Article posted on Black Agenda Report (click here for original)

by Danny Haiphong

“Only gridlock saved Social Security and Medicare from being privatized during his Presidency.”

Thousands have taken to the streets across the country to protest Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 elections. The protests have mainly centered on Trump’s racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric spewed during his campaign. Protesters have yet to wrestle with Trump’s positions on foreign policy and trade that made him a pariah to the majority of the ruling class. The struggle against capitalism and imperialism in the US remains immature even in the midst of positive growth in the movement against police brutality and racism in recent years. While Trump’s overt bigotry gives cause for protest, there is one benefit of the Trump moment that should not be understated. That benefit is the much needed conclusion of the Obama era.

Democrats across the US are in a state of mourning over the departure of Obama. Democrats heralded Obama as the quintessential professional and consummate politician. His celebrity was peppered by the appearance of intelligence and rationality in the face of so-called Republican “obstructionism.” Obama’s rule was advertised as a victory for the Black Freedom movement. His Administration possessed a vast marketing apparatus that defended him as the lesser-evil alternative to the racist vitriol of the White Man’s Republican Party.

“Obama’s rule was advertised as a victory for the Black Freedom movement.”

Black Agenda Report was one of the few on the left that warned of the dangers of Obama in 2008. Once elected, Obama became virtually untouchable. Criticisms of his policies were condemned as racist and insensitive to the needs of Black America. The needs of Black America and the entire left for that matter suddenly became aligned with whatever Obama did. Obama moved forward to protect the banks, escalate war, and erect the largest national security state ever assembled. He instantly became the austerity President, waging a war of privatization on public education with the expressed plans to do the same to Social Security. Only gridlock saved Social Security and Medicare from being privatized during his Presidency.

The full scope of Obama’s legacy has been discussed in earlier issues and will not be analyzed here. What is important is that the left will no longer have Obama to defend its alignment with US imperialism. No longer will the left be able to fall back on the first Black President to sanitize his record. Obama’s immigration policies deported nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants with little protest. His Administration painted itself as a friend of women and LGBTQ identified people despite the fact that his policy of proxy and drone warfare murdered tens of thousands of women and children in Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Honduras.

“The left will no longer have Obama to defend its alignment with US imperialism.”

Obama was able to conduct a greater assault on oppressed people than the prior Bush Administration, making him the most effective evil Wall Street could buy. Obama took over as President in a period where the US was mired in two unpopular occupations abroad and an economic crisis at home. These conditions prompted the ruling class to choose Obama as the required form of counterinsurgency necessary to crush resistance before it started. After making a number of promises to end “dumb wars” and institute a single payer healthcare system, Obama entered office ready to the bidding of the ruling class. Eight years later, Black America is in a worse condition than before, working class people as a whole have lost ground to a low-wage economy, and the world is closer to a World War III scenario than at any point prior.

The massive protests to Trump’s victory are in part a release of popular energy brought on by the departure of Obama. Unrest began with the formation of the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements. However, neither of these movements articulated Obama’s role in creating the conditions for social insurgency and movement. The 2016 elections changed the landscape dramatically. The Sanders and Trump campaigns set millions into motion in protest of the two-party establishment. Obama’s departure will be another breath of fresh air into the internal rot of the imperialist system. It is thus important to ensure that the protests against Trump are not allowed to be channeled back into the Democratic Party graveyard.

“After making a number of promises to end “dumb wars” and institute a single payer healthcare system, Obama entered office ready to the bidding of the ruling class.”

Obama will leave Trump a set of conditions that he cannot possibly maintain without popular unrest. Obama departs office only inches from World War III with Russia and China. Poverty and wealth inequality worsened under his administration. Not even clever distortions of statistics could hide the large number of workers currently unemployed or underemployed in the low-wage economy. School closures, food stamp cuts, and bank bailouts have unleashed the neo-liberal wasteland that Trump spoke about in his campaign.

It appears early on that the left has rejected the viability of Trump’s calls to regulate the banks and renegotiate trade deals in favor of working people. Many have ignored Trump’s “populist” rhetoric and have focused all the energy of resistance on his white supremacist proposals to ban Muslims and deport millions of undocumented people. However, this moment is just as much about Obama’s departure as it is Trump’s arrival. The US imperialist system is facing multiple crises that relate directly back to the economic stagnation of global capitalism. It would be a mistake not to demand Trump stay true to his “populism” just as it was a mistake when the left failed to demand Obama stay true to his promises. Whatever the case, the departure of Obama is a welcome site, and the left should use the room afforded by it to wage an intensified effort to build the organizational basis for social revolution in our time.

Danny Haiphong is an Asian activist and political analyst in the Boston area. He can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com

Article posted on Black Agenda Report (click link for original)

This article previously appeared in Pambazuka News.

“Trump will sabotage the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and similar strategies to solve global problems.”

