Oakland Socialist » pod casts: Recent Episodes
John Reimann
Oaklandsocialist podcast: interview with John Ferretti on Zohran Momdani for New York City mayor. Find it on Oaklandsocialist podcasts here.
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Ferretti-audio.m4a
This is the audio only of the full interview with Trevor Ngwane
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Ngwane-full-interview.m4a
Here is the full, unedited hour and 45 minute interview/discussion we had with Trevor Ngwane. It can also be heard on oaklandsocialist’s podcast channel.
This is the podcast. Full video will be posted later.
Here is the most important (and final) portion of our interview with Trevor Ngwane, Trevor explains what happened to the powerful and revolutionary traditions of the movement against apartheid, how it was “decapitated” and the traditions buried, what are the consequences for today, and where we go from here. The points Trevor makes directly apply to the movement of today around the world.
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Trevor-Ngwane-3.m4a
Here we post the audio of the second section of the interview with Trevor Ngwane. We post it so that it can be heard on our podcast channel.
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ngwane-2.m4a
Here is the audio of part 1 of the interview with Trevor Ngwane. It is available on the Oaklandsocialist podcasts.
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/My-Movie-45.m4a
Here is the first part of the interview with Trevor Ngwane. Below it is a transcription. Also, listen to this as a podcast here. This interview has been edited for length.
John Reimann
About a week after Trump leveled his racist lies when he met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, I was able to catch up with Trevor Ngwane. Trevor is a long time workers leader and socialist in South Africa, and he’s also a writer and professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg. Trevor talked about a great many different subjects, and I’m producing this interview with him in several different sections, because the interview as a whole was almost two hours long. In this first section, Trevor discusses the general views in South Africa of the meeting between Trump and Ramaphosa, as well as his own views. He also discusses the current political situation in South Africa regarding the current government of national unity. And then he goes on to discuss Africa day and the whole concept of African Unity. Finally, he discusses the relationship between South Africa and US imperialism, and also the role of Chinese China and Russia, and he concludes with some points about bourgeois democracy. In the following portions of this interview, we will present Trevor’s thoughts on what happened in the South African revolution against apartheid and a lot more. Also
Trevor Ngwane
In this country, there’s usually not a lot of shades of gray. So if you talk to people the others fall to this side, “it was very bad. You know.Ramaphosa, you know, why did he take the billionaires? Why did he take the whites? Only the white spoke, you know, Trump listened only when the white man spoke.” This and that. Also, there’s this question of the white guy, his minister, who actually is the leader of the opposition, but now they are in the Government of National Unity of one of the white men called the the political party, Economic Freedom Fighters, and the other political party, uMkhonto we Sizwe, associated with Zuma, you know, so, so that was that firstly, of course, there is that kind of inherent nationalism, you know, “He’s our guy. He’s representing South Africa.” South Africa’s more or less economy dependence, or strong reliance on US American business. Ramaphosa had no other way but to try and flatter Trump, and he couldn’t really stand his ground or confront Trump. And then also, there’s, there’s a view that he played his cards well by bringing you know the golfers who apparently Trump asked for the goldfast. On the other hand, the critics say “no, but you, as President, you should speak for all South Africans. You don’t have to bring white people to speak for white people.” Can you see? So you are actually… so they feel that Ramaphosa fell into the racialization, you know, of politics,
John Reimann
I asked Trevor what his view was. He started off by describing how he sees the situation. I would
Trevor Ngwane
You find a situation these days of fascist without fascism.
John Reimann
Trevor then talked about the coalition government of national unity,
Trevor Ngwane
Especially the new government of national unity, the southern government is retreating from the from its mandate of national liberation. Can you see, because remember the whole struggle against apartheid was not just about getting rid of racism, but was also for economic justice. To summarize my point of view, John, I would say Africa is not for sale. Can you see? So what came out strongly for me was that Africa is for sale.
