ANTI-CORPORATISM

EDITOR—ERIC ZUESSE provides a thorough backdrop for the Trump policy choices, one worse than the next, all of them certifiable 100% swamp creatures, noxious imperial figures trading in fake patriotism that should have been retired a long time ago. ||| ACTIVE MEASURES editors examine some of the people already nominated and being considered for key posts in Trump’s cabinet. |||. THE GRAYZONE Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed discuss the shocking psy-op that ensued in Amsterdam, where Israeli football hooligans instigated violence, then played victims of a pogrom, then Anya Parampil joins to discuss Trump’s re-election and the sordid history of his top foreign policy picks. So we go from sneaky and utterly hypocritical liberal totalitarianism to batshit corrupt war hawks and fascistoid chauvinists. ||| RBN’s Nick Cruse comments on the pathetic choices hitherto made by Trump, confirming the man’s severe lack of historical depth and opportunism. ||| DUE DISSIDENCE team provides a rich discussion on the Trump incoming cabinet and what that portends for a nation batered by division, insoluble problems and stunning misleadership.

EDITORS—Joti tracks the reasons for the Dems’ recent embarrassing defeat at the polls, and the UK Laborites’ dismal performance. 
TOPICS: UK/US working class apathy and alienation from the political establishment and taking part in elections, a fact that worries the ruling elites as elections serve to legitimate their rule.  • Trump’s MAGA people may represent the last contingent of true believers in the US promise of an actual popular democracy, notes  • Joti describes in detail how WOKISM (identity politics) is nothing but a shameless ruling class tactic to disarm the working class by introducing issues that serve to divide it, while presenting the state (in the hands of one or another wing of the plutocracy) as their saviours.  Insofar as identity politics replaces the actual class struggle, in which economic factors play the preponderant part, it buries the possibilities for revolutionary social change. This is seen in issue after issue. Radical bourgeois feminists, for example, taught women in the 1980s that their “natural” enemy was men, not the ruling elites.  Bourgeois feminism ended up subverting women’s power. • Same with the “woke” anti-racist movement. Capitalism, in fact, needs racism; it is one of the ideologies fuelling and justifying colonialism and the ruthless expropriation of people around the globe, often using racist imperial soldiers who come from the exploiting country’s working class.

EDITOR—Trump’s former Iran envoy at the State Department, Brian Hook, is reportedly coordinating the transition at State. That suggests that Hook could serve in a top position at the department, and it signals that Iran policy will be once again dominated by the hawks in Trump’s orbit. Iran hawks in Washington have been very pleased with the news of Hook’s involvement in the transition. Mark Dubowitz, president of the hardline, anti-Iranian think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and prominent supporter of the “maximum pressure” campaign, said, “I couldn’t think of a better person to lead the transition team given Brian’s experience in senior roles at the State Department.”

ANDREW KORYBKO—The Russian economy weathered the West’s unprecedented sanctions regime, but Russia’s grand plans to create alternative financial institutions and pivot to the non-West haven’t been as successful. This analysis here about how the latest BRICS Summit achieved nothing of tangible significance at all points out how none of this association’s ambitious initiatives were rolled out. It also hyperlinks to proof that the Chinese-based New Development Bank and the SCO Bank surprisingly comply with US sanctions.

INDRAJIT—The Resistance made a strategic bet on rocket and tunnel technology 30 years ago and it’s playing out now. America made a corresponding bet on jets and avarice and now les jeux sonts faits. The strategic decisions leading to this war happened in the 1980s and neither side is changing. As Lenin didn’t say, there are years when decades happen, and these are those years indeed.