Americans Unhappy And Wary With Their Country’s Course, Leaders And Future

 Countercurrents Collective | December 19, 2022

Most of the U.S. citizens are unhappy with the course of their country, their leaders, and the future, finds a new poll.

A report by USA Today (Unhappy new year? Poll finds Americans wary of the nation’s course, its leaders and its future ahead of 2023, Dec 19, 2022, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/12/18/poll-inflation-future-leaders-americans/10903538002/) said:

Americans are braced for an unhappy new year.

Two-thirds of respondents in a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll say the country has gotten off on the wrong track, and they express little confidence in either political party or any branch of government to effectively address the challenges they see ahead.

FACE OF A POLITICS: U.S. Democracy.

A Journal of People report

Political developments in countries show character of politics in those countries. The following reports are from the United States.

Biden on MAGA supporters & democracy

U.S. President Joe Biden has again condemned the large chunk of the American population that supports his predecessor, Donald Trump, saying “MAGA forces” are an existential threat to democracy and must be defeated.

“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry you love,” Biden said on Thursday in a primetime speech, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

Mikhail Gorbachev, a modern Judas

Nikos Mottas

In Defense of Communism | August 20, 2022

“My ambition was to liquidate communism, the dictatorship over all the people. I found friends that had the same thoughts as I in Yakovlev and Shevernadze, they all deserve to be thanked for the break-up of the USSR and the defeat of Communism”

 — Mikhail Gorbachev, 2000. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, the man who betrayed the dreams and expectations of his own people, has died at 91. His biological death bears little importance. In fact, in the consciousness and hearts of the working class people all over the world Gorbachev had died a long time ago, when he consciously decided to become the gravedigger of the first socialist state in human history, the Soviet Union. 

Gorbachev exposed: “My ambition was to liquidate communism”

In Defense of Communism | August 20, 2022

“My ambition was to liquidate communism, the dictatorship over all the people. Supporting me and urging me on in this mission was my wife, who was of this opinion long before I was. I knew that I could only do this if I was the leading functionary. In this my wife urged me to climb to the top post. 

While I actually became acquainted with the West, my mind was made up forever. I decided that I must destroy the whole apparatus of the CPSU and the USSR. Also, I must do this in all of the other socialist countries. My ideal is the path of social democracy. Only this system shall benefit all the people. This quest I decided I must fulfil.

I found friends that had the same thoughts as I in Yakovlev and Shevernadze, they all deserve to be thanked for the break-up of the USSR and the defeat of Communism.

Thou Gorbachev, just like Brutus!

Farooque Chowdhury

Countercurrents | August 31, 2022

Gorbachev’s was a betrayer’s life. He has physically left this earth, hours back; but has kept kilometer posts of betrayal on a land years ago identified as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

He’s the person who led a band of betrayers to dismantle the USSR – Soviet Union. The biggest country in the world stretching from the Pacific to the Black Sea, from the Arctic to the Caspian Sea, with Tundra, Steppes and the Urals, was created with toil, blood and love of millions of toiling people coming from factories, workshops and farms. It was decades of struggle by the millions. This heroic people defeated armies organized by imperialists from around the world, and defied imperialist blockade. This courageous working people defeated the Nazi marauders.

But the Betrayer Band led by that person named Mikhail Gorbachev stabbed from inside – from inside the party, from inside the state machine.

U.S.: ‘Whether You’re on the Supreme Court Shouldn’t Depend on How Many People You Give Your Phone Number to’

CounterSpin interview with Adele Stan and Elliot Mincberg on John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court

Janine Jackson revisited CounterSpin‘s July 2005 interview with Adele Stan and Elliot Mincberg about John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court for the July 8, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson

FAIR | July 14, 2022

Janine Jackson: “The Lonely Chief: How John Roberts Lost Control of the Court.” That was the plaintive headline of Politico’s June 25 report explaining that Roberts, along with his “middle of the road” approach on abortion, would likely be a casualty of the court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling.

In July of 2005, on the occasion of Roberts’ nomination to the court, CounterSpin host Steve Rendall and I spoke with journalist Adele Stan and with People for the American Way’s Elliot Mincberg about what was known then about Roberts’ record and what he might mean for the court. We’re going to start with my introduction.

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JJ: Many in the news media seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at the news that George Bush was nominating conservative Washington insider John Roberts to the Supreme Court. And not just the folks you’d expect, like Brit Hume at Fox News, who shared a chuckle with congressional correspondent Brian Wilson and White House reporter Carl Cameron when he noted that Bush had named a white male “just like all of us.”

Well, even while admitting that Roberts’ record is sketchy on some issues, many mainstream reporters seem to emphasize the reassurance that he is not a right wing trench dweller like some others who were thought to be on Bush’s short list of prospective nominees.

Corbyn case, a piece of democracy

Farooque Chowdhury

Countercurrents | July 10, 2022

Who opposes democracy? None, but the anti-people, retrogressive forces oppose democracy. They carry on the job sacred to them.

Despite wide preference for democracy as a political system, or process, it has got some problems; and the problems begin with its definition.

With the term democracy, the general perception is bourgeois democracy, which is nothing but dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Lenin exposed this fact decades ago. Mao had a long discourse on the issue in the perspective of the pre-1949-China. Yet, illusions and misperceptions persist, as the aspects/perspective Lenin and Mao discuss are either missed or ignored.

Incidents that go on almost daily, in legislative assemblies, and in acts of executive and judiciary tools of state machine, in advanced bourgeois democracies are eye-openers to perceive the character and nature, to be specific class character and class nature, of bourgeois democracy. Here, the problem is with propaganda and scholarship.

U.S.: Gerrymandering: Making Elections Safe From Democracy

Dorothee Benz

Fair | March 28, 2022

CNN (1/25/22) focuses on the issue that gerrymandering is “polarizing our politics”—i.e., making the two major parties less interchangeable.

The arc of coverage of 2020 congressional redistricting went from speculation that Republicans would end up with a massive advantage—because they controlled significantly more state legislatures—to surprise that Democrats managed to gerrymander their way to roughly the same number of seats as Republicans. This result was deemed good news, as announced for instance in this news “analysis” from the New York Times (3/10/22): “A Potential Rarity in American Politics: A Fair Congressional Map.”

Tax and Politics: Major Australian Firms pay more in Political Donations than Taxes

BOURGEOISIE POLITICS 

A Journal of People report

Some of Australia’s largest corporations paid tax of 10 percent or less of their profit in 2018-2019, but made political contributions that are much more substantial. 

The corporate tax rate in Australia is 30 percent. However, deductions available to companies reveal a legal loophole allowing companies to pay much less.

According to latest data by the Australian Taxation Office, the country’s corporate giants, including energy enterprise Chevron Australia Holdings and car parks operator Wilson Parking Australia 1992, paid little or no tax in the last financial year despite declaring a profit of AU$900 million (about US$656 million) and AU$2.76 million (about US$2.1 million) respectively.

Working-Class and Bourgeois Democracy

BOUGEOIS DEMOCRACY

V. I. Lenin

Published: Vperyod, No. 3, January 24 (11), 1905. Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, Moscow, Volume 8, pages 72-82.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs and The Late Isidor Lasker
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2003). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. • README

The question of the attitude of the Social-Democrats, or working-class democrats, to the bourgeois democrats is an old and yet ever new question. It is old because it has been an issue ever since the inception of Social-Democracy. Its theoretical principles were elucidated in the earliest Marxist literature, in the Communist Manifesto and in Capital. It is ever new because every step in the development of every capitalist country produces a peculiar, original blending of different shades of bourgeois democracy and different trends within the socialist movement.