You know that on Sunday, 25 May, which is like a few days after this departure, it was Africa day. You know what I mean? Oh yeah, that’s the day it’s celebrated in everywhere in Africa. That’s the day the Organization of African Unity was formed by Kwame Nkruma and the great leaders. Yeah, yeah. Now, the vision at that time was at least Nkrumah, who was a socialist by the way, was a radical form of Pan Africanism, which was captured in his slogan, “a United States of Africa”. So he wanted to overcome the colonial national borders.
When we think of Africa Day, we also think of the African diaspora. We also think of our brothers and sisters, you know, black Americans, African Americans, and we ask ourselves, we remind ourselves, how they got to be in America. They went there slaves. Can you see? Yeah, so when we say Africa is for sale we’re not just talking about today’s imperialism, today’s capitalist exploitation, today’s uneven development, today’s Trump’s, I know what Trump’s protectionism, you know, is asserting, you know, might is right. We also think about all those people who were bought and sold, you know, in Africa.
So there is that real sense that what happened at the Oval Office is is so painful, it’s an insult, you know, to that history.
And okay on the other end, when Ramaphosa went to meet Trump that same week. The big story in South Africa was the unemployment figures. So our unemployment rate, it’s called the expanded definition, when you count everyone who’s unemployed, it’s at 40% can you see? more than 40% with the youth. It’s more than 60%. So there is a view that Ramaphosa, our government, must do everything and anything to actually make sure that the situation doesn’t get worse. Everyone wants to make sure that their economies grow, that they can take care of their people, but in doing that, it becomes competitive, it becomes divided, and it ends up being a question of allowing right wingers like Trump, who have managed to grab power. It’s exactly that relationship with America, with global capitalism, which has left South Africa with an unemployment rate of 40% can you see. Yah, because all the worlds profit repatriation and Trump…. Trump’s deal is not to actually haelp the countries. It’s to squeeze them more. You know what I mean? Yeah, because we know where he’s coming from. The American economy is declining, John. The reason it’s declining is because capitalism itself is in crisis. The biggest capitalist economy in the world is going to have a problem when the very system which it’s on top of, you know, is in crisis on
John Reimann
On the issue of of Pan African the Pan African League and African Unity. And the first thing that comes to my mind is the Arab League. And so it strikes me that the question is really, Unity of who? Unity of the capitalist governments, or unity of the working class?
Trevor Ngwane
That question, John is, it’s very deep, because, remember, there’s this idea now that we’re choosing between the East and the West. We’re choosing between, I don’t know, BRICS, China, and the EU or America, but in China, what is happening there. It’s what we call capitalist restoration. Can you see? So it’s abandoning the socialist vision and project in Russia. You know, we might be nostalgic about the Russian Revolution, but you. know, Russia is, is neoliberal. Can you see? Yeah, so that’s, that’s the real confusion. And I can also relate that, take it further. So there’s this whole thing about how Trump is backtracking from what I can call multilateralism. You know, the idea that you know there should be regulations the United Nations, there should be the World Trade Organization, whatever. But the truth is that multilateralism did not do much to stop the suffering of the working class, not only in the Global South, but sometimes in the Global North.
So I think this whole thing really at the heart of it, it’s class strategy. It’s a capitalist crisis. And when there’s a capitalist crisis, the bosses always try to make the working class to pay. Making poorer countries or developing countries or third world countries pay a price, is part of that just dynamic, if you know what I’m trying to say, yeah, yeah. It’s part of a class dynamic. Yeah? So yeah, I agree with you. You know, even pan Africanism, it should be, let’s say, revolutionary pan Africanism, calling for socialism, calling for, I don’t know, workers power, workers governments, Bourgeois democracy has always been the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. You know. Whether it’s tje Democratic Party or the Republican Party or the African National Congress. Can you see? Yeah, yeah. So, but now all pretense is gone. Now. Now might is right. If you have got the money, you have got the power, you have got the bombs, you can bomb Palestinians to smithereens. There’s no consequence, right? If you have got the money, you can exploit the poor. You can exploit, you know, the working class, no consequence. That same attitude you will find even at the workplace, you know, bosses now feel, “Oh, why should we have a union?” You know. “I’m giving you, you know, a chance to make a living.” foreign direct investment. You know, it’s not as if, when they do foreign direct investment, they’re coming here as a charity to donate to Africa or global south countries. No, they’re here to make a profit. Can you see? Yeah, and as soon as they can’t make a profit, they pull out. And, in fact, once they are here, they start demanding tax concessions, all sorts of, you know, I don’t know, kickbacks, concessions from these third world governments. Yeah, yeah.
I was honored to be invited to participate in a Zoom panel at this conference in Milan, of the Italian group “Left for Ukraine”. Here is a video of my presentation and below that is a transcript. I hope Left for Ukraine will post the entire session soon. I will publish that here as soon as they do so. This will also appear as a podcast.
I will start by recalling an event in 1978 in “Jonestown”, Guyana. There some 600 followers of the cult leader Reverend Jim Jones committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide laced Kool Aid, which they also fed to nearly 300 of their children. And that is not that different from the situation with the Donald Trump MAGA cult. And now, just in the last 48 hours, we have a rapidly developing constitutional crisis and the Trump administration is feeding some of the most highly classified state secrets to foreign rivals.
To understand the international consequences of this national disaster, we have to consider the concept of Eurasianism, which was first proposed in the 1940s by the US born and European based fascist, Francis Parker Yokey. He proposed that continental Europe should be one united whole and should drive out the influence of Britain and the US. Today, Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin takes up the theme of Eurasianism, but with Russia dominating the continent. Trump accepts that idea, with the corollary that he and his country should dominate the Atlantic, from Britain to Greenland to Canada and down to the Panama Canal. In other words, what can be called Atlanticism. What will go along with that is that China can have all of Asia.
Even if this scenario were possible, it does not mean “peace”. There will be an intensified battle between these rivals for dominance in Southwest Asia/North Africa, sub Saharan Africa and South America. This battle will heat up and war is possible, even possibly a nuclear war, if we keep going down this road.
This is part of the reason why what happens in US politics has global consequences and therefore should be understood by workers, and socialists among them, the world over. I hope the points I will raise will help in furthering that understanding.
2008 financial crisis and “Tea Party”
Let’s start by looking at the 2008 financial crisis, when then-President Obama bailed out finance capital and left workers to fend for themselves. The result was a populist movement called the “Tea Party” movement. As an anti-government rather than anti-corporate movement, it was a right wing movement, and the Republican Party drew it into their midst and, for the first time in their history, they actually developed a mass base.
Crisis of U.S. working classThe question is why was the 2008 revolt along right wing, rather than anti-corporate/left lines? The answer is something that no wing of the US socialist movement ever discusses (to my knowledge): The devastating political crisis of the U.S. working class.
What we have had is an 80 year war conducted first and foremost by the U.S. union leadership against all the best traditions of the labor movement. The union leadership demobilized the membership while they carried out a propaganda campaign that the unions and the employers were on the same “team” and that all the traditions of the past were dead and gone. These included the traditions of working class solidarity, of mass defiance, of a struggle for political independence and for socialism. And it wasn’t just a propaganda campaign; it was aimed at any member who struggled to maintain those traditions. Those members were ostracized, they were blackballed, they were physically threatened and assaulted, and some were expelled from the unions. I could speak for a half hour on this 80 year war.
This war had a massive effect on the U.S. working class to the extent that probably at least half of U.S. workers supported Trump. To think otherwise, to think this war had no impact on the consciousness of the US working class is pure idealism. Tens of millions of workers support Trump while other tens of millions stand passively by. This left a huge vacuum into which stepped Trump. I think this situation is not exclusive to the United States, by the way.
Trump and capitalist classNow until fairly recently, Trump in the main did not have the backing of any significant sector of the US capitalist class, but that started to change last year or maybe a little bit earlier. Leading the way was the Silicon Valley venture capitalists. This enormously important wing of the capitalist class had torn down and then rebuilt to their own liking a massively important industry, the communication and entertainment industry. And bear in mind that by communication we are, including, not only mass communication (Twitter, Facebook, and so on); we are also talking about data transmission, which lies at the heart of the globalization of capitalism. And in the process of building this industry anew they smashed any attempts by the workers in that industry to organize.
And with that crowning victory, they thought, “well why can’t we remodel all of US society, and maybe the entire world, as we did to this industry? And who better for us to use in accomplishing this goal but Donald Trump?“ And so, led by them, major sectors of the rest of the capitalist class moved into the Trump camp. In part, by the way, those other sectors of the capitalist class had been put off by some concessions that Biden had made to the working class. They did not see any need for Biden to make those concessions because the working class was so fragmented and confused. In other words, the crisis in the US working in class. And so that is why major wings of the capitalist class, possibly the majority of them, ended up supporting Trump in last year‘s election.
U.S. Supreme Court paves the way for TrumpTrump and MAGA have also taken over the Supreme Court, which made a key ruling last year that paved the way for Trump to return to the White House. By a 6-3 majority they ruled that a president (meaning Trump) is immune from criminal prosecution for anything he does in office as long as it is related to his official duties. (Netanyahu must be jealous!) So, that means that a president can literally take bribes and it is legal. It means that a president can literally pass the most highly classified state secrets to a rival capitalist government – in other words, as they say “betray his country” – and it is legal. This ruling was made when Trump was under considerable legal threats. It paved the way for his election victory later last year. There is absolutely no basis for this ruling, neither in US law, nor in the Constitution. Everyone, including conservative, legal scholars, was shocked by the ruling. They should not have been.
Democratic PartyAs for the Democratic Party, both during the election, and since then they have tried to play a middle ground. They tried to please both the capitalists and the increasingly polarized working class. The result is that they have pleased nobody. And so, while Trump has had some not very good polling numbers recently the Democrats support has been even worse. In a recent poll they had 27% support. That doesn’t mean that that is the percentage of votes that their candidates will necessarily get in the 202 bye elections, but it does show the collapse in confidence in their party in general.
The Trump/Vance/Musk Triumvirate in actionNow, let us look at what Trump has done since he returned to office. And really it should be called the Trump/Vance/Musk Triumvirate. That is who was running the executive branch of the government, congress, and at least the US Supreme Court.
And I want to emphasize again that what I’m about to recount will have – in fact is already having – direct international consequences in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Italy, and beyond.
During his first term in office, Trump had a series of appointments who were more loyal to the demands of the US capitalist class than to Trump personally. He learned from that and this time direct personal loyalty to himself and himself alone is the central requirement to be appointed to any position in his administration. Or to put it another way: They must be willing to violate all laws as well as the sacred U.S. Constitution itself if Trump demands it. I don’t have time to review the appointments, but I should add that aside from personal loyalty to Trump, some of them are connected to Putin and/or Xi, and others are fascist sympathizers if not outright fascists. And I don’t use that term lightly.
Now, in terms of Trump’s major foreign policy initiatives, he has moved to give Israel a completely free hand, and he has, infamously, aligned himself with Putin regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I mentioned at the outset Trump’s threats regarding Greenland, Canada, and Panama.
Domestically, Musk’s department of government efficiency or DOGE is central. Through DOGE, Trump has elevated Elon Musk into the position of co-president. And what doge has been doing in slashing tens of thousands of workers from different federal agencies is part and parcel of a plan to completely dismantle those agencies and then use that as an excuse to privatize them, many of them under the control of Elon Musk‘s own businesses. Part of this also would be rating of the funds within some of those agencies such as Social Security. So what you have is a giant privatization/repression/and corruption scam on a scale that would even make Putin proud.
Then you have the ethno-nationalist attack on immigrants, which is part and parcel of the increased repression in general and will most likely be used in the future as an excuse to call out either the national guard or actually the army itself or both.
And we should never forget the coming massive assault on the environment, an assault that will be felt all around the world, including, but not only, on the situation of global climate disruption.
Also, there is the important tendency of this triumvirate to actually defy the federal courts, which means there are no checks on the actions of the triumph for it other than a movement from below.
Also, Trump‘s tariff initiative will have a direct global impact. He basically wants to use the tariff threat in order to bludgeon other governments into line. And it threatens to not only massively disrupt the US economy, but in fact, global capitalism itself – partly because investors don’t know what’s coming from one day to the next. For this reason, and also because of Trump lining himself up with one of the main rivals of US capitalism – Russian capitalism – especially in regard to Ukraine, for these reasons, major wings of the US capitalist class are starting to have serious doubts about Trump. But what can they do about him? They cannot use the rest of the Republican Party against him. It is increasingly clear that the judiciary will not rein him in. And their media, the old line TV stations and newspapers, for example-no longer have the influence on masses of Americans that it used to have.
The unprecedented nature of the situation is revealed by Trump’s first action, on his first day in office, which was to pardon the 1500 federal prisoners who had been convicted for their role in the Jan. 6 coup attempt. These are violent fascist organizers, and many of them will certainly be out there organizing as we speak today. And as opposed to the past, they surely will have the financial backing of the Nazi-saluting Elon Musk. This means the potential for a mass, fascist paramilitary. And to give an example of what is happening, there is a eugenics conference – which is literally Nazi science – planned in the deep Republican state of Texas, and the University of Texas is associated with it as is Musk himself indirectly. If 10-15 years ago anybody had told me we’d be seeing this sort of thing here, I’d have told them they were hysterical. But it is happening. I’m not saying that literally fascism will take power in the U.S., but while it’s unlikely in my opinion, an extremely repressive/totalitarian government along the lines of Putin or Xi is far from ruled out. Very far from it..
U.S. militaryAnother possibility is this: in a situation of mass crisis, to which Trump might respond by trying to call out the military, possibly to prevent a setback of his party in the 2026 bye-elections. I think that it is not ruled out that under the right circumstances, wings of the military could actually start to take their independence of the civilian government, which is to say of the presidency. In other words, to move against Trump. It is a question that certainly needs to be thought through a lot more, especially because it would be totally unprecedented in all of US history. But then the entire situation of the Trump Vance, Musk Triumvirate is also entirely unprecedented.
Popular opposition to TrumpSo now let us look for a minute at the opposition that is starting to develop: we have had all around the country, including in my area, a whole host, a little local protest, all almost all of which have been controlled either by the union bureaucracy or by the NGO’s, both of which are linked to the Democratic Party. The union leadership has been pretty silent. Or rather in some cases, it would be better if they had been. You have that great “reform“president of the auto workers union who shortly after Trump took office, wrote a column in the Washington Post, saying he was ready to “work with Trump“. Then there was the president of the flight attendant union, Sarah Nelson, who raised the threat of a general strike. However, she made a similar threat during the government shut down several years ago, but it turned out to be a little more than just a threat. You can’t rule out the possibility of her actually taking action, but that is by no means assured. So the result is that we cannot rule out the possibility of a mass result, but I think it would be chaotic and disorganized, something similar to the French yellow vest movement of 2018. If that were to happen, then the role of socialist I believe would be to encourage it, to emphasize the centrality of the working class struggle, and the need for working class independence, and also quite frankly for socialism.
Trump vulnerableI think meanwhile there are two things that we should be advocating: first and foremost for the movement in general, we have to see that the triumvirate is actually extremely vulnerable in one key industry, and that is food production. It is vulnerable there because a huge proportion of the workforce is immigrant labor, and the majority of that labor is undocumented. Already many of them are staying off from work because of fear of being rounded up and being deported. So what I think we should advocate is that the unions should organize in that sector. Encourage those workers to in effect. Go on strike, which is to say do what they’re already starting to do, and organize union members and supporters to stand the strike picket lines for them. If that even started to happen, the US grocery store shelves would be empty within a week.
International working class solidarityNow the second thing that I think that all socialist around the world should think about is the crying necessity for an international working class solidarity campaign. Such a campaign would make the links between the struggles against repression of people from Palestine to Ukraine, from Italy to the United States, while emphasizing the absolutely central role of the working class, that the working class must be at the center and must lead these struggles. Because if it doesn’t, then such struggles will inevitably be controlled by the capitalist class, and it will not achieve the results for which so many hundreds of thousands, millions in fact, of people have sacrificed and struggled for. Look, for example, at the great revolution which finally overthrew the fascistic Assad in Syria. Today, the new Syrian government is maneuvering, tacking back and forth, between the dictates of the governments of regional powers – Turkey and Israel – and global powers – the US and Russia, with China hovering in the background. As a movement that, no matter how heroic it may have been, was never led by the working class, and as a capitalist government – when it came time to make international links – which is unavoidable in every instance – when that time came, it had to make links with regional and global imperialist powers. The only other alternative would have been a working class-led revolution that made links with the international working class. That is and will be the same in every single other instance around the world. It doesn’t mean socialists do not support such movements, but we do have to help draw those lessons.
I hope that one result of this conference and similar efforts will be to consider taking up this banner: for a campaign for international working class solidarity.
Added note: For the shifting attitude of the capitalist class towards Trump, seeThe Trump presidency: Four years of chaos and corruption “won’t work”, not even for the capitalists!
Here is a podcast of the article of this same title. Oaklandsocialist podcasts can be found here.
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Podcast-Trump-chaos-and-corruption-22this-wont-work-folks22.m4a
“A friend of mine called me yesterday. “John, what the fuck is going on?!!” he demanded.
Here is the video of our interview with Craig Unger. Below it is the text of that interview. This interview will also appear on Oaklandsocialist’s podcast. Also, see our review of Craig’s book, “House of Trump, House of Putin” and of “American Kompromat“
John Reimann
So we’re talking here with Craig Unger and Craig does Craig does this website here.
He’s also, as you see, the author of that of this current book that just came out. And also, in particular. I wanted to talk with Craig about these two books, “House of Trump, House of Putin” and “American Kompromat”, which are about Trump in particular. And obviously the reason I wanted to talk with him is that Trump will be coming back into office soon. So welcome, very, very happy to talk with you, Craig, in my opinion, those two books of yours, and in particular, House of Trump, House of Putin, are the best books I’ve read about Trump, because what they do is explain a lot of the historical background of what created Trump, what created Putin and what created their relationship. So I’d like to get started you talked a lot about the development of the different criminal gangs in Russia, starting in the Soviet Union, in the Soviet gulag, and how those gangs then morphed into kind of the Russian mafia afterwards. Can you explain a little bit about that.
Craig Unger
Sure, well, I think the most important difference in between the Russian mafia and the American mafia as we know the American mafia, whether it’s through movies like The Godfather or crime reporting – in Russia, the mafia works hand in hand with the KGB, or did in the days of the Soviet Union and and it was sort of a, almost a secondary arm of Russian and Soviet intelligence. So that became very, very important when the Russian mafia started migrating to the United States in the 70s and 80s. And when that happened, I interviewed a former head of counter intelligence for the KGB, general Oleg Kalugin, who now lives in Maryland, and he told me about it When, at the time in the 70s, Russia was heavily criticized for being anti semitic, for sort of going after Jews and not allowing them to emigrate to the United States and and at a certain point In the in the 70s, United States passed an amendment that that encouraged there were sanctions against Russia unless they allowed Jewish immigration. And the KGB said, “wow, this is a great opportunity for us. We’ll allow Jews to emigrate, but there’ll be our Jews.” In other words, they would be secretly working for the KGB, and they moved into Brighton Beach and Brooklyn. I lived in Brooklyn for five or six years, and it’s still an area that’s dominated by former Russians and Ukrainians. There’s some excellent Russian restaurants there, and that’s where they sort of settled, and that was their base of one of their bases of operations. The other, as I found it, was Trump Tower. They started laundering their money through Trump real estate 40 years ago.
John ReimannI want to get to that, but I’d like to get back to another part of what your book explains about how, when they were, when a lot of that those prison gangs were released from prison under Khrushchev, in a way, they formed the earliest capitalists in Russia. And so it’s like gangster capital, or gangster mafia gangster ism was baked into Russian capitalism before capitalism even made its return,
Craig UngerWell, there were, there was no private property in the Soviet Union. So even if you wanted to buy a pair of blue jeans. You would essentially get it on the black market through a mafioso, but the mafia gangs grew into major multinational, multi billion dollar multinational enterprises that included sex trafficking, drugs, international crime syndicates, really.
John ReimannSo then, in your book, you describe one, one of the earliest connections between the between the FSB and so on, and Trump, or between, I should say, between that Russian mafia and Brighton Beach and Trump was through the Cohn family and Club Caribe. The Roy Cohn right family owned that social club, right, right?
Craig UngerWell, Roy Cohn, of course, became Trump’s lawyer, and in many ways, I think he is the model for Trumpism. He was absolutely ruthless. I was I wear it as badge of honor. Roy Cohn yelled at me once and tried to suppress a story I was working on when I was at New York Magazine, and we just ran it anyway. But he was ruthless, and he taught Donald Trump the lessons of deny, deny, deny, and just never admit any defeat whatsoever or that you were ever wrong. And that’s the way Trump has operated. And the he Trump, of course, I mean, Cohn, of course, became a lawyer for the big Italian mobster families as well as Trump, the Russian mafia. Meanwhile, was growing up in Brighton Beach, and by 1984 one of them, a guy named David Bogatin, had went to Trump Tower just after Trump Tower had been built, and he put $6 million in cash on the table and said, “I’d like five condos.” And Bogatin, according to FBI files, was a member of the Russian mafia, and in effect, he was laundering money through Trump real estate. He didn’t live in those places. It was simply a way of washing the money so that when he sold the apartments, he would have cash and he could say it came out of real estate.
John Reimann
I want to get to that issue of the money laundering, which has hardly been discussed anywhere. But before I do one other, maybe detail that I found very interesting, you talk in your book about Trump’s trip to Czechoslovakia in 1978 with his then wife who was Czechoslovakian, Ivana, and you seem to think that that was where the KGB made its first links with Trump, or some of its first links.
Craig UngerWell, it’s certainly possible, and there’s been a lot of speculation. That’s true. It may well be true. The question is, hekatolaki, of course, was part of the East Block, and they were very close to the Soviet Union, and they presumably shared their intelligence with the KGB, as it is. We do know, by 1980 the KGB reached out to Trump through a guy named Semyon Kislin, who is still around and back in 1980 he was, he was what is known as a spotter agent for the KGB. That meant he was trying to spot new talent for them to recruit as agents or assets. And this was the time of Donald Trump’s first and perhaps greatest and maybe only real triumph in real estate, it was in developing the Grand Hyatt Hotel. And like any hotel, once it was built, it needed a lot of TV sets, and Trump bought them through this Semion Kislin, who was a spotter agent who made him an offer that he couldn’t and didn’t refuse, but it was a way of establishing a link with Trump for the KGB and through them, not two months later, KGB reached out to Trump and it was in 1987 that They set up his first trip to Moscow.
John Reimann
Now you talk about Trump having been a money launderer for the Russian mafia capitalists, and I’d like you to talk a little bit more about that in detail, and also why it is that there’s been almost no coverage of that aspect of Trump, right?
Craig UngerWell, I think one of the reasons it’s, I mean, obviously I would love it to get more coverage. I wrote a book on this. You know, one is it’s hard to prove when the Russian mafia is laundering its money. Trump has never been prosecuted for this, and it’s hard to prosecute him, because in order to prosecute him, you have to prove that he acknowledged that the money came from illicit sources. That’s extremely hard to prove in terms of his state of mind. And I think he’d have to be an idiot to say, “Gee, where did you get the this money? David Bogatin? Did it come from sex trafficking?” Trump isn’t is stupid enough to ask. He wants deniability, and it’s simply by pleading ignorance. And it’s very hard to prove otherwise, but, but it was easy enough to prove that Bogdan bought real estate in there, and so did I believe I came up with a total of 13 members of the Russian mafia who bought, lived in or bought property in Trump Tower.
