor.”

Cordova herself is the fourth generation in her family to have cancer. She has joined with others like her to educate and organize the affected communities, to fight to establish the truth. “In their [the government’s] rush to bomb Japan, we were sacrificed in the process. We were enlisted in the service of our country, unknowing, unwilling, and remain uncompensated.”

China is Working to Expand Its Ties to Latin America

Vijay Prashad  & John Ross

In mid-January 2020, 800 people gathered at Mexico’s Ministry of Economy to celebrate “China Day” with a seminar on Chinese-Mexican relations. Mexico’s Minister of Economy Graciela Márquez Colín, who has a PhD in economic history from Harvard University, said, “China and Mexico have to walk together, to build a stronger and more solid relationship.” In July 2020, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement went into force. At the January event, Márquez Colín said that despite this agreement, Mexico must “redouble its efforts” to draw investment from other places, such as China.

Zhu Qingqiao, China’s ambassador to Mexico, said that his country agrees, and has “many plans to invest in Mexico,” including the $600 million needed by the state-owned Dos Bocas petroleum refinery in Tabasco; this money was put together by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the Bank of China, and other international partners.

On June 4, 2019, just after he arrived in Mexico City, Ambassador Zhu wrote an opinion piece in a leading financial newspaper, El Financiero. “The trade war,” he wrote, “will not stop China’s development. Faced with risks and challenges, China has the confidence to face them and turn them into opportunities.” The U.S.-China economies, he noted, are highly integrated, which will make decoupling next to impossible. Meanwhile, China is prepared to increase its interaction with other countries, both through investments into those countries—such as Mexico—or by welcoming investment into China. China, he wrote, is not the author of this “trade war,” and China would like this conflict to end.

Three Pillars of China’s Approach

China has developed three distinct pillars toward Latin America: purchases of Latin American goods, Chinese investment in Latin America, and Chinese political solidarity with key Latin American governments.

Over the past two decades, China has emerged as one of the most important markets for Latin American countries. For example, in 2019, 32 percent of Chile’s exports went to China, 29 percent of Peru’s, 28 percent of Brazil’s, 27 percent of Uruguay’s, and 10 percent of Argentina’s. The mutual reliance of China and Latin America has meant that despite changes in regime, neither China nor the Latin American governments have disrupted this relationship. When Jair Bolsonaro was president-elect of Brazil, he flirted with Taiwan before coming to power; but once he was in office, the economic imperatives made any break with Beijing impossible. Far too much remains at stake. In November 2019, Bolsonaro met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who said that China and Brazil will increase their trade “on an equal footing.” Tsung-Che Chang of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Brazil conceded in September 2020 that there are “many barriers” for Bolsonaro to break with Beijing. Brazil simply does not have the latitude that Australia has, since Australia—reliant upon the Chinese market—nonetheless joined with the U.S. in a military alliance against China known as The Quad (along with India and Japan).

After the election victory in Bolivia of Luis Arce’s Movement for Socialism (MAS), Chinese President Xi sent Arce a message of congratulations. In that message, President Xi recalled the 2018 strategic partnership agreed upon by the Chinese government and the then President Evo Morales. That partnership led to the choice of China’s Xinjiang TBEA Group to hold a 49 percent stake in a planned joint venture with Bolivia’s state lithium company YLB. “Why China? There’s a guaranteed market in China for battery production,” Morales said at the signing ceremony. Bolivia’s new president Arce was Morales’ head of economic policy; he has signaled that he would continue the policy of cooperation with China, particularly in the context of the pandemic. There is no indication that Chinese investment will be slowed, certainly not to Bolivia.

Finally, on the political front, China has indicated in various diplomatic forums that it will provide a shield as much as possible to prevent regime change operations against Cuba and Venezuela. China and Russia have openly spoken out against the U.S. unilateral sanctions against Venezuela, and the Chinese government is currently holding talks with Venezuela about a new oil-for-loan deal. China maintains very close ties with Cuba; when Fidel Castro died in 2016, President Xi went personally to the Cuban embassy in Beijing to pay his respects by bowing three times (Fidel is the only foreign leader who has received this treatment).

U.S. Pressure on Latin America

In September 2019, Trump’s daughter Ivanka visited Argentina. She traveled to Jujuy, which is toward the border with Bolivia. Ivanka Trump came there with John Sullivan (then deputy secretary of state) and other members of the U.S. government (from the Defense Department and from USAID). She met in Purmamarca with Jujuy Governor Gerardo Morales, and then alongside David Bohigian of the U.S. government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) announced $400 million toward road construction along what is known as the “lithium route” (Argentina, with Bolivia and Chile, form the “lithium triangle”). This was widely seen across the border in Bolivia as a statement about the MAS orientation toward China.

Bohigian transitioned OPIC into its current incarnation as the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). The DFC’s project—América Crece—is directly designed as a challenge to Chinese investment in Latin America and the Caribbean. In September 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Guyana, where he championed the investment of ExxonMobil and other oil companies into the South American country. Pompeo said that Guyana should make a deal with U.S. oil companies, which—he claimed—are not corrupt; “You look at that,” Pompeo said in reference to their record, “and then look at what China does,” implying that Chinese firms are corrupt and that a country like Guyana should shun China.

On April 26, 2019, Kimberly Breier, the assistant secretary for the Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs in the U.S. State Department, made a full-fledged attack on Chinese investment in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Chinese, she said, came to the continent with “bags of cash and false promises”; she made sly allegations, but did not back these up with any factual examples.

All of these attacks on China make little headway in Latin America. For example, a Pew survey from 2019 shows that 50 percent of Mexicans have a favorable opinion of China, while only 36 percent have a favorable opinion of the United States; more Mexicans had a favorable opinion of President Xi than of President Trump.

In September 2020, Luz María de la Mora, a senior official in Mexico’s Ministry of Economy, said that China is a “great example” for Mexico. China, she said, is a “partner to boost our economic recovery” and help Mexico “emerge from the pandemic as soon as possible.” No doubt that the United States is and will be for a long time Mexico’s largest trading partner; but the new affinity between China and Mexico, particularly because of next year’s anticipated economic growth in China, is also important. Despite pressure from Washington, and there is no indication of a major change when Joe Biden becomes president in 2021, these Latin American countries such as Mexico know that they cannot break with China; that would be reckless.

Biden’s Victory: Is the Worst Yet to Come?

David Rosen

When the media declared Joe Biden the projected winner of the 2020 presidential election on Saturday, November 7^th, millions of Americans celebrated with heart-felt relief, street rallies and a belief that a better tomorrow is possible. Unfortunately, that tomorrow is under serious threat.

After four years in office one thing about Donald Trump has become transparently clear – he is a petty, vindictive man. He never admits mistakes and makes false statements whenever they serve his purpose. In the face of an apparent electoral repudiation, he – and his team led by Rudi Giuliani and Bill Barr – is seeking to overturn the election results through dubious legal challenges. His strategy will likely fail, even with his successful packing of the Supreme Court with arch conservatives.

In all likelihood, Trump will turn over the presidency to Biden on Inauguration Day, January 20^th. However, if he refuses to cede power, even if the Court rejects his claims regarding the legitimacy of the elections, a true national crisis could result.

In his acceptance speech, Biden outlined five key issues that he would address as president:

The battle to control the virus. The battle to build prosperity. The battle to secure your family’s health care. The battle to achieve racial justice and root out systemic racism in this country. The battle to save the climate. The battle to restore decency, defend democracy and give everybody in this country a fair shot.

The challenge facing Biden and the new Democratic administration when it takes control of the federal bureaucracy are considerable. Whether it can delivery on these – and other – issues is an open question. Given the likely make-up of the Senate, with Republicans maintaining numerical control, Biden political hands may well be tied much like Pres. Obama’s second term. More problematic, Biden is a traditional “liberal” or moderate and will likely resist efforts by more “progressive” Democrats to advance major legislation that could adequately address the deepening economic issues facing the nation.

A critical assessment of four of the five issues Biden identified outlines some of the likely challenges the new administration will face.

Covid-19 Control – As of early November, over 10 million Americans were infected and nearly 240,000 have died of the coronavirus. One of Biden’s first actions after his projected electoral victory was to outline a “science” based plan to “beat Covid-19.” The cornerstone of the plan is to “Provide clear, consistent, evidence-based guidance for how communities should navigate the pandemic – and the resources for schools, small businesses, and families to make it through.” One of the defining aspects of the plan is to establish a “Pandemic Testing Board like Roosevelt’s War Production Board. It’s how we produced tanks, planes, uniforms, and supplies in record time, and it’s how we will produce and distribute tens of millions of tests.”

In addition, the plan calls for “the effective, equitable distribution of treatments and vaccines — because development isn’t enough if they aren’t effectively distributed.” It seeks to “ensure everyone — not just the wealthy and well-connected — in America receives the protection and care they deserve, and consumers are not price gouged as new drugs and therapies come to market.”

The most challenging part of the plan is its call to “implement mask mandates nationwide …” It declares that “President-elect Biden will continue to call on:

+ Every American to wear a mask when they are around people outside their household.

+ Every Governor to make that mandatory in their state.

+ Local authorities to also make it mandatory to buttress their state orders.”

Will “every American,” “governors” or “local authorities” go along with such a plan? It’s clear that such a mandate should have been implemented when the virus first appeared nine months ago and that failing to do so was Trump’s greatest failure of leadership. One can only wonder whether such a mandate will be adhered to now as people seem more resigned to their fate and many anti-virus militants (including Q-Anon supporters) will resist.

Build Prosperity – The U.S. is the throws of recession that could topple into a depression. The recession began in February 2020, just around the time the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Two Harvard economists, David Cutler and Lawrence Summers, paint a grim picture of total costs of the pandemic. “The total cost is estimated at more than $16 trillion, or approximately 90% of the annual gross domestic product of the US,” they wrote. “Approximately half of this amount is the lost income from the COVID-19–induced recession; the remainder is the economic effects of shorter and less healthy life.”

In May, House Democrats Leader Nancy Pelosi proposed a $3 trillion Covid recovery plan that — after months of wrangling with the White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel — died on the vine. If the Senate remains under Republican control, one can expect a similar standoff over a Biden plan for relief and recovery.

The word “inequality” is absent from Biden’s acceptance speech and one can only wonder why? The income gap between the rich and everyone else has been growing markedly, by every major statistical measure, for more than 30 years. The Covid pandemic and the recession have only made the situation worse – and one can expect it to deepen over the first year or two of Biden’s administration.

Racial Justice – The Biden campaign is notable for two critical cultural developments. One is selecting Kamala Harris as his running mate and her provisional election as the nation’s first woman and first woman-of-color as Vice President. Second, Biden’s acceptance speech was noteworthy for one critical sentence: “The battle to achieve racial justice and root out systemic racism in this country.”

Very few establishment politicians ever refer to the endemic nature of American racism as “systemic” and Biden can be applauded for it, especially in light of his questionable role in promoting the 1994 crime bill that paved the way to mass incarceration of Black Americans.

A real test of the Biden and Harris stand on racial justice will likely come at an unexpected moment in an unlikely city when a police officer shoots and kills an unarmed Black man. Biden called the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests a “wake up call for our nation.” However, if popular political action invoking the spirit of the BLM movement might lead to significant outrage, even “violent” demonstrations and looting, what would the new administration do?

Biden will likely not deploy federal marshals like the Trump administration did in an effort to show it was tough on “law and order.” Biden and Harris may turn the page on traditional forms of social control, but this is yet to be determined.

Save the Climate – In his acceptance speech and his candidate “plan,” Biden never refers to “climate change.” He does advocate a $2 trillion plan to further a “clean energy revolution and environmental justice.” Among the key features of this plan include: cut carbon emissions from power plants; cut greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector; cut particulate matter air pollution; and increase climate spending to rural and urban low-income areas, especially among “BIPOC” (i.e., Black, Indigenous, and people of color).

Greenpeace has raised some concerns about his climate plan. They include the fact the cuts in greenhouse gas emissions is for 2050 and carbon pollution-free electric power by 2035. It warns the following:

He’s pledged to eliminate coal, gas, and oil subsidies and hold polluters accountable, but has not pledged to reject permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure. He made strong commitments to coal and power plant workers, but has not promised to guarantee wages and benefits to all workers impacted by the energy transition.

At best, one should hold one’s breath to see if Biden fulfills his goals.

The two major political parties realigned over the last quarter-century into self-contained contradictions. The Republicans – once the party of the old bourgeoisie and country-club gentry – have become, especially under Trump, a White “populist” and racialist party. The Democrats seek to embrace the tech nouveau riche along with inner-city Blacks and other minorities.

Both parties may well explode. Republicans may face split a deepening split between pro-Trump reactionaries like Lindsey Graham, who could forge a Tea Party-type opposition, and more moderates Republicans like Susan Collins and Mitt Romney. In addition, the Never Trump Republicans will likely call for the good-old-days of the Bushes and return to a country club party. Trump’s supporters will harden the party’s ideological arteries and build a grassroots movement that could lead to an ever more reactionary.

This situation may well be further exasperated if there is a deepening split within the Republicans as pro-Trump reactionaries like Lindsey Graham forge a Tea Party-type opposition to more moderates Republicans like Susan Collins and Mitt Romney. This situation may well be further exasperated if there is a deepening split within the Republicans as pro-Trump reactionaries like Lindsey Graham forge a Tea Party-type opposition to more moderates Republicans like Susan Collins and Mitt Romney. A similar fracturing may split the Democrats, with moderate’s embracing Biden’s vision of social reconciliation without struggle or a fundamental change in social relations. In reaction, so-called “progressives” may well push for a viable “democratic socialist” alternative.

And the White working class: what will be its fate in an increasing fractured political environment?

Six Brief Theses on the Trump Era

Gary Leupp

1. Ruling classes are not monoliths. The major employers, finance capitalists, top politicians, senior military brass, military-industrial complex, and capitalist political parties are divided into factions. There are genuine differences among them as to how to best exploit people. Trump was never favored by the dominant faction of the U.S. ruling class to become the Republican candidate for president. In 2016 the big bourgeois money was behind Jeb Bush, and/or behind Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate. Either evoked sentimental family feelings and would have been acceptable to Wall Street.

2. Once in power Trump pleased Wall Street with his tax cuts and deregulation, but alarmed many by his apparently unstable personality, and unpredictable trade and foreign policies. Many bosses wanted to fire him. Ruling class opposition to him took the most traditional, uncreative, backward Cold War form: he was criticized for alleged ties to Russia. But the campaign to oust Trump as a Putin puppet failed, as did the effort to impeach him—for the high crime of delaying delivery of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. Having avoided removal from office in February 2020, as the Dow Jones reached new highs, Trump seemed poised for reelection.

3. Then COVID19 arrived. The main issue now became not the (discredited) Russia charges, but the president’s callous, irresponsible response to the virus, indeed his responsibility for tens of thousands of deaths. And in May there was a sudden surge in mass demonstrations—despite the virus—against systemic racism as reflected in the latest iPhone-captured police murders. The protests were extraordinarily diverse and peaceful, and depicted sympathetically by much of the press. Trump’s hostile response to the protests, catering to his racist base, was condemned as “divisive.” COVID, racism and the prospects for a police state became the new issues in the drive—backed by the majority of the ruling class—to oust Trump.

4. Just as schools were closing in the wake of the coronovirus outbreak, the DNC threw the Democratic nomination to Joe Biden. The election would now be about Trump (the virus-spreader and racist divider), versus Biden (the defender of medical science and racial unifier.) Universal health care as advocated by Bernie Sanders would not be an issue. The fight would be between indecency and decency, aberrancy and normalcy.

5. The contest was won by normalcy. Trump was convincingly defeated. But so was the mainstream of the Democratic Party, which gained no Senate seats and lost some in the House. The significant role of progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar in abetting Biden’s victory is hardly appreciated by figures like Rep Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) who blames the party’s poor showing on “socialism.” “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” she declares, as though support for socialism was a matter of pragmatism or mere rhetoric. “We lost good members because of that [word “socialism”]. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success . . . we will get fucking torn apart in 2022.” Quite possibly the party will tear itself apart, as the Democratic Socialists of America emerge as the progressive alternative to the Neanderthals like Spanberger.

6. The Trump era ends not with his removal as a Russian agent (the initial plan), nor with his imposition of a fascist police state (a prospect over-hyped by some) but with a conventional humiliating electoral defeat. The defeat was obtained at the cost of suppressing—while smugly exploiting—the progressive wing of the Democrats. The election did what it was supposed to do: restore normalcy, re-enforce the default militarism, suppress “socialism” and convey to the world an image of America reuniting confidently after a period of deep division.

It was as much an election to prevent “socialism” as “fascism.” The mainstream of the ruling class wants neither right now, and it continues to make the decisions. Biden is now the face of the ruling class, the bulk of which (Wall Street numbers suggest) is happy to see his victory. Far from being a puppet of the left, as the defeated Moron President warned might happen, he will say “thank you very much, AOC and Ilhan,” before combining with Spanberger to marginalize them. And to proceed with the ongoing bipartisan national patriotic cause of “pushing back” on Russian and Chinese “adversaries” in their near waters—where north Americans in accord with God’s plan should clearly prevail!

The immediate specifically fascist concern (in the real world) is with the center of European neo-fascism, Ukraine, where neo-fascists (in the Svoboda Party and Right Sektor) played key roles in the Feb. 2014 coup organized by Obama’s State Department (to get Ukraine into NATO).

Biden (with his warmongering history) has a very keen interest in Ukraine. Since “foreign policy issues” were generally excluded from discussion during the campaign most people are in fact clueless about this issue. NATO is never problematized by the ruling class parties and their media; people are taught as a matter of the national religious creed that NATO has protected peace and stability in Europe for 70 years. They are encouraged to imagine a Europe without tens of thousands of U.S. occupying military forces falling through its own devices into chaos or under the Soviet boot. Biden as his campaign literature stressed is an advocate of NATO expansion.

There is reason to breathe deep and enjoy the death of a disgusting presidency. Ding-dong the witch is dead! Okay, good. But the stale air of Clinton’s bombing of Serbia (Beau served proudly in Kosovo) and Obama’s bombing of Libya lingers. The contagion of imperialism (to paraphrase somebody) is breathed forth by hell itself unto the world. The sad-eyed, confused looking new president has never repudiated his support for criminal wars. Kamala Harris for her part, who could be president tomorrow, is an AIPAC lackey critical of the Iran Deal and friendly with India’s Modi and the fascist Hinduvatu movement.

One ugly face will fade from view, even if it has to be tugged out of the White House by the Secret Service. But the nightmare is not over. There is no revolutionary party with a strategy, enjoying credibility, to lead anything like a Bolshevik Revolution. There’s no immanent takeover of the Democratic Party by the Democratic Socialists. It will be Biden, then Harris, exuding the status quo. It’s back to normalcy and its own dreamed illusions.

The Biosecurity Myth That is Destroying Small Farming

Lucile Leclair

Chen Yun’s pigs stopped eating, then developed a fever. Within a week, all 10,000 on his farm in Jiangxi, in southeast China, had died of African swine fever (ASF). In 2018-19 the virus affected every province and led to the slaughter of half the country’s pigs. The outbreak spread from China to Southeast Asia; the virus, already present in central Europe, reached Belgium in 2018. France and other European nations remain braced for its possible arrival. ASF, which was identified over a century ago, does not infect humans but mortality can be up to 100% among pigs.

To tackle the epidemic, China is favouring farms with at least 500 pigs, following the biosecurity precept that bigger is better. ‘Family farms will tend to disappear in favour of industrial production,’ said Jian Huang, an expert at China’s national pig institute. China is following health advice from international bodies for epizootic diseases (epidemics that affect animals), said Wantanee Kalpravidh, an animal health expert at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO); farms are classified according to their presumed risk of infection, from sector 1, deemed to have the highest level of biosecurity, to sector 4, with the lowest.

The underlying idea is that the spread of viruses is limited when animals are reared in closed buildings or behind fences that prevent contact with wild species that could transmit pathogens, and livestock eat commercially produced feed with sanitary certification rather than feed grown on the farm. Biosecurity regulations govern not only the farm’s hygiene regime (hand-washing, clothing changes before entering buildings, disinfection of vehicles) but the technical and business orientation of the operation. And that raises questions.

The biosecurity approach, which standardises and compartmentalises production methods, fails to take account of the risk created by industrial-scale livestock rearing in confined spaces. Large-scale units are presented as the solution to a problem they helped create. While the destruction of nature and wild habitats, often for industrial purposes, has led to the transmission of new viruses, many studies have shown the acceleration of epizootic diseases also owes much to the industrialisation of livestock farming.

In Thailand, data collected in 2004 indicated that ‘the odds of H5N1 [bird flu] outbreaks and infections were significantly higher in large-scale commercial poultry operations as compared with backyard flocks’. In industrial farming, poor genetic diversity and widespread use of preventative treatments depress immunity to disease, while the geographic concentration of livestock, dense stocking of animals and increased distances they are transported encourage the spread of pathogens.

The recent ASF outbreak is not unique. In the past 30 years, there has been a series of crises in pig breeding: diarrhoea epidemics (scours), dysgenesis (organ malformations) and respiratory syndrome, and H1N1 flu. Bovine TB has reappeared on cattle farms; poultry breeders have encountered new, highly infectious strains of H5N1 flu; and sheep farms have faced a resurgence of the bluetongue virus. According to the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health (established in 1924 as the Office International des Épizooties and still referred to as the OIE), the number of livestock epidemics has almost tripled in the past 15 years. This is a danger not only to animals, but also to humans, as some diseases can cross species, notably H5N1 flu, though instances are rarer than once feared.

The FAO’s Kalpravidh said, ‘Producers have to ask themselves, “How many kilos of chicken can I produce? How many eggs?” They have to up production to make more profit and use the surplus revenue to invest in biosecurity.’ This presumption in favour of intensive agriculture worldwide is a form of industrialisation; ‘biosecurity’ is simply a more palatable term for it, making it the unchallengeable frame of reference for a particular social and economic model. And no farm on the planet is exempt.

The bulletin of the French Veterinary Academy, acknowledging the decree from the ministry of agriculture of 8 February 2016, noted, ‘Biosecurity measures became obligatory for poultry farmers with the avian flu of 2015-16. In future, all sectors, whether extensive or intensive, will have to incorporate biosecurity measures.’ It conceded that ways of integrating such measures with transhumance (the seasonal movement of livestock) ‘are yet to be devised’.

Farmers raising animals free-range or for local markets are struggling to survive. Their livestock are subject to the same biosecurity regulations, though they are less exposed to contamination because of less dense stocking and less contact with the outside world. Since 2020, rules in the pork sector have required a 1.3m fence around fields and a visit every two months from an outside contractor to control insects and rats. Anne-Marie Leborgne, a pig breeder in Haute-Garonne, realised that ‘to make a profit after meeting the biosecurity rules, I’d have to raise my prices.’ Just one pig in 20 in France is outdoor-reared. Leborgne, 39, was selling 2,000kg of organic pork a year and working part-time at the school in her village south of Toulouse. Two months after biosecurity training from the local chamber of agriculture, she decided to get out of pig-rearing: ‘I can’t see myself selling many pork chops at €18 a kilo.’

To support biosecurity measures, the regional council in southwest France and the EU offer grants that cover 30% of the cost of materials. But that’s not enough, according to Benoît and Isabelle Dubois, mountain farmers in their 60s rearing pigs on 90 hectares near Brie in the Ariège department. They estimate that, excluding their time and upkeep costs, they would have to spend €400,000 to meet biosecurity standards, more than they have made in 30 years of farming. ‘After we’ve paid our bills, we’re left with €500 each month for us both to live on. Putting up fences in such steep, rocky terrain would be tough.’ They continue to farm on this arid land, but suspect they will be the last to raise pigs here. They don’t offer student work placements as they think it would be unfair to encourage young people to go into a business that’s ‘impossible to make work’.