The most catastrophic long-term consequence is climate change. This is because Trump is a denialist who will give the green light to widespread fracking, coal and oil exploration. Africa will be the most adversely affected continent. United Nations scientists estimate that 9 out of 10 small-scale farmers are unlikely to farm by 2100 due to drying soils and global warming, plus extreme weather will also cause 180 million unnecessary African deaths by then, according to Christian Aid.

Under Trump, we can safely predict that Washington will no longer seek to control United Nations climate negotiations, as did Barack Obama’s administration. The WikiLeaks Clinton emails and State Department cables revealed blatant manipulations of the Copenhagen and Durban climate summits. Instead, Trump will simply pull the US out of the 2015 Paris agreement, as did George W. Bush from the Kyoto Protocol.

By good fortune, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change annual summit is underway this week in Morocco. The only logical move, if the delegates have any spine, is to expel the US State Department and establish the machinery for a major carbon tax applied to products associated with countries – the US especially – which raise emissions and threaten the survival of many species across the globe.

“Trump will simply pull the US out of the 2015 Paris agreement, as did George W. Bush from the Kyoto Protocol.”

Trump also heralds a rise in US racism and xenophobia, parallel to the Brexit vote by the British white working class. In neither case will local solutions be effective for the simple reason that neither Trump nor Theresa May (UK Prime Minister) are interested in the income redistribution required to benefit their economies.

And African elites who have – with a few exceptions – climbed over each other to please Washington, won’t find themselves welcome in the White House.

Hopefully the contagion of Trump’s racism – which will make life for Africans much harder – will be met by a major resistance movement including Africans from all walks of life in solidarity with various groups that stand to be oppressed by the US – women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, environmentalists, progressives of all sorts. This movement can shape up in the same spirit to those that gave solidarity during the fight against apartheid.

What are the likely economic consequences?

Consistent with his isolationism, world trade stagnation will continue. In the case of Africa, Trump is likely to retract benefits under the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act and reduce US aid.

That isolationism, in turn, could give Africans a chance to recalibrate what is now an excessive, self-destructive reliance on export of oil and gas, minerals and cash crops. Africa must focus on localizing its economies to be able to meet basic needs.

Trump’s hatred of what he terms the “globalists” is probably just hot electioneering rhetoric. It’s fair to predict that pro-corporate candidates will come forward as Trump allies to calm the crashing stock markets.

The “neoliberal” group of policy wonks who expressed disgust with Trump and favored Hillary Clinton will quickly make inroads into the new administration. They will ensure that the continuing US dominance in Western-leaning multilateral institutions is not disturbed.

We can simply anticipate more brazen US self-interest, as witnessed during the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush regimes, with less of the confusing rhetoric promoted by Obama and his allies.

What US policies on Africa are likely to change? With what impact?

To be frank, we can only offer guesses. Trump said literally nothing about Africa during his campaign. He wants to “rebuild US military power,” which might include strengthening the Pentagon’s controversial Africa Command, known as Africom.

Economically, it is worth noting Trump’s close relations to the oil and gas industry which comes via Vice President Mike Pence. This suggests that multinational corporations in the extractive industries who desire more explicit imperial support for African adventurism will be served well by Trump’s bully-boy mentality.

What does this mean for multilateral institutions and how will this affect Africa?

The US’s role in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will become nastier given the veto power it enjoys, holding more than 15% of the voting shares. Trump will probably hire a brutal neoliberal as his IMF executive director, someone who will tighten the screws on Africa using Washington’s veto power. The leaders of two big African economies are desperate for IMF credits: Nigeria ($29 billion) and Egypt ($12 billion).

In relation to the United Nations, an interesting question comes to mind: should the UN leadership now sitting in Trump’s Manhattan East Side neighborhood not develop a contingency plan to move UN headquarters out of the US? Trump promises to make life very hard for visitors who are Muslims, Libyans, Syrians and Mexicans – amongst others – so holding multilateral events in the US may soon be impossible.

The period ahead demands a very different multilateralism due to a number of expectations. The first is that Trump will sabotage the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and similar strategies to solve global problems, and wreck nuclear non-proliferation strategies such as the agreement that Obama painstakingly reached with Iran earlier this year.

And the second is that three of the BRICS’ nationalistic leaders – Vladimir Putin in Russia, Nahendra Modi in India and Michel Temer in Brazil – can be expected to establish much closer ties to Trump. This is likely to affect the balance of power between geographical regions, added to which are the drift of Pakistan, Turkey and the Philippines away from Washington. Trump’s hatred of China is another indeterminate factor.

Regardless of the geopolitical maneuvers, it’s time for a ‘multilateralism-from-below’ in which traditional progressive movements in civil society find common cause, because this is the most serious threat to humanity, the world economy and environment we’ve seen in living memory.

Patrick Bond is Director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society and a professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand.