Remembering Martin Luther King in the Age of Trump

By Jim Burns

This year's celebration of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. assumes special significance, poignancy, and urgency as we remember King during the same week that Donald Trump assumes the U.S. Presidency. My university, like many other institutions across the United States, paid homage to Dr. King. Yet leaving the commemoration, replete with speeches that praised King's dream, I wondered whether the paradox of celebrating the life of a Black anti-capitalist, anti-war radical juxtaposed with Trump's empty "Make America Great Again" sloganeering was lost on many of those in attendance. Trump's victory, which stunned so many White liberals, resulted from a historically proven winning strategy that tapped White fear through racist appeals for "law and order" and virulent anti-immigrant sentiment tied to economic stagnation.

In the aftermath of Trump's victory, many in the White liberal academic, media, and political establishment, who apparently viewed Hillary Clinton as entitled to the U.S. Presidency, fumbled to explain Clinton's defeat. Columbia University Humanities Professor Mark Lilla, for example, in a New York Times Op-Ed , characterizes the electoral outcome as "repugnant," yet he condemns liberal identity politics and the "obsession with diversity" for producing Trump's victory. Lilla offers his own "make America great again" prescription for a "healthy" national politics based not on affirming and appreciating difference, but on "commonality" and returning to the liberal politics of the New Deal, racial exclusivity and all. Lilla's appeal to contextualize education about the "major forces shaping the world" in their "historical dimension" sits uncomfortably beside a stunning lack of historical perspective, particularly in the presentation of Whiteness as a neutral norm and the glorification of the American project as the assimilation of difference.

Katherine Franke, Lilla's colleague at Columbia, provides that critical perspective in her response in the Los Angeles Review of Books . Franke characterizes the liberalism championed by Lilla as the "liberalism of white supremacy…that regards the efforts of people of color and women to call out forms of power that sustain white supremacy and patriarchy as a distraction." The Trump phenomenon, and analyses of it such as Lilla's, represent, as Franke points out and as Michael Kimmel writes in Angry White Men , a sense of White, heteropatriarchal aggrieved entitlement. Anyone who possesses the deep understanding of American history advocated by Lilla would conclude that Trump's victory actually demonstrates the victory of the White heteropatriarchal identity politics long deployed through relations of institutional power against many Others. Trump's election is no anomaly; it illustrates a history of White terror and backlash against demands by historically oppressed groups for their rights and human dignity.

Returning to the memory of Dr. King, his life and legacy have long suffered the tragedy of many civil rights leaders, who have been caricatured to comfort White America and fit a partial historical narrative to preserve the status quo. King's vast body of public intellectual work and activism have been reduced to his "I Have a Dream" speech, trotted out yearly to absolve the guilt and paralysis many Whites feel for their lack of personal commitment and action in the struggle for justice-racial, economic, social, and political-for which King and many others fought and died. Understanding King requires engagement with the entirety of his evolutionary thought, for example his Letter from Birmingham City Jail , in which he clearly articulated his disappointment with the white moderate "more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."

Yet a major aspect of the justice that King fought for, which seems lost in the sanitized celebrations of his life and work, included economic justice for all the people of the world. In an August 16, 1967 speech entitled " Where do We Go from Here? " King concluded that "the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society":

"There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, 'Why are there forty million poor people in America?' And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy."

James Baldwin echoed King's skepticism of the White moderate in his 1965 essay The White Man's Guilt . White Americans, Baldwin wrote, possess the ability to see the "disastrous, continuing, present, condition which menaces them and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility," but in lacking the "energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it." Baldwin, like King, appeals to the force of history, not as something exterior to us, but as something that we embody, a force that exercises unconscious control over us and "is literally present in all that we do."

Yes, the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency in what Gore Vidal famously called the United States of Amnesia illustrates yet again the masterful and predictable use of the White identity politics of fear, racial divisiveness, and class oppression. Trump's election demonstrates the dearth of meaningful dialogues about class in our political discourses, specifically the intersection of race and class, and the historic expunging of the class consciousness of working people through the destruction of organized labor. Super-wealthy plutocrats like Trump and much of his cabinet, to whom Adam Smith referred in his day as "the masters of mankind," maintain a clear sense of class consciousness lost by so many in the burgeoning precariat of disposable people mired in contingent work and living increasingly tenuous lives. Remembering Dr. King in the age of Trump should remind us that we cannot realize the totality of King's dream without immersing ourselves in the full range of his thought and the grandeur of the Black intellectual tradition more broadly. Commemorating King's life should also remind White Americans that we cannot develop a more complete and humane understanding of our country, ourselves, or the world without engaging with the force of history to which the African American intellectual tradition is integral.

The Working Class, the Election, and Trump: An Interview with Sean Posey

By Brenan Daniels

Given the talk of the role of the white working class in the recent election I decided to do an interview with Hampton's Urban Issues Chair Sean Posey on the white working class, seeing as how he is from such an area. In it, we discuss the media, the Democratic Party's relation to the white working class, and end with what the left can do from here.

There is constant talk of how the Democrats lost the white working class. What do you think of this narrative? It seems especially strange when the media rarely if ever brings up the working class and especially the white working class.

It's true. As the New York Times put it, "In the end, the bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength among white working-class voters fell to Mr. Trump." Basically, voters in the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania allowed Trump to breech Clinton's "blue wall" and win the election.

But yes, it's interesting that working class voters-white working class voters, anyway-were a significant part of the media's presidential coverage for the first time in many years. The media's focus on the white working class is predominately because of Trump and the kind of campaign he chose to run.

Trump honed in on what he called "forgotten Americans," largely working class people in "flyover country," as it's often derisively called. Somehow Trump understood the enormous malaise that exists in wide swaths of America where local economies-and cultures-have disintegrated. He tapped a vein of populist rage and channeled it back into his campaign. It seemingly took everyone by surprise, especially the media and the political elite.

It's important to remember how concentrated the media is now-mostly on the coasts around Washington, New York City, Boston, places like that. So it comes as no surprise that many journalists are deeply puzzled by Trump's rise. It's far less surprising to those of us rooted in what you might call "Trump Country."

Although poorly covered by the media, white working class support buoyed Obama in 2008 and 2012. As the New York Times put it, Obama's "key support often came in the places where you would least expect it. He did better than John Kerry and Al Gore among white voters across the Northern United States, despite exit poll results to the contrary. Over all, 34 percent of Mr. Obama's voters were whites without a college degree - larger in number than black voters, Hispanic voters or well-educated whites."

There are those that argue that those who voted for Trump are all racists/sexists? Now, it would be foolish to say that racism and sexism didn't play a role, however, how true would you say these accusations are, being from an area that voted for Trump?

As you mention, it's foolish to discount the importance of race-and racial appeals-along with sexism. However, those who attempt to reduce Trump's win to matters of race and gender alone are kidding themselves. Whites actually lost a net total of 700,000 jobs in the aftermath of the Great Recession-the only racial/ethnic group to experience such losses. White workers aged 25 to 54 lost nearly 6.5 million jobs during those nine years, while Asian, Latino and black workers in the same age bracket gained millions of jobs.

And there are now almost nine million more jobs than in November 2007.

According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, during the primary, Trump won 89 of the 100 counties most affected by trade with China. And most disturbingly, life expectancy for whites, predominately in the working class, is actually declining. There's nothing similar in the West to compare it to. It's no wonder that so many found Trump's appeals, which aside from race, centered on trade, jobs, national and cultural renewal.

My home state of Ohio suffered immensely after China's entry into the WTO; that's in addition to the deindustrialization that began in the 1970s. The inability or unwillingness of the Democrats to address the pain of the "hollowed out American Heartland," as I call it, brought them disaster on November 8. Trump won HALF the union vote in Ohio. That's unprecedented for a Republican candidate.

Some would say that those who voted for Trump are getting exactly what they deserve, as they voted Republican. While understandable, isn't that line of thinking a bit of a problem seeing as how these very same people didn't really have any other options besides Republicans or neoliberal Democrats, both of which would have damned them?

Those who say that Trump voters get what they deserve are actually feeding into the Trump movement. It's important to understand where many of these people are coming from. Now, I'm not talking about the Alt-Right or the Klan elements, but I'd clearly place them in the minority. If we write off a huge chunk of the working class, how are we ever going to build a movement of working people?

In his book, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? Thomas Franks dissects the decades-long movement of the Democrats into the neoliberal camp. The Democratic Party is America's left party; it's why the party exists. Yet Democrats increasingly represent a tiny fraction of Americans, not the top 1 percent, but the top 10 percent. Unions, industrial workers, service workers, etc., have no place left to turn. Many ran to Trump's campaign. Condemning those voters as completely stupid or as a "basket of deplorables" will simply give us eight years of Donald Trump. Liberals would do much better by looking in the mirror.

There seems to be something of a stereotype of poor whites who voted for Trump as these dumb, backwards people who can't figure out their own interests, which doesn't seem true, as Washington Post reported in November that people voted for Trump as they saw him as vital to securing their economic interests . Seeing as how you are from an area that voted for Trump, how would you characterize the people there?

The Washington Post article you mentioned gets to the heart of it. Obama actually carried Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin-twice. The idea that Hillary couldn't win these states is pretty laughable. Trump is the first Republican candidate in 30 years to be really competitive here in Ohio's Mahoning Valley, and he became competitive by running a populist campaign. By contrast, Clinton couldn't even elucidate a reason why she wanted to be president, other than the fact that she wanted to be president. The deindustrialized communities of the Rust Belt voted for disruption. Why? They've clearly gained little from the status quo. Perhaps the Democrats should listen…

What are your thoughts on the attempt by Jill Stein and others to engage in a vote recount or try to pressure the electoral college to vote for Clinton?

Stein's recount effort proved to be a waste of time and resources. It represents one of several misguided efforts (such as the attempt to influence electoral voters to defy Trump) to derail the Trump Train. I see it as one more effort to avoid building a real movement for change. Say what you want about the right, but they understand how to organize and influence power. Liberals and progressives? Not so much.

There is large amounts of anger and frustration at the election of Trump, however, it seems to be being put into marching and backing other Democratic candidates, some of whom such as Bernie Sanders, have said they would work with Trump. Why do you think that people are still pushing for the same old solutions, when those clearly have not worked?

The left is badly fractured and demoralized. The failure of the Democratic Party and the failure of movements such as Occupy have left many on the left confused and bewildered. For decades, communism served as the one great unifier for many leftist movements, but communism is dead. No coherent competing philosophy has emerged to counter capitalism and neoliberalism. You can see this in Europe where nationalism and right-wing populism are on the rise. The left across the West is perplexed about how to deal with it.

What is to be done? No one seems to know at this point, and we don't have time much time left to figure it out.

Welcome to the Trump Era: Time To Rethink the Word "Allies" (Yes, White Women, We Are Looking At You)

By Cherise Charleswell

The Orange Empire Strikes

On January 20, 2017 we will be entering what some have begun to call the Trump Era, an era that will be post-facts, considering the disdain that Donald Trump seems to have for facts and truth . It will also likely be marked with attacks on civil liberties, civil rights, women's rights, and LGBTQ rights, along with cuts to social services and funding of government agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Health & Human Services, and Department of Education. When a President is elected on a platform of climate change denial and promises to end the Affordable Care Act, all of this should be expected. However, this clearly is just the beginning of attempts to erode democracy and the right to dissent. In fact, any form of dissent or disagreement has been viewed as an unforgivable slight that cannot be ignored by President-Elect Donald Trump, a man who is unable to control his emotions and "Twitter fingers," often rushing to provide 140-character responses with startling regularity. Then there is the scandal at the Department of Energy , where the Trump transition team sent a 74-point questionnaire to workers, requesting an inventory of all agency employees or contractors who attended meetings or conferences on climate change, and asking for a current list of professional society memberships of any lab staff. All this has raised fears among civil rights lawyers specializing in federal worker whistleblower protections, who say the incoming administration is at a minimum trying to influence or limit the research at the Department. And at worst, attempting to target employees with views that run counter to the president-elect. The incoming administration's and Republican party's anti-science stand has actually led to Scientists frantically copying U.S. climate data because of fears that it may vanish under the new administration.

Then there is the recent failed attempt of the Republican-majority House of Representatives to end the House of Ethics Office , which was swiftly and rightfully met with backlash.

There are arguably Dark and Dangerous days ahead, particularly for women and other minority groups (Latino- particularly Mexican-Americans, African Americans, Asians, Muslims, LGTBQ) in the United States, all of whom were individually attacked during Trump's campaign. Since the Presidential election there has been a reported rise in hate crimes and speech, where many of the offenders are actually referring to Donald Trump and "Making America Great Again" amidst their acts of hate. See here , and here - regarding attacks against Jews, despite the GOP's peculiar love affair with Israel. Proving once and for all that they view they view this "Greatness" as a throwback to the time when White Protestant Heterosexual men (and women) were the majority, and discrimination and segregation were the status quo.

His Administration, and the Republicans that are seizing this opportunity, with control of the Legislative and Executive branch of government, have already announced their priorities to defund, repeal, and cut programs that helped to ensure access to health for women and others, including what some may refer to as an all-out war on women's bodies:

· Supposed Man of Faith, Vice President Michael Pence's statement to the press explaining that the Administration promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and that it will be THE priority of the Trump administration. Now they have been saying this and attempting to do so for 8 years now, but still have yet to come up with a replacement. And on January 5, 2017, before Trump takes office and President Obama's final address the Senate voted 51 to 48 to repeal the Affordable Care Act .

· Promises to defund Planned Parenthood. To see what's at stake there, revisit my Ensuring the Right To Reproductive Health: The American Public Health Association Takes A Stand With Planned Parenthood .

· Mike Pence has actually positioned himself as an opponent of Planned Parenthood and has openly acted to dismantle the organization. In October 2016, during a speech at Liberty University, he promised that "a Trump-Pence administration will defund Planned Parenthood and redirect those dollars to women's health care that doesn't provide abortion services." In addition, in 2011, the House of Representatives passed a bill co-sponsored by Pence to defund the group.

· Making the Hyde Amendment permanent law to protect taxpayers from having to pay for abortions. Despite asking then mistress-Marla Maples to have an abortion , in 2016, Donald Trump stated that abortions are "not acceptable," and that women who try to obtain them should be subject " to some form of punishment ." Following a public outcry, Trump backtracked on his remarks , saying it's not women who should be punished for having an abortion, but the doctors who perform the procedure.

· Making open promises not to cut social security, while stacking his cabinet with millionaires and lobbyist who are Pro-Privatization . A lesson in believing what people "show you", not what they "tell you".

· Continuing to deny what scientist, public health specialists, human rights activists worldwide, and others agree is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Climate change and environmental degradation. The Trump administration is unfortunately a triumph for climate change deniers .

The Blame Game

Now that we are in this era we cannot make the same mistake as previous generations, and that is to dismiss history and not take the time to truly reflect on how we got here. This process of reflection should not solely be about placing blame, but accountability has to be done. In a previous article Bamboozled: On African Americans and Feminists Casting Their Votes for Hillary Clinton , I discussed many of the blaring problems with Hillary Clinton's candidacy, much of which has also been pointed out by many others, such as Michelle Alexander, author of the New Jim Crow. Yet, the DNC is still taking it upon themselves to deflect and blame Russia for hacking emails -while ignoring the fact that even if hacked, the Russians did not create the content of those emails. The Russians did not set out to sabotage Bernie Sanders' campaign and disenfranchise many Democratic voters. The DNC did that, and needs to take full responsibility for it and the fall out that it created, which includes the millions of dismayed voters who chose to sit out the 2016 elections all together. Seriously, constantly blaming and being upset with Russia for their deceit is the equivalent of being upset with a Woman who chooses to let her friend know that her husband is cheating on her. Maybe she decides to share a Tinder profile as "evidence" with her friend. Perhaps she got the information because the husband left his phone unlocked. None of this changes the fact that the husband - like the DNC-did the cheating.

But the DNC's blame does not stop there. It includes lashing out at those who voted for third-party candidates (again a foolish strategy that will only help to further distance and infuriate these voters), and then the DNC actually had the audacity to lash out against minority voters who did not show up at the polls. Those who have been left off the hook, who have seemed to be forgiven because they are part of this often-mentioned group, are "white working class" voters - the people who seem to be the only group that has a right to be angry and heard. The group who is just now feeling the effects of unchecked capitalism, high rates of unemployment, and poverty. And this is why a historical lens is always needed. Other historically disenfranchised groups could literally just leave the " Welcome" mat out for them. A welcome to their reality. Malcolm X once made the remark that when "America catches a cold, Black people catch pneumonia," and this speaks to the historical social disparities that continue to exist. For instance, one can consider the national unemployment rate (4.9), and that of Native Americans (11.3%), African Americans (8.8%), and Latinos (5.6%). For a further explanation of why this focus on the White working class voter in a country that has changed greatly in terms of demographics and attitudes is problematic, see here .

Still, the greatest problem with the DNC's misdirected blame game is that it goes back to asking groups of people whose issues are not acknowledged or addressed until it comes to election time - to mobilize and do the heavy lifting, and this is especially true of Black women, who were the largest voting block for Hillary Clinton. Malcolm X once described this problem in his speech Ballot or the Bullet . This is an issue that has been discussed in great detail by Black- and intersectional feminists.

Intersectionality: Seeing Beyond Privilege

But let's focus on this term intersectionality, coined by Kimberlee Crenshaw, Civil rights advocate, educator, and leading scholar. While Black feminists and other feminists of color have pointed out the relevance of an intersectional framework in politics and legislation, establishment feminism - including Hillary Clinton, her pants-suit nation, and the strategist at the DNC - focused on what seemed to be a revisionist history of Suffragists and Second-Wave Feminists., conveniently ignoring the racism and classism present in both movements. Yes, the part of history that most white feminists would like to forget, or have not even been taught about (conveniently not discussed and swept under the rug), includes historical facts such as - once it became apparent that the right to vote would either come first to Black men or White women, the White suffragettes quickly betrayed Black women who had worked beside them. Just reference the history of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and their treatment of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, many white feminists extended this indifference toward intersectional issues throughout the 2016 Primaries and National election - up until it was too late. Sure, they conveniently put on a "dog-and-puppy show" inviting the mothers of victims of state-sanctioned violence out to attend the 2016 Democratic National Convention, referring to them as " Mothers of the Movement" after previously refusing to provide a space for Black Lives Matter protestors or even have an open and honest conversation about the Clinton legacy and Hillary's use of the term "super predators" to describe African American children. Still, there was the concerns with Hillary's dishonesty, lack of sincerity, pandering, and bolstering of imperialist foreign policy that primarily negatively impacted women and children, people of color, and the poor through war, political de-stabilization and disenfranchisement, environmental degradation, and unchecked capitalism.

Again, there should be no surprise that we are in a Trump Era, given the DNC's support of a candidate as flawed and out-of-touch as Hillary Clinton, despite the electorate's demands for Change and a much needed rift between multinational corporations and those in government. I am not one to readily believe in psychic powers, and I do not believe they were needed to predict this win. It is something that I pointed out in my interview for the Hampton Institute's podcast, A Different Lens, entitled, False Feminists & Hillary Clinton.

Intersectionality has always been understood by Black feminists and other feminists of color, as well as women of color in general who do not identify as feminists or may not be familiar with the term. They literally LIVE the reality of intersectionality, leading lives where they do not have the privilege to ignore the impact of racism, sexism/misogyny, and classism on their lives; and it is this perspective and understanding which really sets them apart from white feminists (often referred to as allies) and certainly white women voters. In the 2016 election white women voted 53% for Donald Trump (compared to only 43% who voted for Clinton ), making it clear that they certainly do not view the world through an intersectional lens, and that white privilege for the most part " trumps" solidarity or womanhood/sisterhood.

A Closer Look at the 2016 Exit Polls:

There was a distinct racial gap between voters, which opened wider when age and religion came into play.

· 58% of White women voters ages 45-64 voted for Trump (perhaps they remember the days of blatant White supremacy - and thought that a Trump presidency would harken back to that and "Make America Great Again".

· And again, it was not just White working class women who supported Trump - 45% of White college educated women supported Trump.

· 64% of White Protestant women also voted for Trump.

· While 88% of Black voters supported Clinton.

· And 65% of Latino voters supported Clinton

Source: NBC News Exit Poll

Further, as much as the media likes to focus on the uninformed, uneducated, poor, working-class white voters, the fact of the matter is that the educated and more affluent voters came out in support of Trump. The median income of Trump voters was reported to be $72,000--- $16,000 more than the national average. Perhaps one can make the argument that when it comes to a platform characterized by racism and ran by a millionaire who will look out for corporate interest and that of the upper middle class - these people really may have believed that they were "voting for their own interests, and not against it."

The reality of who Showed Up to vote for Donald Trump sent Comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actress, media critic, and television host, Samantha Bee, to unleash a tirade that bemoan the country's decision, calling out the group responsible for his election: " The Caucasian nation showed up in droves to vote for Trump, so I don't want to hear a goddamn word about Black voter turnout…… How many times do we expect Black people to build our country for us? ........Continuing with " If all 3.3 million Muslims in America apparently have to be held accountable for every radical terrorist, then white people better be ready to take their responsibility for their peers, too. "

Then there is the fact that Trump's candidacy did not come into question, or begin to lose endorsements, until the "Grab Them By The Pussy" moment; because his crass remarks were specifically about White women, sending many to clutch their pearls and wag their tongues in disgust. Apparently, he had taken things too far! And this despicable reality was appropriately addressed by Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, in her article " Dear Fellow White Women: We Fucked This Up:

"After all the supposed progress we've made, painstakingly trying to change a white feminist movement into an intersectional one (and for that we have only the hard work of women of color to thank ), white women didn't show up to fight back against a man whose rhetoric and policies directly attack women of color , immigrant women , Muslim women , LGBTQ women and more ."

She goes on to add:

"So I am ashamed. I am ashamed of my country. I am ashamed of white people. But more than anyone else, I am ashamed of white women. Is this who we really are? Clearly ― and it is who we have always been ."

So, who really are these "White middle class, educated, women" supporters of Trump, who helped to usher in this era of despair?

I think that the following excerpt from the Buzzfeed article " Meet the Ivanka Trump Voter " provides a great description:

There's a Trump supporter you rarely see at rallies, but whose existence has been affirmed, again and again, through polling. Call her the Ivanka Voter. She lives in the suburbs. She has great highlights, most certainly not out of the box. She might be middle-aged, with kids in high school or college, or a stay-at-home mom; she might be an up-and-coming professional, not yet married. She lives in the well-to-do suburbs - places like Rochester, Michigan; Indian Hill, Ohio; Eden Prairie, Minnesota; and Haverford, Pennsylvania. She had to drive to get to the rally, because not enough people would come if he held one where she actually lived. She wears expensive jeans tucked into her cute boots. She doesn't wear a Trump shirt - but she might wear a button on her fashionable sweater. She shops at Nordstrom, and Macy's, and Marshall's.

This voter is almost entirely absent from the images that proliferate around Trump and his events, which are overwhelmed with obvious signifiers of class: the men and women depicted might be overweight, have bad haircuts, or wear crass T-shirts. They might have bad teeth. They might be worked up, red-faced, quoted spouting a racial epithet. They're the heavily mythologized "white working class": men and women who've been left behind by globalization, ignored by both parties, and magnetized by Trump

More about this group:

· They most likely do not consider themselves racist - and much of that is because they truly do not know what racism is. However, even if they do not see themselves as racist - they have no problem supporting a racist.

· They have the privilege of voting for Donald, even when they do not "agree with EVERYTHING" he's said. And as people of color and others are being openly attacked, based on his inflammatory remarks, that has emboldened bigots and racists --- they also have the privilege of knowing that they will not be attacked by these groups of people.

· They are certainly not all conservative, and may view themselves as socially moderate. It should not be hard to believe that white women also have abortions. The fact that there decision to vote for Trump jeopardizes this freedom-is one clear example of where they did vote against their own interest; regardless of socioeconomic status.

· They do not realize that the way that you vote, much like budgets are a reflection of morals. It is about what you prioritize and what you deem acceptable.

· They are dangerous - moving in silence, while secretly upholding white supremacy. Essentially the vote for Trump is just another example of the use of macroaggression against minorities. More about that here , here, and here.

· They are willing to look past blatant nepotism and cronyism when it comes to Ivanka Trump, and they actually believe that she is qualified to serve in her father's cabinet and hold a position of prestige and power. Why?? Because they like her, find her relatable, and think that she has phenomenal people skills. And we should note that this reflects the same mentality of the "Ol' boys club" that ensured that only those who one lives amongst and interacts with (other white people) would be those who were (are still) able to get the most prestigious positions, or employment period. But hey, why should we demand that Ivanka be qualified, when her father is grossly unqualified for the position that he was elected to serve?

Moving In Silence. Silence in the Face of Fascism

Let's go back to the issue of silence, and how these "Ivanka Voters" may not have openly taken part in the rallies, shied away from the cameras, and chose to not openly discuss their support from Trump. They told exit pollers one thing, and their actions reflected the exact opposite.

This tradition of doing things in "Secret" to uphold white supremacy is certainly nothing new. Just consider the KKK and their love of white sheets that serve as their cloak of anonymity. This practice of Secrecy helped to spawn the use of Dog Whistle politics, covert in nature, allowing for one to readily go back and deny charges of racism.

When looking closely at their actions, and the need to hide their true intentions, one can only assume that they went through all of these shenanigans because they knew Who and What they were supporting, a racist and bigot, and they did not want to admit it to themselves and colleagues. They didn't want to face judgment. They did not want to explain why they were casting their vote for a candidate who was openly endorsed by the KKK, and for whom the KKK held parades in celebration following his election. Leaving them with no way to pretend that they didn't notice that he was not a racist. Ultimately, what they have shown us all is that they are not to be trusted, that being women does not automatically make them an ally, and further that we must come to the realization that not all women should be viewed as minorities or "marginalized majorities." The Ivanka voter was not fighting to dismantle systems of oppression, racism, and discrimination; they were fighting to uphold them, because they believe they are part of and benefit from that power structure. In the words of the late Poet, memoirist, actress, dancer, and civil rights activist, Dr. Maya Angelou, "When people show you who they are, believe them."

What is clear is that there was a convenient narrative to Blame a certain subset of voters, particularly white, uneducated, "low informed" and working-class women; and that was done because it is more difficult to deal with the fact that even the more educated and affluent white women, those who benefitted the most from Affirmative action, the women's rights movements, and may (or may have identified) as Second Wave feminists, quietly and secretly casted their votes for Donald Trump. And they did so because they have the privilege -- white, affluent-- to look past his racist views, even his misogyny.

In terms of Pants Suit nation and the white feminists who could not understand why many women of color and others had such a visceral reaction and disdain for Hillary Clinton as a candidate-this image from Glamour magazine provides the best visualization of the problem . In describing this issue, which involved no use of Photoshop , Editor-in-chief Cindi Leive stated that "Gender equality is on all of our minds. It's really important to me that Glamour not just talk the talk about female empowerment, but that we also walk the walk …… So we've decided to support women in the most meaningful way we can: by hiring them. From first page to our last, every photo we commissioned for the February issue was created by women: photographers, stylists, hair, makeup, everything." However, in looking at the cover, it is quite clear that this is White Feminism, a wall of white women, who believe that their representation and presence reflects or represents ALL women.

The Trump ERa is in part brought to us by the toxic mix of Pants Suit nation and establishment feminism, and their quest for the first Female US President, which left them blind to her many flaws. From suburban soccer moms (60-70% of who stated that they viewed Trump negatively but found a reason to vote for him regardless), professionals who have successfully "lean forward" and push against the glass ceiling , and working class "angry" WHITE women - it is truly time to reevaluate whom are considered and called allies. It is time to redistribute the work being done, to counter oppression and yes, get candidates elected. Because those who overwhelmingly (many holding their noses) to vote for Clinton were again Black women, who for far too long been viewed as "mules of the earth," as described by Short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist, Nora Zeale Hurston. In this Trump Era, if you want to really be any ally, checking your privilege will not be enough. You will have to literally put down and unpack that invisible knapsack of privilege . And this process begins with stepping forward, getting on the front lines, and being the first to resist and push back against the rising fascism of the Orange Empire, which now threatens the health, viability, security, and well-being of all Americans. Essentially, you caused the spill -- and simply cannot ask African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, those who are LGTBQ, and even the disabled (who were also openly mocked by the President Elect) to handle the clean up on Aisle 4 for you.

Deconstructing Workplace Hierarchies: On Contrived Leadership and Arbitrary Positions of Power

By Colin Jenkins

Bosses don't grow on trees. They don't magically appear at your job. They aren't born into their roles. They are created. They are manufactured to fulfill arbitrary positions of power within organizational hierarchies. They possess no natural or learned talents, and they are not tried and tested through any type of meritocratic system. Rather, they gravitate to these positions of authority by consciously exhibiting attributes that make them both controllable and controlling - being punctual, highly conformist, placing a premium on appearance, knowing how to talk sternly without saying much of anything, blessed with the ability to bullshit.

Hierarchies aren't natural phenomena within the human race. Outside of parenting, human beings aren't born with the inclination to be ruled, controlled, "managed," and "supervised" by other human beings. Hierarchies are artificial constructs designed to serve a purpose. They are a necessity within any society that boasts high degrees of wealth and power inequities. They are a necessity for maintaining these inequities and ensuring they are not challenged from below. They exert control, conformity, and stability within a broader society that is characterized by artificial scarcity, widespread insecurity, unfathomable concentrations of wealth and power, and extreme inequality. Without such control, these societies would unravel from within as human beings would naturally seek autonomy and more control over their lives and the lives of their loved ones - control that would amount to nothing more than the ability to fulfill basic needs.

Despite the artificial and arbitrary nature of both bosses and hierarchies, they persist. They dominate our days from the time we wake until the time we go to sleep. They control our lives, our livelihoods, and our ability to acquire food, clothing, shelter, and all that is necessary to merely survive. If we do not subject ourselves to them, we run the risk of starving, being homeless, and being unable to clothe or feed our children. Despite this, we seldom examine them, seldom question their existence or purpose, and seldom consider a life without them.

Capitalism, Hierarchies, and "Management"

"People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds."

- Jeffrey Eugenides

While hierarchical human relations have existed in many forms throughout history, the dominant modern hierarchy stems largely from capitalist modes of production. Capitalism is a system that relies on private ownership of land and the means of production for the purpose of transforming capital and commodities into profit for the owners of said land. Under the predominant system of industrial capitalism, those with sufficient capital may purchase parcels of land, build means of production (i.e. factories) on that land, and employ masses of workers to create products which can be sold on the market for a profit. Owning this land, and accessing the capital required to transform it into a means to produce, is a privilege reserved for only a very few. When land is privately owned in this manner, it represents a social relationship between those privileged few (owners/capital) and the rest of us (workers/labor). It is not owned for personal use, but rather for use as a location to extract labor value for production and profit. The owners of private property do not use it to satisfy any personal needs, and rarely even step foot on or in it. Understanding the difference between personal property and private property is crucial in this regard, as the term "private property" is often misused to falsely associate capitalism with freedom. In reality, when private property is used as a social relationship, as it is in a capitalist system, it becomes antithetical to any sense of freedom or liberty. A large degree of the profit that is created in this process is done through the exploitation of labor, whereas the owner will pay each worker a set wage in exchange for labor that ultimately creates commodities worth much more than this wage. And with the legislative destruction of the commons that took place during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, performing labor for an owner essentially became a coercive proposition, not a voluntary one. For under capitalism, those of us who must sell our labor to survive essentially have two options: (1) work for someone or (2) starve (this reality is the exact reason why the welfare state became a necessity alongside industrialization).

Because the development of capitalism represents the latest form of coercive social relations between human beings, the need for industrial "management" and "supervision" is paramount. After establishing the coercive conditions necessary to compel workers to sell their labor to owners (through the legislative destruction of the commons), owners were left with figuring out how to maximize their exploitation of a workforce that was ultimately forced to spend half its waking hours (if not more) in a place they do not want to be in, doing something they do not want to do. This task has endured ever since. Not surprisingly, scientific management, or Taylorism, developed alongside industrial capitalism with this very purpose: to improve "economic efficiency" through the improvement of "labor productivity." Fordism also surfaced around this time, taking a more all-encompassing approach to issues of mass productivity and management under capitalism. The common denominator in these fields of "human management" was to figure out how to effectively commodify a human being; in other words, how to turn a human being into a machine in order to perform menial, repetitive tasks for several hours at a time. Capitalist management systems looked to slave plantations for ideas on how to best accomplish this task. "The plantation didn't just produce the commodities that fueled the broader economy; it also generated innovative business practices that would come to typify modern management," Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman write . "As some of the most heavily capitalized enterprises in antebellum America, plantations offered early examples of time-motion studies and regimentation through clocks and bells. Seeking ever-greater efficiencies in cotton picking, slaveholders reorganized their fields, regimented the workday, and implemented a system of vertical reporting that made overseers into managers answerable to those above for the labor of those below."

The hierarchies of slave plantation management have effectively been transferred to modern office buildings in both the private and public sectors. To this day, entire fields of study have been dedicated to "organizational management" and "workforce optimization." The hierarchies that exist today, whether in private or public organizations, stem from archaic forms of management designed to essentially make humans less human. The fact that the term "human resources" has been fully integrated into our vernacular highlights the inhumane nature of labor in this regard. Coercion is simply not enough to ensure productivity. Frederick Taylor's contributions made this clear, at times valuing workers as less than "intelligent gorillas;" while Henry Ford's assembly-line, mass-production operations carried out Marx's warning from decades prior, essentially turning workers into mere "appendages of machines." Ford even went as far as creating a Sociological Department designed to study and standardize workers' private lives in order to further streamline them into visages of machinery. Ultimately, these fields of study have developed the corporate culture that has become synonymous with capitalist society: extreme hierarchies, a total absence of autonomy, strict guidelines and rules, threats of disciplinary action, and complete submission to conformity. These organizational hierarchies have been placed everywhere - within most corporations, most companies, most schools, most non-profits, most NGOs, and most public agencies. Quite simply stated, they are a necessary component in maintaining the unnatural wealth and power inequities that are so rampant within the capitalist system. Without high levels of control to keep people in line, this system would inevitably collapse.

The Contradictions and Inefficiencies within Hierarchies

"Maybe it is not a coincidence that, even in heaven, under the perspective of the Bible, there is a hierarchy. After all, what better way to impose the "benefits" of accepting the power of a hierarchy in the human mind?"

- Miguel Reynolds Brandao ("entrepreneur, business developer, and investor")

While hierarchies serve a systemic purpose in regards to how they relate to broader society, they also develop internal cultures that mimic the unequal power relations that have come to characterize our society under capitalism. These internal cultures breed competition among workers by creating an exclusive, managerial class that must be filled by a select few. In order to satisfy the inherent power inequities that exist within all hierarchies, organizations create arbitrary positions of authority, advertise these positions as being available to those who "qualify," and encourage people to pursue these positions in exchange for material gain. In this pursuit, however, contradictions and inefficiencies naturally arise.

In a professional capacity, whether we're talking about a public or private organization, people climb the proverbial ladder for two reasons: 1) to make more money and 2) to work less. The narrow-minded pursuit of authority and power, whether conscious or subconscious, essentially lies within these two, fundamental objectives that are inherent to human beings who are placed within hierarchical (competitive, not cooperative) systems defined by capitalist/corporate culture. In other words, when forced into a top-down organizational structure, it becomes natural to want to make more (money) and work less (idleness). The often-subconsciously attractive idea of acquiring a position of authority is the singular casing around these material wants. While the uncivilized act of exerting power over another human being may boost self-esteem, this form of psychosis ultimately operates secondary to the material benefits that come with this power. Therefore, it is safe to assume that if material benefits did not accompany positions of authority, they likely would not exist.

Regardless of this inclination, there are still many people who have no interest in climbing the ladder. Ironically, these people, for one reason or another, are more beholden to the natural human attribute of cooperation. They are either able to see beyond the self-centered pursuit of power (money and idleness) and are simply turned off by it, or they are just not interested in climbing over (and eventually overseeing) others for personal gain. In turn, those who choose to seek power (money and idleness) - those who are willing to spend time and energy climbing the ladder - do so in a purely self-serving way. They simply want to make more and work less, have no qualms about taking positions of artificial superiority over their fellow workers, and thus do whatever it takes to obtain that status within the organization. This flow creates an interesting paradox, as the most self-serving members of an organization inevitably gravitate to the top of the hierarchy. Thus, while organizations theoretically consist of groups of people working toward a common goal, this natural phenomenon based in hierarchical ascendency inevitably destroys any hopes of a collective will, while also breeding a culture of incompetence (as those self-serving individuals take the reins).

This culture of incompetence almost always comes to the forefront, as a majority of workers will inevitably experience it through daily occurrences of redundancy, inefficiency, and frustration. When there is work to be done, bosses almost inevitably seek refuge in their offices. When crises arrive, bosses do not take it upon themselves to work, but rather demand more work from those below. In most cases, bosses become so far removed from the actual work and mission of an organization that they essentially alienate themselves. As this disconnect grows, so too does the culture of incompetency. And with the tendency for animosity to develop from the majority of the workforce that is perceived to be "at the bottom," the only option for those who seek to control, supervise, and "manage" other human beings is to instill fear in their subjects. At this stage, trust is non-existent, organizational problems are always reduced to workers not doing enough, and solutions are always rooted in disciplinary action.

Furthermore, this phenomenon creates a natural inefficiency as those who are paid more money are essentially contributing less to the mission. In the case of so-called "supervisory" and "management" positions, this inefficiency becomes two-fold by not only creating a scenario where the organization is getting less for more, but also seeking more for less from the majority of its workforce (since this void must be filled somewhere). With this realization, we can see that hierarchies are not only unnatural forms of organization, but also inefficient and incompetent ones. Their purpose for existing lies in controlling this unnatural environment predicated upon massive inequities of power and wealth. However, beyond this need to reinforce the coercive nature of society, they are useless from within. This paradoxical existence is thus forced to construct mythological purposes for the arbitrary power positions that serve no real purpose internally, yet must maintain and mimic the power relations that exist externally. Ironically, wielding fear through micromanagement and the constant threat of disciplinary action ultimately becomes this artificial purpose. And it convinces those who occupy these power positions that workers are inherently lazy and, therefore, must be prodded like cattle. The irony comes in the fact that any development of so-called laziness, or a lack of effort, that comes to fruition from below almost always is the result of widespread animosity toward those who exist "higher up" on the ladder for the sole purpose of making more and doing less. Human beings simply do not respond to arbitrary positions of authority (often candy-coated as "leadership positions") because such positions serve no purpose in any real sense of organizational operations. Frankly put, the mere existence of these positions is an insult to all of those who perform the brunt of the work from "below."

Corporate Doublespeak, Contrived Leadership, and Insecurity

"Corporations are totalitarian institutions. Board of directors at the top of managers give orders, everyone follows orders. At the very bottom of command, if you are lucky you can rent yourself to it and get a job, and if you are sufficiently propagandized you may even buy some of the junk they produce and so on."

- Noam Chomsky

The totalitarianism inherent in corporate structures is defined and preserved by the hierarchy, and these structures stretch far beyond for-profit, private enterprises. In an attempt to justify arbitrary positions of power, organizations often portray them as "leadership" positions, deploying corporate doublespeak like "team leaders" or "officers" in their hierarchical arrangement. The problem with this is that leadership, in any true sense, is an absolute contradiction from power; and especially from arbitrary power. The acquisition of money and idleness that becomes synonymous with climbing the ladder makes leadership roles impossible for those who fill these positions to obtain. Never mind that the term "leadership" itself often includes connotations of superiority, or at the very least attempts to differentiate oneself from "the pack." Leadership can never be arbitrarily assigned through "promotions" or self-proclamation. If leaders truly exist among people, they only do so through a form of facilitating. And it may only develop organically, as the result of unplanned developments springing from natural occurrences of facilitation from within a group. Leaders are facilitators who may provide organic direction in a group, and they are always those who exhibit a selfless willingness to take on a brunt of the effort, or at the very least their share of the collective effort, while expecting nothing of individual value in return. Dictating from behind a desk is not leadership. Screaming down from a supervisory booth is not leadership. Analyzing and calibrating labor productivity is not leadership. Those who climb the proverbial ladder to (1) make more and (2) work less can never be leaders. Thus, filling arbitrary positions in hierarchies can never produce any semblance of leadership. Coercion, yes. Fear, yes. But never leadership.

The fact that hierarchies remain the predominant organizational structure throughout capitalist society tells us two things: (1) they are the most effective structure for exerting control; and (2) control is most desirable characteristic of any organization existing under capitalism. The inherent cultures of incompetence and contradictions which develop within these structures remain a secondary concern to that of maintaining control. And by masking this controlled environment through corporate doublespeak, organizations are often able to stoke a cognitive dissonance among its workforce that simultaneously puts forth a healthy dose of faith in the "team approach" by day while complaining about the incompetent and overbearing bosses by night. This is accomplished through a rebranding of arbitrary power to justify it with the appearance of a (non-existent) meritocracy, and tame it by transforming self-serving overseers into "leaders." The insidious nature of this rebranding even goes as far as trying to convince those in arbitrary positions of power that they not only belong there, but invariably serve an important purpose there. The natural insecurities that develop within managers and supervisors, who are plagued with a never-ending paranoia about being exposed as the frauds they are, are put at ease with cycles upon cycles of "leadership courses" and mounds of self-help books that call on their inner-CEOs to seize the moment!

Despite these contrived efforts to establish competence and confidence, those in arbitrary positions of power within a hierarchy are undoubtedly reminded of their uselessness during daily operations. The material benefits that come with these positions are typically all that's needed to cope with this realization; however, the organizational contradictions and inefficiencies always remain, and with them enduring fissures seeping with animosity and fearfulness from below, and insecurity and paranoia from above. There is simply no getting past the fact that the mere act of "supervising" another person is inhumane, because its purpose is premised on the belief that people are inherently lazy, dishonest, irresponsible, and incompetent. Or, at the very least, the existence of supervision confirms the coercive and inhumane nature of both traditional labor and hierarchies. Supervision is only necessary in a world where workers are viewed as cattle to be prodded, pushed, "motivated," and directed. The fact that those placed with this task of supervision possess no special skills or talents only makes this relationship even more precarious, as those being supervised will almost always recognize the illegitimacy of their supposed superior. Whether through interviews or exams, there simply is no way to find people suitable for supervising others… because, quite frankly, they don't exist. The supervision or management of a human being is never a suitable proposition, no matter how many executives, boards, curriculum developers, trainers, and corporate planners try to make it so.

Delusions Shattered: How Democrats Lost Claims to a Moral High Ground by Ignoring Obama's Transformation Into Bush

By Jon Reynolds

When President Obama was sworn into office back in January 2009, and just a few months later agreed to " look forward" and disregard gross human rights violations committed by Bush officials (such as waterboarding, insect pits, solitary confinement, and more), they were quiet.

When President Obama oversaw the brutal force-feeding of untried prisoners at a detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, they said nothing.

When President Obama's mass-deportations of undocumented immigrants in the US outpaced deportations under his predecessor, they stayed silent. As the Nation reported, "To pay for the ballooning enforcement-first approach, the budget for immigration enforcement grew 300 percent from the resources given at the time of its founding under Bush to $18 billion annually, more than all other federal law-enforcement agencies' budget combined."

When President Obama spent his first term in office outspending his predecessor on raids against legal marijuana dispensaries , his supporters had little to say. "There's no question that Obama's the worst president on medical marijuana," Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, told Rolling Stone magazine. "He's gone from first to worst."

When President Obama extended the US military occupation of Afghanistan until 2024, anti-war Democrats under George W. Bush were nowhere to be found.

When President Obama fabricated a reason to bomb oil-rich Libya in 2011, and then just a year later, reauthorized the US invasion of Iraq, they were voiceless, with the exception of a few scattered protests in the US, none of which came anywhere close to the size of those against the 2003 invasion of Iraq carried out by a Republican president.

When it was revealed that President Obama met weekly with his advisers for what was dubbed " Terror Tuesday" to decide who was worthy of being picked off by US predator drones around the world - and when it came to light that President Obama had a "kill list" and US citizens were on it, and were being killed, all without due process - again, barely a peep.

When Obama granted legal immunity to telecom companies that had conducted invasive spying during the George W. Bush years, when he extended the Patriot Act, when he prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all past presidents combined , when he expanded the NSA's surveillance programs , and when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and greenlit indefinite detention of US citizens without trial, Democrats remained complacent.

From January 2009 to the end of 2016, there has been a near-virtual silence from those identifying as Democrats against a variety of violations committed under President Obama, violations which were widely protested during the George W. Bush years, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by researchers at the University of Michigan, who released the results of an analysis of antiwar activity and found that after Obama's election, "Democratic participation in antiwar activities plunged, falling from 37 percent in January 2009 to a low of 19 percent in November 2009." Unsurprisingly, they also discovered that "anti-Republican attitudes had a significant, positive effect on the likelihood that Democrats attended antiwar rallies." Moreover, polling data from early 2012 showed Democrats supporting the same policies they heavily opposed during the Bush years, like keeping Guantanamo Bay open and drone warfare.

Under a Democratic president, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan was continued, US boots hit the ground in Syria and Iraq, US bombs fell in Libya, US drones terrorized the skies over Pakistan and Yemen, America's nuclear arsenal was upgraded, and highly provocative military drills were conducted along the borders ofRussia and China. Eight years of warmongering by the Nobel Peace Prize winner has been met with eight years of silence by the very same members of his party who protested such activities under a president whose main difference was the political party he was affiliated with.

But the eight year drought of direct action by Democrats abruptly ended in November of 2016 when someone from the "other" party just barely managed to score a presidential nomination. Facing a loss of power, suddenly, Democrats reappointed themselves as the sole defenders of minorities everywhere and quickly attempted to seize the moral high ground. Faces familiar during the Bush years clawed their way out from under enormous piles of steaming hypocrisy to lecture the world on human rights, faces like Michael Moore , who for the past two elections (2008, 2012) encouraged everyone to go out and vote for the guy blowing the legs off Muslim teenagers in faraway lands with aerial death machines. Protests filled major cities across the US with demonstrators wielding signs about human rights, equality, and social justice, the irony lost on them that the candidate they wanted so badly to win would have been just as dangerous to the very minorities they attempted to champion.

Muslims, both domestic and foreign, would have continued to fall under the threat of persecution, violence, or radicalization under a Hillary Clinton administration. She supported the US occupation of Afghanistan and both the 2003 invasion and 2012 reinvasion of Iraq, she supported the drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and she supported Obama's meddling in Egypt and Syria, as well as the bombardment of Libya in 2011. Where was the outcry during the Obama years? Where was the outcry when she took these positions as a presidential candidate? As Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian wrote back in 2013, "Does anyone doubt that if Obama's bombs were killing nice white British teenagers or smiling blond Swiss infants - rather than unnamed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Somalis - that the reaction to this sustained killing would be drastically different? Does anyone doubt that if his overhead buzzing drones were terrorizing Western European nations rather than predominantly Muslim ones, the horror of them would be much easier to grasp? Does it really take any debate to know that if the 16-year-old American suspiciously killed by the US government two weeks after killing his father had been Jimmy Martin in Sweden rather than Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen, the media interest and public outcry would be far more substantial?"

And let's not forget that Obama, like Bush before him, and certainly like Hillary Clinton after him had she won, offered support to regimes like Saudi Arabia , which are notorious for oppressing homosexuals and women.

Domestically, the War on Terror has also caused a variety of discriminatory problems for the same minorities Hillary Clinton and other Democrats claim to be interested in protecting. In early 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the Obama administration over government surveillance programs allegedly aimed at curtailing domestic Muslim extremism. According to the ACLU, based on public documents, "the initiatives appear based on theories about so-called radicalization and violence that years of social science research have proven wrong. They also result in ineffective law enforcement and unfairly stigmatize American Muslims." Just a few years prior, it was also reported that the Obama administration was continuing to fund Bush-era programs in New York City that helped police departments spy on predominately Muslim American neighborhoods. As USA Today reported, money from Washington helped pay for "computers that store innocuous information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events." In the event of a Hillary Clinton victory, it seems likely that these types of policies wouldn't disappear given her passionate support for and involvement in the Obama administration.

And then there's the War on Drugs, another minority-crushing gem supported by both Republicans and Democrats alike. In 2010, just a year after Obama was sworn into office, black men and women were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession , even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates. African-Americans are 62 percent of drug offenders sent to state prisons, convicted at a rate 57 times higher than white men, yet they represent only 12 percent of the US population . In New York, Latinos are arrested at nearly 4 times the rate of whites for marijuana even though, as with blacks, the rates of use are nearly the same, and from 2008 to 2014, one-quarter of a million people were deported for nonviolent drug offenses, often due to low-level marijuana possession. Hillary Clinton vowed to continue failed drug prohibition policies and disregard the overwhelming evidence illustrating its blatantly racist overtones.

The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way, shape, or form entitled to the moral high ground over the equally horrific opposing party is a beyond ridiculous assertion without any basis in reality. To see crowds of people motivated to action by the loss of their party, protesting an archaic electoral college system that they would have likely accepted the results from had their candidate won, tests the limits of ones ability to empathize with their plight. Kill lists, defense of torture, mass surveillance, US citizens being picked off by drone missiles, the continued buildup of a vast empire - none of it prompted thousands upon thousands of American Democrats to fill cities across the US in a fit of anger because at the time, their chosen political racehorse was in Washington.

If Hillary had won, the drone strikes would have continued. The wars would have continued. The spying would continue. Prohibition would continue. Whistleblowers would continue being prosecuted and hunted down. And minorities would continue bearing the brunt of these policies, both in the US and across the world. The difference is that in such a scenario, Democrats, if the last eight years are any indication, would remain silent - as they did under Obama - offering bare minimum concern and vilifying anyone attacking their beloved president as some sort of hater. Cities across the US would remain free of protests, and for another 4-8 years, Democrats would continue doing absolutely nothing to end the same horrifying policies now promoted by a Republican.

Trump's victory, if there is anything good to say about it, will at least breathe much needed life into an antiwar sentiment that has been largely dormant since Bush left office. Issues like drone strikes, torture, military occupations, mass surveillance, and other hot button subjects once protested by Democratic partisans during the Bush era will again - hopefully - be criticized and fought against. Yet the shame about it all is that this time, those unaffiliated with either of the two major parties - those who have been focused on these issues while Democrats have offered pathetic excuses and baseless justifications in defense of them - won't make the mistake of thinking Democrats will stick around for the fight if they win office again in the next election.

This article was reprinted from the Screeching Kettle .

Academia's Other Diversity Problem: Class in the Ivory Tower

By Allison L. Hurst and Alfred Vitale

"How can you know anything about the working class?" asks Ernest Everhard, the protagonist of Jack London's 1908 dystopian novel, The Iron Heel as he addresses a group of liberal do-gooders and college administrators. They can't possibly know the working class, he argues, because they don't live where the working-class live. Instead, they are paid, fed, and clothed by "the capitalist class." In return, they are expected to preach what is acceptable to that class, and to do work that will not "menace the established order of society". While this was written over 100 years ago, for many working-class academics (those of us who grew up poor or working class and climbed into academia), this conversation rings true. Many of us have presented some variation of it at one time or another to our more privileged academic colleagues.

Watching this past election cycle has been difficult for us. It has reminded us of the gap between the places we currently inhabit (the so-called Ivory Tower) and the places we originally came from, which we still visit from time to time. We cheered Bernie when he came on the scene, because he appeared to understand this gap and promised to make things better for the people we loved. When Trump began overtaking other candidates, we were not as surprised as the people around us seemed to be, because we understood that his message, cloaked as it was in misogyny, nativism, and racism, was directed at real issues long overlooked by the Democratic Party. We held our breaths, hopeful that Sanders would take down Trump, that his message was the message of change and kindness rather than change and hate. After the primaries, we crossed our fingers but felt the DNC had made a major blunder in nominating a candidate who stood for everything that people seemed to be fighting against - business as usual, neoliberalism, paternalism.

Both academia and the DNC have a class problem. They don't know anything about the working class because they have isolated themselves from working-class people. We have been struggling for years to change this within academia. In 2008, after a few years of discussion among comrades, a group of us formed the Association of Working-Class Academics (AWCA), a group for people like us with lives that straddled the working class and middle class. We wanted to bring class into the academy, to get people talking about it, aware of it, doing something about what we saw as an unsustainable growth of economic inequality. We had parents without retirement income, brothers with back-breaking jobs, sisters without the ability to pay for childcare, generations who faced joblessness or an attempt at a local college, with accompanying debt. We knew firsthand that things had shifted somewhere in the promise of the American Dream, that good jobs were harder to come by, that many people didn't have the luxury to plan and save and think about retirement. We thought that having more faculty with backgrounds like ours would provide natural checks-and-balances on academic discourses that tend to move far away from the reality of class as lived by the overwhelming majority of the population.

It hasn't exactly worked out that way. Discussion of social class has always been relegated to the margins of academia. In turn, public discourse about class is muted. By denying the opportunity for social class to be a valid academic subject in itself, or to be considered an authentic form of social identity, educated folks (academics, pundits, campaign managers, and journalists) didn't just silence the voices of the poor and working-class, they also denied the possibility of critically engaging the problem of affluence. How to critique Trump without this? His status as a member of the billionaire class was not seen as problematic, despite all we know about the power and impact that class has on the very real experiences of the vast majority of Americans. He was lampooned as a buffoon, then excoriated for his bad manners, and finally deplored for his many bad acts, all of which left the essential issue of a billionaire running on a platform of economic populism relatively unquestioned. When we saw the picture of the Trumps and the Clintons hobnobbing in evening wear, we thought, "This will nail him!" But that picture was never used by the DNC, because it would target their candidate as well. Plus, it wouldn't have been polite.

A society more sensitive to the complicity of the ruling classes, more willing to eschew the sycophancy and reverence given to the already overwhelmingly privileged, more capable of resisting the urge to lionize the affluent, and more attentive to the ubiquitous power handed over to the 1%, would have appropriately vilified Trump and dismissed him well before his name went on the ballot. We can spend time looking at any number of reasons for his victory, but we must ask the bigger question of why an unabashedly greedy billionaire glided through the primaries and general election without any real resistance. Could it be the case that we have consistently neglected to blame, unequivocally, the economic elites for inequality, and to hold them accountable for it? Where was the critical intellectual attack on the damages reaped by the excesses of the 1%? This takes us back to Jack London's protagonist Mr. Everhard, and his suggestion that such critique would "menace the established order of society." It may be true that many university researchers have studied poverty and made it their social justice duty to try to understand and ameliorate it. But the lens is most often focused downward, to poverty, and there has been virtually no research directed upward at the practices and mechanisms by which the affluent cause, exacerbate, benefit from, and rely on the steady continuation of inequality. And the occasional whispered squeaks of condemnation for the wealthy fade quickly, subsumed by the jingoistic, pragmatic liberalism of the well-educated in an academic world increasingly shaped by the whims of the donor class.

This form of economic censorship, justified by the neoliberal fabric of institutions of higher education, ensures that no acceptable critique of affluence will become sewn into the fabric of pedagogy. It is our contention that if academia was proportionately represented by faculty and students from the poor and working-classes, the influence of the donor class on the institutional structure could be counteracted at the immediate level of teaching and research as a matter of course, rather than as an occasional garnish on the obligatory "race, class, gender" courses offered in many college departments. Discourse would create a resistance to the universalizing narratives compressing "poverty" and equalize it through a reciprocal comingling with intersectional narratives condemning the oppressive presence of affluence. If social class is duly acknowledged as salient, we will have to problematize and identify the systemic sources that shape the dominant narrative. Such a critique will require an indictment of capitalism as it stands, and therein lies the problem: how can we expect a real, class-sensitive critique of affluence in a milieu that tacitly condones its pursuit and happily reaps its benefits?

But, you may be asking, is there some problem here? We all know that academia can seem far removed from the day-to-day social worlds of most people, so what does it matter if academia doesn't want to indict affluence? Let's consider this question in light of the recent failures of the Democratic Party, and its slow slide away from economic populism and into neoliberalism since the days of Bill Clinton. Let's acknowledge that the increased dismissal of social class discourse in academia coincides with the current chasm in understanding between those who run the Democratic Party and those whom it purports to represent.

In many ways, the Democratic Party is like the Ivory Tower. They have both distanced themselves from a class awareness that they profess to have-so much so that they have forgotten and refused to acknowledge what social class means to actual people in the world. They have nominally acknowledged oppression, but have not really invited the oppressed into their circles; consequently, they assume they will have the support of the oppressed when it's needed. Diversity (or, rather, the lack thereof) remains a major problem in both academia and the Democratic Party. Both the party and academia have come to rely on a cadre of affluent donors, thereby shifting their priorities to fund-raising, advancement efforts, and the doling out of reciprocal favoritism, influence and rewards to the philanthropist class.

This diminishing attention to social class, both culturally and academically, paralleled the decline of unions in the United States, the crumbling of rust belt cities, and a sweeping upswing in inequality. The poor and working-classes ceased to have even a small amount of power, and were picked clean by things like predatory lending, healthcare costs, student-loan debt and skyrocketing college costs, jobs moving overseas, and major cutbacks in the social safety net. Relatedly, while scholarly attention to other factors in human experience such as race or gender grew exponentially - and it is true that there are deliberate efforts at most universities to invite more faculty from diverse race and gender backgrounds - there remains a relative and concerning scarcity of minorities as faculty members or students, and in particular, of working class and poor faculty and students. It may be the case that the very structural class dynamics most liberal professionals have neglected could help explain why they're having such a hard time ensuring equitable racial and gendered distributions in the University and the meritocratic beyond.

Although access to higher education has helped some members of the poor and working-classes "move up" in the world (we are witnesses to that), the numbers remain stubbornly small. Our colleges continue to serve children of the elite, or at least children of the highly educated. Proportionately speaking, faculty in universities do not reflect the existing social class strata that exists outside the walls of the Ivory Tower. This is not likely to change. Many academics from poor and working-class backgrounds are in disproportionate amounts of debt because they had to pay for the academic entry-fee themselves, and the tuition prices went up as the lines got longer. As it becomes more expensive to fund a graduate education, we will continue to find a smaller percentage of employed academics that come from poor or working-class backgrounds. The academic system keeps out the rabble, as it always has. This, in turn, comforts the donor class, who are assured that their role as instrumental philanthropists (i.e., manipulative tax-avoiders) will continue to garner them the reverence that their economic power naturally deserves - all without any means for resistance by the masses.

Thus it stands that the absence of real class awareness and the glacial pace of diversity efforts plague both the Democratic Party and institutions of higher education. Perhaps both the ivory tower and the DNC shouldn't be publicly trying to recruit the poor and working-class to become members of the liberal elite, and privately insulting them if they aren't. Instead, maybe we should ask ourselves what we can do to make academia privilege the voices of disenfranchised people, rather than the elite group speaking on behalf of them. Perhaps then, maybe in 2020, our collective voices will shout to the elites the same words spoken by Jack London's Ernest Everhard:

"We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you tread upon the faces of the poor. So we have preached power. By the power of our ballots on election day will we take your government away from you."

Alfred Vitale, Ph.D. and Allison L. Hurst, Ph.D. are two co-founders of the Association of Working-Class Academics, a non-profit that was recently absorbed into Working Class Studies Association.

Lies and Legacy: A Conversation on Fidel Castro

By Brenan Daniels

This is a recent email interview I did with Patxi Ariet, the son of Cuban immigrants to the US who supported Fidel Castro, about Castro, Cuba, the US media coverage of Cuba/Castro, and Cuba's future.

What are your thoughts on Castro's death and the media's reaction?

The death of Fidel Castro marks the end of an era in the history of Cuba. To me it marks the end of the 20th century and the Cold War era and moves Cuba into the 21st century and makes room for the youth of Cuba to continue the revolution in the spirit of Fidel Castro. As to the media coverage, I feel that it was highly choreographed as to what was said. At first Fidel was referred to as the "Leader of the Cuban people," when the news first broke about his death. As the day went on, however, he went from leader to Dictator.

We saw the political line of the American government come out through all media sources in the United States. Whether this was print or broadcast, the line was the same. There was also very little attention to given to Cubans in the island. The emphasis was on the Cuban exiles and their story out of Miami. Showing people living in Key Biscayne, which is one of the most exclusive and wealthiest parts of Miami, to get their take on the death of Fidel and of course to through some punches at his legacy. This was to be expected though, every emperor rejoices in the death of their enemy.

Tell us about your life and growing up as a Cuban whose parents supported the revolution? Why did your parents support the revolution?

To say the least, I did not fit in with the other children that came from staunch Anti-Castro, Republican homes. I would listen to the stories they have heard from their parents and I would tell mine. My family supported the revolution because they remembered and were not blind to the abuses of the Batista government. They saw the need for a total change in Cuba and its relationship with the United States. I would hear about how Havana was controlled by the Mafia and American corporate interests. They would tell me the stories about the "Saca Uñas," the Nail Pullers.

These were special secret police that would kidnap, interrogate, imprison, even kill Anti-Batista Cubans, or just those that did not do what the secret police told them to do. My own great grandfather who was Captain of the Police force in Havana was forced to resign his post when he refused to assassinate people for the government. These were stories that many Cubans in Miami would never talk about or allow their children to hear. Along with the corruption my family remembered the poverty and injustice outside of Havana.

How people could just be thrown off their land by the whim of the foreign land lords. My own grandfather used to deliver medicine for free and provide medical care for free in these areas because they did not have any money for food much less healthcare. This is why the revolution was necessary in their eyes.

How have people received your support for Castro? Have you been shunned by members of the Cuban community?

Depends on who I am talking to. An American will sit with me and discuss the Cuban missile crisis and Bay of Pigs, of course from the American perspective. These conversations usually end with, "Huh, I didn't know that", from the person I'm speaking to. As far as the Cuban community, the reaction is a bit different. I never try to disrespect or put down the experiences of those Cubans that I'm speaking to that lived through the early days of the revolution. I know that any revolution is a difficult thing to live through, change is always a painful process and I try to sympathize with what they went through. For the most part I am either kicked out of where I am by the Anti-Castro supporter, or I am drawn into a long conversation about the horrors of Fidel and then kicked out.

There is a type of shunning that comes with being a Pro-Castro Cuban in Miami. People automatically know your name, recognize your face. Create elaborate stories about you, about how you are a spy for the Cuban government, how you must have killed 100 political dissidents to get to where you are. This is the basis of the Anti-Castro propaganda, lies and exaggerations. I remember once I was at a schoolmate's house doing a project for school.

My parents struggled to send me to La Salle high school in Miami, one of the two obligatory schools Cuban exile children chose from to attend. I was doing a project at the house of a class mate whose mother was Anti-Castro, gun-ho republican. She was speaking to me about President George W. Bush's policy towards Cuba. She went on and on, when she finished all I said was, "The embargo is the reason for the shape Cuba is in, but Fidel and the revolution has still managed to help the people of Cuba." I was immediately told to leave. This is normal and you learn to keep your mouth shut in certain areas. I am much more well-received in American areas

There are some who would argue mistakes were made by Castro, Talk about those mistakes, but also how the media seems to ignore anything positive Castro has done.

Every government makes mistakes. To err is human. Unfortunately, when the leader of a country makes mistakes, some people suffer from it and it becomes the focal point of propaganda. In my humble opinion I feel Fidel could have done more in the way of "Socializing" industry and not just Nationalizing them. Industry should have been for the benefit of every Cuban and controlled by the workers of those industries. I see this as a major flaw to an exact Socialist state. This mistake, however, I do not even hold to much against Castro. I was never in his position and I trust he did what he thought was best to maintain the revolution in Cuba and make sure it was in the best interest of the Cuban people in the long run. I also know that there is scarcity due to the embargo so this could also be a reason to nationalize all industry, to make sure that enough is produced and distributed among the people.

However, the media looks at these "flaws" as evidence of an Evil dictator that refuses to adequately feed his people. Of course, they don't mention the free healthcare and education systems across the islands, nor how Cuba send doctors all over the world to help those in need that cannot afford medical care. They don't mention how every Cuban has a job, can read and write, has housing.

You never hear about the low infant mortality rate that is even lower than in the US. You don't hear the fact that no one starves to death on the Island. There is scarcity, yes, but everyone eats and no one is starving to death. The western media ignores these facts and make Cuba look like a prison.

They distort why some people are in jail, they distort the numbers of people in jail, yet fail to mention that the US has the highest prison population in the world! How the prison system in the US is used as a modern day slave system to contract inmates, mostly of color, out to companies to do jobs for little or no pay. This is never brought up, yet the few small incidences in Cuba are blown out of proportion to be used as propaganda. It is disgusting.

What would you say is the impact Castro has had over the years and the impact he is still having?

Over the years Castro has impacted millions of lives. To begin with, in Cuba has impacted every single Cuban those who love him and those who hate him see this man as the one that changed their lives. Around the world he has impacted many, many others over the years. From his stance against the Belgians in the Congo during their fight for independence. Him sending troops to Angola to defeat the apartheid soldiers sent in from South Africa, which were supported by the US.

To the peoples of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador who looked to Fidel Castro as well as Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos as an inspiration to overthrow those in their countries that wanted to use them as slaved to continue making money and who have repeatedly sold them out to the United States so they can further their own economic interests. Even after his death he is impacting and will continue to impact millions of people daily.

He has become the symbol of revolution, the symbol of fighting for what you believe in and fighting for the right of your country and your people to be free. He stood up to the biggest empire this world has ever known and lived to be an old man. That is inspiring. His actions will never be forgotten and it is because of his action that his words and his legacy will be immortal. History has truly absolved him.

If possible, have you been in contact with anyone in Cuba who can speak to how the Cuban people are feeling?

I have a few friends of mine that are from Cuba and travel to Cuba quite frequently. None, unfortunately, that have visited the island after the death of Fidel. I can speak to how he was spoken about while he was alive. I have heard some say he was like a grandfather. Others who criticized him for not giving in to the Americans so they can have more things. Overall though the people of Cuba do not regret the revolution nor do they wish for the state to be overthrown.

As any patriotic citizen of their country, they feel that Cuba can be better, and it is exactly that feeling that Fidel Castro inspired in people and that is why Cuba will be better. Notice that those that have criticized Fidel were not harassed, nor put into prison. They criticized him openly and without fear of the state.

What do you think the future hold for Cuba, especially with regards to its relations with the US?

I think Cuba will continue to grow and move towards Socialism. With the next generation preparing to take the helm of the country I am excited to see what happens. When it comes to relations with the US. I am afraid that under President Donald Trump, the doors of diplomacy will be closed once again and the Cold War with Cuba will continue. I do not see Cuba giving in to the demands of a demagogue like Trump. I feel optimistic, however, that this will not limit Cuba's interaction with the international community and that Cuba will continue to grow economically in the world despite the attempts of Mr. Trump to strangle it.

President Rodrigo Duterte's Killing Fields and People's War in the Philippines: An Interview

By Andy Piascik

E. SAN JUAN, Jr., emeritus professor of Ethnic Studies, English and Comparative Literature, is currently professorial lecturer at Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He was a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University; and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previously he served as Fulbright professor of American Studies, Leuven University, Belgium; and visiting professor of literature at Trento University, Italy; and at National Tsing-Hua University and Tamkang University, Taiwan.

San Juan received his A.B. from the University of the Philippines and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Among his recent books are In the Wake of Terror (Lexington), US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave), Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell) and Between Empire and Insurgency (University of the Philippines Press). Forthcoming books are Learning from the Filipino Diaspora (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House) and Filipinas Everywhere (De La Salle University Press). His recent anthologies of poems in Filipino are Kundiman sa Gitna ng Karimlan, Ambil, and Wala.

San Juan has received awards from MELUS (Katherine Newman Prize); Association for Asian American Studies, Gutavus Myers Center for Human Rights; Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, Italy; Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University; Academia Sinica, Taiwan; Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh;; and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. He is a member of the editorial advisory board for Cultural Logic, Humanities Diliman, Malay, and Kritika Kultura.

Who is President Rodrigo Duterte and who and what does he represent?

San Juan: For 22 years, Duterte was mayor of Davao City, the largest urban complex in Mindanao island, Philippines. TIMEmagazine dubbed him "the Punisher" for allegedly organizing the death-squads that eliminated drug dealers and petty criminals via "extra-judicial killings" (EJK)-no arrests or search warrants were needed, the suspects were liquidated on the spot. That's the modus operandi today. If Davao City became the safest or most peaceful city in southeast Asia, it was also called "the murder capital" of the Philippines.

Drug addiction is rampant in the Philippines. Previous administrations either turned a blind eye or coddled druglords, often police and military officials, infecting poor communities and generations of unemployed and unschooled youth. My relatives in Manila and friends in the provinces have complained that their children have been corrupted by the drug culture in neighborhoods and schools, so that when Duterte ran for president last May, he got 16 million votes (39% of total votes cast), 6.6 million votes ahead of the closest rival, Mar Roxas, a grandson of Manuel Roxas, the first president of the Republic in 1946. This implies that people want a government leader who can rid the country of the drug menace.

News reports described Duterte's victory as an upset, like Trump's win over highly favored Hillary Clinton. Is it accurate to say that voters simply wanted a change, regardless of the substance of Duterte's platform?

While the U.S. set up the electoral system in the Philippines, the feudal/comprador classes manipulate it so that personalities, not ideology, and bribery determine the outcome. Democracy in the Philippines is actually the rule of the privileged minority of landlords, bureaucrat capitalists, and business partners of foreign mega-corporations (called compradors) over the majority.

All presidential candidates promise change for the better. In the last two decades, the popular demand has been: get rid of corruption, drugs, rapes, wanton murders, etc. Over 75% of 130 million Filipinos are impoverished, sunk in palpable misery. Consequently, over 12 million have travelled to all continents to earn bare subsistence-about 5,000 OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) leave every day for Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, North America, Europe, etc.

Scarce decent jobs, starvation wages for contractual labor, unaffordable housing, lack of adequate medical care and schooling-symptoms of terrible underdevelopment- have pushed millions out of the country, or driven them into the hills and forests to take up arms against an unjust, exploitative system whose military and police are trained and supplied by Washington-Pentagon, IMF/World Bank, and global capitalist powers. The country has been a basket-case in Asia since the Marcos dictatorship in the seventies, outstripped by smaller nation-states like Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, etc.

Relatively unknown to the MetroManila political milieu, Duterte's reputation as a scourge of druglords was glamorized to the point that he became a harbinger of change. His slogan was: "Change is coming." The public responded to this propaganda. Although unlike Roxas and his group, among them the Aquino-Cojuangco clan and Makati (Manila's Wall Street) corporate moguls, Duterte does not belong to the traditional elite dynasties, his campaign was supported by some of the biggest corporate stakeholders, such as the Floirendo agribusiness, and by billionaire investors (Uy, Te, Alcantara, Villar) engaged in mining, public utilities, construction with huge government contracts, etc.

We cannot underestimate the Marcos family's contribution, which added to the P375 million that Duterte allegedly spent. This fact explains why Duterte allowed the controversial burial of the Marcos cadaver in the National Heroes' Cemetery. Duterte's father, and other relatives in Cebu, collaborated with the Marcos martial-law regime.

Duterte thus belongs mainly to a hitherto excluded fraction of the comprador bureaucrat capitalist class, with links to the patrimonial landlord families. He now serves as a "populist" front of the parasitic oligarchy that has dominated the class-conflicted order of this dependency since the U.S. directly ruled the country from 1899 to 1946 as a classic colony, and a pacified neocolony during the Cold War up to now. Duterte's regime prolongs the moribund structure of colonial institutions and practices that feed off the labor of the peasantry, workers, middle stratum, women, Moros, and the Lumads (indigenous) communities-these last two are now mobilized to oppose this predatory status quo.

What is your assessment of Duterte's intent of becoming more independent of the United States and the moves he's made in that direction thus far?

This was a burning topic before the US elections, when the Cold War was being revived. Duterte got the cue. His move to invoke his youthful experience with the nationalist movement during his student days was a smart one. Tactically, he beguiled the leaders of BAYAN (the major anti-imperialist legal opposition) and their parliamentary foot soldiers to join him against the lethargic Roxas-Noynoy Aquino fraction of the oligarchy. Obviously he needed symbols of radical change monopolized by BAYAN, which reinforced the outsider image.

Part of his strategy is to firm up his base in the Mindanao-Visayas elite and consolidate his hold on the ideological State apparatus controlled by holdovers from the previous reactionary administrations. He has been doing this when Obama, the US State Department, and the UN entered the scene and began scolding him for his murderous method of amplifying EJKs, his jettisoning of the Philippine Constitution's Bill of Rights and various UN covenants guaranteeing the right to life and due process for all citizens. Karapatan (a human-rights monitoring NGO), church groups, and civil-society associations blasted Duterte for the "brazen impunity" shown by the orgy of police violence and State terrorism.

Cognizant of those criticisms, Duterte offered to renew peace talks with the National Democratic Front Philippines (NDFP) and its military arm, the New People's Army (NPA) which, up to now, is still stigmatized by the US State Department as terrorist. This broke the long stalemate in the peace talks during the Arroyo and NoyNoy Aquino regimes. Duterte made a token release of 18 political prisoners involved in the talks and promised to grant amnesty to 434 jailed dissenters. This was hailed by the local media as constructive and a promising change-maker. At the same time, Duterte also made noises about the meddlesome US military presence in Mindanao, the annual U.S.-Philippines "Balikatan" exercises, and the US intervention in the China Sea prior to his visit to China and Japan. This triggered heavy media coverage, projecting Duterte as a Latino anti-imperialist crusader like Fidel Castro or Chavez.

For a while, there were rumors of a CIA plot to kill Duterte. When former president Fidel Ramos berated Duterte for his anti-U.S. polemics and withdrew his support, was there a symptom of some crisis in the regime?

No, it was a calculated publicity technique to divert attention away from the bloody police-vigilante blood bath. Duterte's complaint was mere grumbling, blowhard gestures of the bully in the hood. His "pivot to China" may have calmed down the turbulent waters of the South China Sea, with the US fleet continuing to maneuver from its bases in Hawaii, Guam, and Okinawa. Obama dismissed Duterte as uncouth, ignorant of diplomatic niceties. Vietnam and Japan rolled out their red carpet to the cursing Leviathan of what academics designated as "Hobbesian" Philippines. Poor Hobbes, maybe Machiavelli's Borgia would have been the more appropriate analogy.

Nothing to worry about for Washington and the Pentagon. The U.S. military presence all over the islands, legitimized by the 1947 Mutual Assistance Agreement and the 1951 Philippines-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty, plus the recent Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), insure the continued stranglehold of Washington-Pentagon on Duterte's military, police, and various security agencies. With Trump's condoning of Duterte's "killing fields," Duterte has proved himself a wily demagogue whose touted popularity, however, is fast eroding on the face of mammoth protests all over the islands, and in the Filipino diaspora around the world.

Are we likely to see a decrease in the U.S. military presence in the Philippines soon?

Not at all. First of all, as I already mentioned, all the onerous treaties that subordinate the Philippine State security agencies are safe and stable. Even the Supreme Court and the trial courts follow U.S. protocols, as laid down initially by two well-intentioned civilizing missionaries, Justice George Malcolm and anthropologist David Barrows. Legal scholar Eric A. San Juan has clearly documented this fact in a recent essay, "Cultural Jurisprudence" (Asian Pacific Law & Policy Journal, 2013). In short, we have been thoroughly Americanized according to the racialized, utilitarian bourgeois standards of the industrialized metropole.

Of course, the entire ideological state apparatus, including the military-police, court and prison system, was systematically crafted by the U.S. colonial administrators for surveillance and repression of those unruly natives, as proven by Professor Alfred McCoy's research, Policing America's Empire. Incidentally, Professor McCoy has also documented the role of the pro-U.S. military in the People Power revolt against Marcos in 1986 and the subsequent coups against Corazon Aquino marked by the assassination of radical militants Rolando Olalia and Lean Alejandro.

Duterte's cabinet reflects the conjunctural alignment of class forces in society today. Vice-president Leni Robredo represents the Roxas-Aquino oligarchy which (except for Robredo, whose victory is now challenged by Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte's patron) lost the May elections. Except for three progressive ministers, all the officials in Duterte's Cabinet are pro-U.S., chiefly the Secretary of Defense General Delfin Lorenzana and the Foreign Affairs Secretary Alfredo Yasay.

More revealing of Duterte's retrograde bent is the newly appointed Chief of Staff of the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) Eduardo Ano, the notorious architect of summary killings and abductions of activists in the last decade. He is the prime suspect in the kidnapping of activist Jonas Burgos, among others. The party-list youth group KABATAAN called Duterte's appointment of this bloodstained general a signal for more massacres of civilians, forced disappearances of critics, and military occupation of the countryside. This is in pursuit of U.S.-inspired counterinsurgency schemes launched from the time of President Corazon Aquino and intensified by the Ramos, Estrada, Arroyo and Noynoy Aquino regimes.

Like General Fidel Ramos, who succeeded Corazon Aquino, all the military and police officials in the Philippines follow U.S.-ordained training, ideological indoctrination, and political goals. Their logistics, weaponry and operating procedures are transplanted wholesale from the Pentagon and U.S. State Department, following treaty regulations. Military aid to the Philippines rose during the Carter and Reagan administrations in support of the beleaguered martial-law Marcos regime. From 2010 to 2015, the US military aid totalled $183.4 million, aside from other numerous training and diplomatic exchanges, for example, the active presence of CIA and FBI agents interrogating prisoners at Camp Crame police headquarters.

Given the massive archive of treaties, ideological control, customary habits, and various diplomatic constraints, only a radical systemic change can cut off the U.S. stranglehold on this neocolony. At least, that's a first step in changing people's minds, dreams, and hopes.

Will President-elect Trump water down Obama's "Asian pivot" in view of his isolationist impulse, instead of allowing Duterte to assert a more "independent" foreign policy?

That remains to be seen. As of now, there is no real sign of a foreign invasion from China or anywhere else-it's the U.S. that has re-invaded several times. There's no sign of a brewing confrontation in the South China Sea today. The threat to the global capitalist system comes from the masses of oppressed workers and peasants, women, Lumads, and especially the formidable forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which Duterte has to address by diplomatic means before long. From Marcos up to Noynoy Aquino, for over four decades now, the Moro people have resisted total subjugation and genocide. It would be foolish, if not suicidal, for Duterte to persist in implementing a militaristic approach-unless the U.S. (via his generals) needs to dispose of surplus weapons following the imperatives of the profiteering military-industrial complex.

For all his braggadocio and macho exhibitionism, Duterte is unable to halt the attacks of the dwindling Abu Sayyaf group, the al-Qaeda-inspired gang of kidnap-for-ransom Moros in Basilan and Sulu. Like drug addiction, the Abu Sayyaf is a symptom of a deep and widespread social and political cancer in society. Studies have shown that its followers have been paid and subsidized by local politicians, military officials, businessmen, and even by U.S. undercover agents. Only a radical transformation of class-race relations, of the hierarchy of power linked to property and economic opportunities, can resolve the centuries-long grievances of the BangsaMoro peoples.

Will you address Duterte's crackdown on drug dealing and drug use, the one thing about him people in the U.S. are likely to have heard about?

This is probably the only issue that preoccupies the infotainment industry eager for high ratings/profits. The international media (e.g., Telesur, Al-Jazeera, UK's Guardian, CNN worldwide) does not allow a day to pass without headlining or commenting on the new "killing fields" in the Philippines. The New York Times, December 7 issue, devoted a long elaborate video/print special to this topic, in English and in Filipino (at YOUTUBE) entitled "They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals." This equals in visual power the TIME report "The Killing Season: Inside Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's War on Drugs" (October 10) that provoked Duterte's wrath. Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and social media have blanketed the atmosphere with Duterte's EJK performance.

Right now, however, reports of Russian meddling in the US elections have marginalized Duterte's antics, overshadowing even the horrible wars in Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. We might have a reprieve on the carnage in that remote outpost of the Empire.

The New York Times reporter Daniel Berehulak counted 54 victims of police raids in the 35 days he accompanied the guardians of law-and-order in the urban complex of Metro Manila.

Filipino addicts and small-time pushers inhabit impoverished squatter areas in suburban Caloocan, Pandacan, Tondo, outside the gated communities of the rich in Makati or Forbes Park. As of now, the total victims of police and vigilante violence of Oplan Tokhang (the rubric for the drug war) has reached 5,800 suspects killed: 2000 by the police, the rest by vigilante or paramilitary groups. According to the Philippine National Police (PNP) headquarters, there have been 35,600 arrests that netted 727,600 users and 56,500 pushers. Duterte himself initially said he will kill another 30,000, enough to fill the waters of Manila Bay and to make funeral parlors thrive. This represents a new level of ruthlessness that has converted the country into "a macabre house of mourning."

Most of the victims are part of the vulnerable, marginalized sectors of society. Curtailing their basic rights to a life of dignity, denying them due process and equal treatment under the law, will surely not solve addiction. Everyone recognizes that Duterte's plan is an insane program of solving a perennial socio-economic malady. Scientific studies have shown that drug addiction springs from family and social conditions, contingent on variable historical factors. Only education in healthcare, a caring and mutually supportive social environment, as well as support from government and health agencies, can reduce the havoc wrought by this epidemic. Not by stifling human lives, no matter how damaged or dysfunctional. But as we've remarked, the hegemonic norms of a class-divided society do not allow this consensus to prevail.

So is there another motive or underlying purpose behind this terrible war against drugs?

Surely there is a larger political intent: dividing your enemy, splitting communities, demoralizing the angry citizenry. To some degree the climate of fear and terror has sown animosities among members of the middle class, and incited antagonisms among the lumpen and ordinary citizens toward the relatively well-off and those who welcome authoritarian policies and security in exchange for liberties. Meanwhile, the police ride roughshod over everyone, and so far there is no sustained legislative or court opposition to the relentless executive coercive power behind this unconscionable outrage.

Karapatan chairperson Tinay Palabay has acutely seen through the smokescreen of this drug campaign: the State's program to pursue counterinsurgency under cover of a hitherto well-meaning campaign. The AFP has labelled national-democratic militants as drug suspects, such as the case of anti-mining activist Joselito Pasaporte of Compostela Valley, Davao.

Under cover of the drug war, Oplan Bayanihan, the counter-insurgency low-intensity war of the AFP, proceeds in the form of civic action-peace and development programs. During Duterte's 100 days in office, Palabay's group has documented 16 victims of political murder, 12 frustrated killings, two cases of torture, and nine victims of illegal arrest and detentions, mostly involving indigenous peoples in Sumilao, Bukidnon, and farmers massacred in Laur, Nueva Ecija. As of December 12, the NDFP has documented 18 activists killed, 20 survivors of attempted assassination, and 13,000 persons victimized by forced evacuations from their homes. Consider also 14,000 cases of schools, clinics, chapels and civilian infrastructure being used as military barracks in violation of peace agreements in respect for human rights signed by both the government and the revolutionary NDFP.

Irked by Karapatan, Duterte has vowed to kill all human rights activists. His agents are already doing their best to sabotage and abort the peace talks. If he dares to carry out this pompous threat, he might drastically shorten his own tenure and stimulate the opposite of what he wants: mass fury against tyrannical rule and police-state barbarism.

What is the state of the revolutionary armed struggle that has been going on in its modern form since 1969?

As of last week, the revolutionary elan has peaked with huge nationwide mass demonstrations against Duterte's decision to allow the burial of Marcos in the National Heroes Cemetery. This has politicized millennials and a whole generation otherwise ignorant of the horrendous suffering of the people during the Marcos dictatorship. It has mobilized anew the middle strata of students, professionals, workers, women and the urban poor, as well as Lumads, Moros, and the peasantry who constitute the majority of the citizenry. The anti-Marcos-dictatorship resurgence has diminished Duterte's popularity, exploding the myth of his supposed incorruptibility and pro-change posture. It's more of the same, and even worse.

It's a mixed picture that needs to be viewed from a historical-dialectical perspective. While the size of the NPA has declined from about 25,000-30,000 fully armed guerillas in the 1980s to less than 15,000 today, its influence has increased several times. This is due to deteriorating socioeconomic conditions since the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship. Thanks also to the immiseration of workers' lives and the pain inflicted by the vicious rampage of the military and police in the countryside. Large areas in Mindanao, Luzon and the Visayas are under the sway of partisan units of the NPA. Meanwhile, the MILF continues to preserve and defend its liberated zones from AFP incursions.

Meanwhile, the character of people's war has changed in its quality and direction. The shift to political and diplomatic tactics within the strategy of protracted war (following Mao's teaching) has made tremendous gains in organizing women, students, the urban poor, and Lumads.

Various cultural and social formations engage in pedagogical and agitational campaigns to expose the chicanery and deception of the Duterte regime. Not a single perpetrator of human rights violations has been arrested and punished, such as the soldiers guilty of the Lianga and Paquibato massacres, the murderers of personalities such as Romeo Capala, Fernando Baldomero, Fr. Fausto Tentorio, William Geertman, Leonardo Co, Juvy Capion, Rebelyn Pitao, Emerito Samarca, and hundreds more. Meanwhile General Jovito Palparan, who murdered many activists, continues to enjoy army custody instead of regular civilian detention. The scandalous "culture of impunity" is flourishing in the killing fields of the tropical neocolony.

Many disappeared activists (among them, Jonas Burgos, Sherlyn Cadapan, Karen Empeno, Luisa Dominado-Posa, and others) have not been accounted for by the State, while martial law victims and their families have not been indemnified. All these existing anomalies may explain the belief that given the corrupt bureaucracy and justice-system, the only feasible alternative is to join the armed struggle against the rotten, inhuman system. This is why the communist-led insurgency cannot be defeated, given its deep roots in the 1896 revolution against Spanish tyranny and the resistance against U.S. imperial aggression from 1899 up to the present.

What is your assessment of Duterte's overture to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and the BangsaMoro insurgency?

As I noted earlier, Duterte's overture was hailed as a positive step to solve a durable, national-democratic insurgency dating back to the sixties, when the Communist Party of the Philippines was re-organized and the NPA founded. The peace talks began with Corazon Aquino's recognition of the role played by the underground resistance in overthrowing Marcos and installing her. Similarly, Duterte implicitly recognized the political traction of the left-wing representatives in Congress in the last few years. While Duterte welcomed the unilateral ceasefire declaration of the NDFP, lately he declared that he would not grant amnesty nor release any more prisoners unless the NDFP stop fighting and submit to the government's dictates. The severely punished prisoners are now pawns in Duterte's gambit to coopt the subversives. Duterte's mandate has been changed to: One step forward, two steps backward.

Duterte allows his military and police to terrorize the citizenry. No substantive reform of those decadent institutions has been carried out. Criminalization of political activities still continues with the AFP arresting Lumad teacher Amelia Pond and peace advocate John Maniquez, charging them with murder, illegal possession of firearms, etc.-the usual alibi of detaining activists which proved utterly barbaric in the case of the Morong 45 during Macapagal-Arroyo's tenure. Rape, torture, robbery, threat of assassination, and warrantless arrest of innocent civilians remain the State's formula for safeguarding peace and order in society.

No tangible step has been made to seriously confront the Bangsamoro insurgency-unless Duterte's attempt to cement his friendship with Nur Misuari, leader of the other Moro group, the Moro National Liberation Front, is a tactic to divide the enemy. That may be his Achilles' heel.

On this arena of diverse antagonisms, with fierce class war raging all over the country, Duterte finds himself in dire straits. Sooner or later, he will be compelled to either defy the pro-U.S. imperialist hierarchy of the AFP and the fascist PNP if he is sincere in challenging the status quo, or suppress a rebellion from within his ranks. He has to reckon also with the opposition of the more entrenched, diehard cabal of the Ayalas, Cojuanco-Aquino, the comprador owners of malls and export industries, as well as the traditional warlords and semifeudal dynasties that depend on U.S. moral and financial support. That will be the day when Duterte's fate as "Punisher" will be decided. Meanwhile, the struggle for national liberation and social justice continues, despite the trumped-up charges inflicted on anyone denouncing Duterte and his friend, president-elect Donald Trump.-##

Andy Piascik is an award-winning author who writes for Z, Znet, Counterpunch and many other publications and websites. His novel In Motion was published earlier this year by Sunshine Publishing (www.sunshinepublishing.org).

How to Talk to Trump Evangelicals at Christmas

By Stephen Mucher

Many Americans remain discouraged or angry about the presidential election. Those gathering around the tree this holiday season with Evangelical family may feel particularly bewildered. No demographic played a more central role in the election outcome. Over 80 percent of self-described Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.

I grew up in the Evangelical movement of the 1970s. I was raised in the Southern churches that gave birth to the Moral Majority. I had a front row seat as Christian conservatives, initially agitating from outside mainstream politics, eventually reshaped and emboldened the Republican Party.

I have some advice. And even some good news.

Those of us interacting with Evangelicals at Christmas no longer have to play defense. The script has flipped. The candidate who hung the "loser" label on seemingly every group not white or Christian, turned out to be correct. With a firmer grip on both houses of Congress than any party since 1928, and nearly unprecedented influence in state legislatures and governor's mansions, Trump's Republican Party has secured a national safe space for the voters who make up this long emergent winning coalition.

Fortunately those of us deeply troubled by this right wing ascendency are no longer obligated, post-election, to defend any particular alternative to Trump. We can now focus exclusively on Trumpism and dismantling the narratives that made this political trend possible. These efforts begin by treating Trump voters, not as outsiders, but as winners who owe us an explanation for what happens next. And we can go a step further with Evangelicals: requiring explanations that are grounded in actual Christian religious belief and in the sacred texts they say guide their decisions.

This expectation will put many pro-democracy activists in an unusual position. Atheists, agnostics, Jews, liberal Catholics, mainstream Protestants, and many thoughtful people with other beliefs aren't exactly well practiced at proselytizing. Those who typically view religious faith as a personal and private endeavor will find it difficult to do what I suggest here. Yet many of us know family and friends who, within the chosen safety of their Evangelical enclaves, are never held accountable or asked to explain the many ugly national sins that made their candidate's rise possible - the mendacity, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, and language of violence that so clearly energized the Trump phenomenon. These unconfessed sins, as well as ongoing support from Evangelicals, are precisely what will keep Trump in power or drive him from it. Given the circumstances, it is appropriate to expect, if not demand, religious answers to questions we ourselves may not find particularly religious.

Our conscience, and the weight of this historical moment, should serve as a reminder that this strategy is more than an exercise in irony. We can now refuse the inevitable attempts by Trump Evangelicals to revert to arguments no longer relevant under new dynamics of governance. We can also ask Trump Evangelicals to explain the connection they make between their chosen president and their own heartfelt religious convictions. Both of these tactics and the simple strategy outlined below can ease our own holiday conversation frustrations and, more importantly, serve as small necessary acts of political resistance. As Trump himself proved, one does not need any theological expertise to talk religion with Evangelicals. But a few basic rules for discussion can help:

1. Don't discuss Hillary. There is nothing that Trump Evangelicals would rather do than talk about Hillary Clinton, a nemesis they have relied on for thirty years. She is gone. Don't be baited. Hillary-talk is often an evasion of persons who fear your questions about what Christianity requires of them in a post-Clinton era.

2. Don't discuss Obama. This may be more difficult. You may feel nostalgia and a moral impulse to defend an unfairly maligned minority president. Don't go there. It serves no productive purpose.

3. Don't discuss Trump. Accept the fact Trump supporters were inspired, not just by his promises, but by how he made them feel. His persona, full of flip-flopping and exaggeration ensures you won't get far pinning down "the real Donald Trump" at post-truth holiday gatherings.

4. Don't discuss Trump voters. Some readers will object that I put too many Evangelicals in the same basket of deplorables. If so, they have a valid point. Voters cast ballots for a wide variety of reasons, including frustrations about economic fairness and national belonging that deserve compassion. You should concede this point too and move on.

5. Discuss Jesus. What you believe about Jesus is not the point. You aren't on trial. But a group of people charged by their holy book to share the good news of Christ is now the most potent voting block for the most dominant, powerful political majority of your lifetime. You can indignantly expect answers. You can ask what this "good news" actually entails. You ask why the kinds of people Jesus ministered to, the poor and dispossessed, aren't viewing this news as particularly good right now.

Talking about Jesus reveals a faith that originated, not in support of Empire, but in its resistance. The Biblical Jesus gave up power willingly, lived in poverty, and suffered unfairly. Christmas exposes the hypocrisy of voters who cling to incompatible claims, embracing the humble story of Christ's birth while donning the mantle of empire.

Empire offers context for a New Testament story about a poor, pregnant, unwed woman, lacking documentation, health care, or affordable housing, who crossed borders on her way to a post-war occupied Palestinian village called Bethlehem. Empire explains why foreigners and seasonal laborers were among the first to share the joy in her son's humble and homeless birth. Empire explains a judicial system 33 years later that arrested, convicted, incarcerated, and brutalized an innocent man of color. Empire explains Christ, not as a ruler, but as one who was ruled. This context of empire, in short, confronts the Trump Evangelical with images of Jesus as a targeted minority, a refugee, a prisoner, and a torture victim.

Unfortunately, exposing these contradictions of faith and empire won't guarantee the Trump Evangelical's conversion. Post-election polls reveal a demographic with inflated optimism feeling emboldened by this electoral triumph. From this position of power, Trump stalwarts are still likely to interrupt or ignore your efforts to avoid their favorite topics at Christmas dinner. But this proposed strategy can provoke a necessary conversation - one that Evangelicals know, if only subconsciously right now, that they are obligated to engage. Regardless of immediate outcome, this approach gives you necessary strength for your own path of resistance. It picks away at a narrative of Evangelicals as patriotic outsiders bravely seeking to redeem American politics. It gradually removes Trump Evangelicals from the margins and positions them appropriately at the center of U.S. political power. Most importantly, it reminds us that Trump Evangelicals are no longer simply justifying a "prayerful choice" they made in November, they are defending a regime that requires their loyalty each and every day to maintain power.

Speaking truth to Evangelical power matters now more than ever. Given how this power is already being used and exploited, silence is not an option. But we can still discover the effectiveness of remaining quiet as Trump Evangelicals stammer through the most basic questions about their religious commitments in this new age of empire. Indeed we should consider the possibility that our own resistance to power can be most active when listening passively, with or without compassion, as this power is explained, however awkwardly, back to us.

This appeared at Stephen's personal blog.

Vladimir Putin and the Return of Russophobia: Symbols of a Changing World

By Michael Orion Powell

Something peculiar has happened in modern geopolitics. Russia, a country that arose nearly as a fractured version of the much larger Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, has arisen in our time as one of the most powerful and feared power brokers in the world.

President Vladimir Putin's role in Russia's rebound has led to his vilification in the United States and much of the Western world. He has been featured numerous times on the cover of mainstream Western magazines, whether leading a rebellion of nationalist leaders on the cover of the Economist or being accused of attempting to subvert American elections on the cover of Time. Some covers have even gone as far as picturing him with enhanced, evil green eyes.

Putin is a chameleon. American progressives see him as a white nationalist, while leftists such as Venezuelean leader Nicholas Maduro award him peace prizes. American conservatives see him as a "KGB thug," as Adam Taylor of Business Insider put it, while America's new Trump-style crop of "Alt Right" nationalists see him as an icon. Putin somehow gets a warm reception in Bejiing, Caracas, America's Rust Belt, and even Jerusalem.

Putin's decade-plus-long ascent comes at the time of America's great decline from global control, and his combination of power and charisma is timed just when much of the world, including the United States itself, is looking for alternatives to the Western order. A general alienation from American command is the uniting facet from the quite disparate leaders that have attracted to Putin's rise, be it Nicholas Maduro, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Rodrigo Duterte, and the various groups that they represent.

Wide Appeal

Putin is popular in Latin America. In early October 2016, only a month before the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, Putin was awarded the 'Hugo Chavez Prize for Peace and Sovereignty' award in Venezuela. Speaking emphatically of the Russian president, Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro said of Putin that he was "a leader that I believe is the most outstanding there is in the world today, a fighter for peace, for balance, and a builder of a pluri-polar, multi-centric world."

Venezuela is not the only country that sees Putin as a peacemaker. In 2011, Putin was awarded with China's 'Confucius Peace Prize.' Whereas the Venezuelans saw Putin as a leader in creating a world of more diversified power, the Chinese praised Putin for his toughness and leadership in fighting terrorism, citing the conflict in Chechnya especially. Translated to English, the accompanying document stated, "His iron hand and toughness revealed in this war impressed the Russians a lot, and he was regarded to be capable of bringing safety and stability to Russia. He became anti-terrorist No. 1 and the national hero."

Pope Francis, the widely popular pontiff, has said that Vladimir Putin is the "the only one with whom the Catholic Church can unite to defend Christians in the East." Francis has also made outreach to the Eastern Orthodox Church a priority for his papacy, a move that the Economist has said is akin to "kissing Putin's ring."

Adding to Chinese and Latin American appeal, and perhaps drastically contrasting to, Putin has been praised by figures within the rising Alternative Right, the once fringe element of American conservatism - widely seen as a "white supremacist" and "fascist" movement -- that has been credited with propelling Trump in to the White House.

Matthew Heimbach, a widely known American white nationalist and leader of the Traditionalist Worker's Party, said quite simply when asked by the New York Times, "Russia is our biggest inspiration. I see President Putin as the leader of the free world."

Sam Dickson, a former Ku Klux Klan lawyer who speaks often at "alt-right" events, said of Putin, "I've always seen Russia as the guardian at the gate, as the easternmost outpost of our people. They are our barrier to the Oriental invasion of our homeland and the great protector of Christendom. I admire the Russian people. They are the strongest white people on earth."

For a white supremacist to claim Putin's Russia as the "barrier to the Oriental invasion of our homeland" while China simultaneously rewards Putin for his "iron hand and toughness" is truly fascinating. Groups that do not like, trust, or respect one another have somehow found a common admiration of Vladimir Putin for the same characteristics.

While Alan Feurer and Andrew Higgins, in their New York Times report, accounted Trump's admiration for Putin as "a dog whistle to a small but highly motivated part of his base," the reality may be much more daunting. Russia's leadership has managed to win over even the most trusted and reliable of American allies. For example, while relations between the United States and Israel declined, Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly reached out frequently to Russia.

While the US-Israeli bond is likely to be strengthened with incoming president Trump, who has pledged various itinerary that Israel has sought for years, such as approving Israel's West Bank settlements and the recognition of Jerusalem as the Jewish capital, the trend of Putin winning over countries alienated during the Obama years was still very striking, especially with the internationalist image Barack Obama himself ran with when he campaigned for president.

The popularity and admiration of the Russian president, coming from so many very different audiences, tells us of the increasingly tumultuous and inconsistent state of the world in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

A Post-American World

In 2008, right as Barack Obama was cascading toward his first term as president, American journalist Fareed Zakaria published the book "The Post American World," where he postulated that the policy decisions of Western powers were leading to a world of declined authority for American and other Western powers.

Zakaria primarily saw the economic heft of India and China as the major players in a post-American world. China has a GDP of $9.4 trillion while India has a GDP of nearly $1.9 trillion. With growth rates that exceed the US, both countries represent fierce competition for the American leviathan, which incurs $16 trillion annual GDP as of 2013. Russia, on the other hand, has only $2.1 trillion annual GDP, putting it ahead of India but well behind China and the United States.

For all of their economic weight, China and India have not yet taken on military obligations of the level superpowers usually do. Putin's Russia has taken the lead in the various chaotic situations left behind by America's interventions in the Middle East and North Africa. From Duterte in the Philippines to white nationalists in the US, Putin seems to appeal to people who once looked to the United States military as a source of global dominance.

This in effect explains some of Putin's wide-spanning appeal. In contrast to Obama, who won the more traditional Nobel peace prize in 2008, Putin's prizes from Venezuela and China represent an emerging global culture, breaking the shell of the old world signified by the Nobel -- a world that has been dominated by Western interests for roughly the past half of a millennium. The prize was set up in 1898 in the name of Alfred Nobel, a repentant industrialist and arms profiteer. The peace prizes that Putin received enjoyed him as one of the inaugural recipients.

The 2016 American presidential race especially illustrated how Putin had stepped in to the power vacuum of a declining United States. Russia is being routinely accused of interfering in the elections, much as the US itself boasted of doing in the election of Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. In response, Putin has asked rhetorically if the US still was a "great country" or if it now was a "banana republic," a term used to malign the unstable governments that riddled Central America in the early twentieth century.

Ironically, the phraseology once reserved for so-called "Third World" countries which invariably found themselves within the realm of western dominance, too chaotic and disoriented themselves to be powers of their own, and almost always exploited into oblivion, is now being directed at the US. In this time, with a bevy of countries like the US eroding from within while being spread thin throughout, we may begin to associate terms like "developing country," "banana republic" or even "Third World" with the once great Western powers, which have failed to adapt or aide their people in meeting a changing world. Putin's role in history specifically may be as the man who symbolized the decline of America's superpower role and the ascent of many other soon-to-be stronger nations in a rapidly changing world.

Michael Orion Powell-Deschamps has been published by the Blue Ocean Network, the San Francisco Examiner, the Heritage Foundation, Tikkun and Talking Points Memo. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from California State University - East Bay and maintains a website, Radical Second Things, which is dedicated to exploring liberation theology and Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Notes

Bearak, Max. "Vladimir Putin Just Won an International Peace Prize." The Washington Post. WP Company, 11 Oct. 2016. Web. 06 Dec. 2016.

Cohen, Harry Zieve. "Israel Pivots to Russia?" The American Interest. The American Interest, 08 June 2016. Web. 06 Dec. 2016.

"Did the Pope Just Kiss Putin's Ring?" The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 15 Feb. 2016. Web. 06 Dec. 2016.

Feuer, Alan, and Andrew Higgins. "Extremists Turn to a Leader to Protect Western Values: Vladimir Putin." The New York Times. The New York Times, 03 Dec. 2016. Web. 06 Dec. 2016.

Sputnik. "Pope Francis Sees Putin as 'Only Man' to Defend Christians Around the World." Sputnik International, 18 Feb. 2016. Web. 06 Dec. 2016.

Taylor, Adam. "7 Remarkable Stories Of Vladimir Putin Being One Of The World's Most Brutal Thugs." Business Insider. Business Insider, 17 June 2013. Web. 06 Dec. 2016.

Wong, Edward. "For Putin, a Peace Prize for a Decision to Go to War."

The New York Times

. The New York Times, 15 Nov. 2011. Web. 06 Dec. 2016.