While free-range operations struggle to comply with biosecurity measures, the economy still works for big producers. During health crises, some producers are exempt from movement restrictions. Only sector 1 operations that comply with security measures and checks can obtain a permit that grants them ‘compartment’ status, defined by the OIE as ‘one or more establishments under a common biosecurity management system containing an animal sub-population with a distinct health status with respect to a specific disease for which required surveillance, control and biosecurity measures have been applied for the purpose of international trade’. All 182 OIE members approved the compartmentalisation principle in 2004, and it later became law in Chile, the US, UK, China, Australia and elsewhere. In February 2006 France issued a decree that favoured big producers.

One such company is France Poultry, a Brittany-based producer formerly known as Doux, which gained compartment status for its 120 affiliated farms in 2017. It slaughters 340,000 birds daily and ships 70-80 containers a week from the port of Brest, 93% for export. The poultry is reared in 35,000-bird units, each bird allotted less space than a sheet of A4 paper. The units belong to subcontractors who work exclusively for France Poultry, complying with strict biosecurity specifications, which, according to CEO François Le Fort, makes them ‘sanitary bubbles’.

But a 2018 study shows that frequent contact between farms in the same compartment creates significant opportunity for virus transmission in a bird flu outbreak. Even if compartmentalisation prevents contamination from wild animals, there are other vectors of disease, such as the staff, air, water and feed. Although all these transmission routes are covered by strict regulations, daily working practices often fall short. Manon Racicot of the University of Montreal’s department of epidemiology selected eight producers in consultation with Quebec’s poultry-breeding associations, and studied how they applied biosecurity protocols. She found 44 repeated mistakes that invalidated claims of biosecurity, including stocking density, confusion between clean and contaminated areas, failure to observe hygiene standards, and employees’ poor understanding of sanitary principles. Sanitary bubbles are a myth.

A biosecurity regime, and the ‘islands’ outside the common law that it creates, threatens the health of animals and humans by setting no upper size limits on big producers. It also represents a democratic deficit, with case-by-case reasoning trumping the common good. The process of recognising a compartment for export involves two stages that transform the authorities into a service provider for industry. A farm must first be approved by its own country’s veterinary authorities. Then, all exporting countries negotiate bilateral agreements with importing countries to have their applicant companies approved.

Diplomacy now flies the flag for private enterprise. The state is no longer supporting its agricultural community, a sector or a regional specialism: it’s becoming an ambassador for brands and their products. When France speaks up for France Poultry’s activities, is it championing public or private interests? The OIE and the ministry of agriculture declined to comment.

Things May Get Worse Before They Get Better in the U.S.

Walden Bello

I’m one of those kibitzers who supported Joe Biden reluctantly from a distance, mainly because I felt that for both the U.S. and the world, he was the lesser evil. And like many, I breathed a sigh of relief when Biden crossed the 270 electoral vote marker.

Then the political sociologist in me took over as I looked at the electoral breakdown by race.

Whites make up around over 65 percent of the electorate of the US. Surveys show that 57 percent of white voters (56 percent women, 58 percent men) went for Trump, despite everything — his awful mismanagement of the pandemic, his lies, his anti-science attitude, his divisiveness, and his blatant pandering to white nationalist groups like the Nazis, Klan, and Proud Boys.

The electoral coalition that was behind Biden’s win was a minority of whites (42 percent, most likely the people with more years in school), the vast majority of Black voters (87 percent), and a big majority of Latinx voters (66 percent) and Asian American voters (63 percent).

Trump’s support among whites was essentially the same as in 2016, with support from women rising to make up for a slight decline in that of men. White solidarity continues to be disturbingly strong, and, more than opposition to taxes, opposition to abortion, and unqualified defense of the market, it is now the defining ideology of the Republican Party.

How did the party of Abraham Lincoln, author of the Emancipation Proclamation, become so completely opposite of what he stood for?

The Party of White Reaction

Over the last five decades, the key feature of U.S. politics has been the unfolding of a largely race-driven counterrevolution against progressive and liberal politics.

The year 1972, when Richard Nixon beat George McGovern for the presidency, was a watershed, since it marked the success of the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy.” It had been Nixon’s aim to detach the American South from the Democratic Party and place it securely in the Republican camp as a reaction to the Democrats’ moving to embrace — albeit haltingly — the civil rights of Black people.

From 1972, the racist colonization of the Republican Party steadily progressed, reaching a first peak with Ronald Reagan, president from 1981 to 1989, whose extremely effective “dog-whistle” was the “welfare queen,” which whites decoded into “Black woman with lots of children dependent on state support.”

His successor, George H.W. Bush, memorably owed his election to his playing up the charge that his opponent Michael Dukakis, owing to a prison furlough bill the latter had supported as governor of Massachusetts, was “responsible” for a Black man, Willie Horton, going on a weekend leave from which he did not return and went on instead to commit other crimes.

This does not mean, of course, that people flocking to the Republicans during this period did not have other reasons for doing so, like opposition to abortion and to tax increases. There were a variety of reasons, but the central driver of this political migration was racism.

That racist Republican base, the majority of whom still believed as late as December 2017 that former President Obama had been born in Kenya, was the key factor that catapulted Trump to the presidency in 2016 (though Obama’s pro-free trade policies also played a crucial role in costing Hillary Clinton white working class voters in the deindustrialized Midwest states).

Turning Away from Democracy

What Trump has managed over the last few years as president is not so much to transform an already racially polarized electoral arena but to mobilize his racist base extra-electorally, combining dog-whistle race-coded language with rhetorical attacks on “Big Tech” and “Wall Street” (and on the latter, it’s just a matter of time before his followers will start zeroing in on the immigrant Indian roots of some very visible members of Silicon Valley and Wall Street’s elites, like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former Citigroup chief Vikram Pandit.)

That is where the danger lies now: the fascist mobilization of a white population that is in relative decline numbers-wise.

History has shown that when large social groups no longer feel they can win by democratic elections, the temptation towards extra-parliamentary solutions becomes very tempting. As the aggregate minority population in the U.S. moves toward parity in numbers with the white population over the next few decades, white nationalism is likely to become more rather than less popular among whites of all ages and across gender lines.

Many people are wondering why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and most other Republican top dogs aren’t telling Trump to concede, though they most likely know his claims of fraud are bogus. The reason is that they know very well that if they do, Trump’s base would turn against them, endangering their current and future ambitions.

This just goes to show how much Trump and his base have converted the Republican Party into a pliable political instrument, with a leader-base relationship much like the Nazi Party in the Germany of the 1930s.

In fact, Trump is as much a creation of his base as he is creator of that base. What liberal commentators do not understand is that it is not not only a case of Trump whipping up his base for his personal political ends. It is that, but it is much more: that base wants Trump to lie for them and cheat for them and go to hell for them — and if Trump were to stick to the conventions of the transition process, he himself would run the risk of being disowned by them.

For Trump’s people, what is at stake is the maintenance of white supremacy, the enduring material and ideological legacy of the genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of African Americans that are among the key foundational elements of the United States of America. Just as the South was willing to stake everything on the roll of the dice of secession in 1861, a very large part — perhaps the majority of the Republican base — is probably now willing to resort to extra-parliamentary means to stop the tide of equal rights and equal justice for all.

In this connection, the armed pro-Trump convoys that paraded against Black Lives Matter supporters in Portland in September, and the armed band that showed up to intimidate electoral workers counting the votes in Maricopa County, Arizona, on election night, may not be aberrations but a taste of things to come.

It is now evident that the Republicans’ emerging strategy is to refuse any formal concession on Trump’s part and boycott the inaugural ceremonies, then mobilize against the Biden administration as “illegitimate,” paralyzing it over the next four years.

I hate to spell this out, but the current mood in the U.S. approximates that of civil war, and it may just be a matter of time before one side, the Trump forces, translates that mood into something more threatening, more ugly.

Can Biden’s victory be the equivalent of Lincoln’s in the elections of 1860, which led the white South to support the secession spearheaded by the slave-owning aristocracy? Lincoln’s words unfortunately ring true today as they did then: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”