US Imperialism Under Pressure at Home and Abroad

Sean O’ Torain.

I am sharing with our readers some thoughts I have about the present situation. This Trump is astounding in his stupidity. Think about this. I think it is open to question whether he will bomb Syria except maybe another empty airfield. But if he does bomb serious targets within the country and hit Russian imperialism's forces, there might be other repercussions beyond a military response from Putin.

Putin might think Trump was no longer of use to him in the White House. He might decide that the love affair between them is over and release all the information he likely has on him. It’s seems almost impossible that Putin, an ex KGB man, didn’t take advantage of Trump’s visit to Russia in more ways than one. If Putin did this and called for negotiation on Syria he could pose as a peace maker compared to Trump. This would be a major blow to US imperialism's stature abroad. 

So you could have Putin helping to elect the US president and then helping to bring down the US president. As Facts For Working People blog has been saying for some time. US imperialism is engulfed in a very serious political crisis. We have also been saying that era of the monopoly of US politics by the two parties of US capitalism is coming to an end.

US corporations as well as former aides and legal representatives are jumping ship and now the rich politician Paul Ryan has announced he is bailing out. The great genius who had the plan to cut the deficit has presided over it exploding. But does he admit this? No! He Just runs for the exits, most likely to a multi million dollar income as a briber, a lobbyist for the corporations whose taxes he cut.

FFWP has been saying for some years now that US imperialism can no longer afford to maintain its huge military to dominate its rivals and continue to plunder the world’s resources and maintain its own working class at the level it was accustomed to in the post World War 11 decades.

US imperialism moved to address this problem by attacking its own working class. This began with with the deregulation under the Democrat Carter who used the Taft Hartley against the miners in 1978 and it intensified under Reagan with his firing of the air traffic controllers and has continued under Republican and Democratic regimes alike. They were able to get away with this onslaught on the US working class because the pro capitalist US trade union leaders cooperated, helping to crush the series of strikes that took on a national character in the 1980’s in response to Reagan’s war on organized labor.

What the West Virginia teachers and educators strike shows is that this period has come to an end. These workers pushed aside their own leaders, struck and won, and this has inspired teachers and educational workers in other areas------mostly Republican states. From now on, shifting the cost of their international imperialist role on to the backs of the US working class will be challenged. A new era has begun in the US. The working class will begin to rise to its feet, is beginning to rise to its feet. And as it increasingly does so, US capitalism making its own working class pay for its imperialist role will become more difficult and eventually impossible. To be clear to new readers; what this imperialist role amounts to is protecting the profits of US corporations and holding onto and dominating as much of the planet's resources as possible, struggling with its rivals such as Russia and China, and keeping down the working class internationally. This the reality they cover up by their continual prattling on about defense spending about the defense department, about the Secretary of defense. 

Two points arise out of this situation.  One is increased struggles by the working class to defend areas such as education, Medicaid, Medicare and other public services and living standards in general. Secondly, this will then pose the costs of US imperialism's global activities in a concrete way. The costs of the military will be increasingly looked at and demands made that it be cut. This will sort out the liberal bourgeois politicians like Clinton, Sanders and others like them who support military spending, are terrified of even hinting that the military spending should be touched.

Yes! A new era has begun.

 It’s The Biggest Budget The Pentagon Has Ever Seen… “$700 billion. That’s far more in defense spending than America’s two nearest competitors, China and Russia, and will mean the military can foot the bill for thousands more troops, more training, more ships and a lot else… The enormous increases in defense spending agreed to by lawmakers on Friday go beyond what Trump ask[ed] for. Of the $700 million in spending for the 2018 budget year that started last Oct. 1, about $629 billion is for core Pentagon operations and nearly $71 billion is for the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Trump had requested a 2018 military budget of $603 billion for basic functions and $65 billion for war missions. The deal Congress approved early Friday also sets the Pentagon’s 2019 budget at $716 billion, giving Mattis the financial stability he’s been demanding. The biggest winners in the military buildup are the country’s largest defense contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and General Dynamics, that spend millions of dollars each year lobbying Congress.” – Washington Post, Feb. 10