John ReimannBut it wasn’t just Trump Tower, and it wasn’t just Bogtin, right? I mean, there was that real estate deal in Florida, for instance, and just all kinds of different Russian mafia mafioso, who were, you know, buying property from Trump left, right and center right.
Craig UngerIt went on in different forms and came back again and again over the years, Trump, I think had a total of six bankruptcies. And he, when he expanded into Atlantic City, he sort of went, Uh, hog wild and over expanded. And that led to one bankruptcy after another, and it was the Russian mafia, in a way, that came to to his aid. There was a firm named Bayrock, which was run by, among other people, a man named Felix Sater, whose father was part of the Russian mafia. A lot of the money, and they offered Trump terrifically remunerative deals by using his name in later years. That is, Trump wasn’t really developing real estate. Other people were doing it, and they were calling these places Trump, they were using his name. He was just branding them, much as a fashion manufacturer might make blue jeans with, you know, with their brand on it, and Trump’s franchise, is exorbitant. I think he would get as much as 25% of the profits, which is far more than a than a blue chip company like Hyatt or Marriott might get for franchising hotels.
John ReimannSo, you know, I read this book, [“American Kleptoracy” by Casey Michel] I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. And in that book, they talk about money laundering in general, the role of limited liability companies and all that sort of thing, and how money laundering is so integrated into the major banks and so on, and also real estate development in general. And so I have always wondered why, whether the media in general is reluctant to open up that can of worms. It costs a whole lot of other dirt might start crawling out,
Craig UngerWell, well, um, you know, I was going to say that, no, it’s clearly true. And I mean, I’ve lived in New York on and off for over 40 years, and one could not escape seeing these huge towers with these pencil thin buildings going up 100 stories, with real estate where individual apartments would go for $200 million or so, and yet they’re empty. The lights are off at night because no one lives there. It’s a haven for money, and there’s no penalty. The real estate regulations are against money laundering are just pathetically weak, and the real estate industry doesn’t want to stop that. They make a lot of money as a result of it. Sometimes their ads still get into newspapers like the New York Times. You know, I’ve written about it. It’s also the kind of thing I guess people don’t find it to be a sexy story or something. Right? But it’s enormously important in that you have billions and billions of dollars in hidden funds that come from credible enterprises and have gone to support Donald Trump, and also real estate developers in general.
John Reimann
Yeah. So you mentioned, you mentioned Felix Sater. My impression from the book is that he was quite central to Trump’s real estate development money laundering schemes. Would would you agree with that?
Craig Unger
Well, he and Bayrock did played a very important role. I’m trying to remember the exact years, but I think it was after 2000 and helping Trump come back from his failures in Atlantic City. And you know, I think it was a great source of income for Trump.
John Reimann
So I want to come back to that. But before I do another thing that you mentioned in your book that I found extremely interesting was this guy, Robert Hanssen, who you say was probably the most successful Soviet spy, and his connection with that Catholic society, Opus Dei and you mentioned number of others who were, who are members of Opus Dei. You mentioned Louis Freeh, former FBI director, Rick Santorum, Bill Barr and and and others. And how the Federalist Society, which basically controls the supreme court now is also connected with Opus Dei. Can you talk about that a little bit? Right?
Craig UngerWell, Opus Dei grew out of fascist Spain under under Franco, and it really put together the judiciary there. It’s an extremely it’s a right wing sect within Catholicism and in in Washington, they have headquarters there. They actually they have one in New York as well. But it became very closely linked to, and there was an overlap with people who were in the Federalist Society, which has been run by Leonard Leo, who’s probably been the most significant single figure in reshaping the United States Supreme Court as a right wing court with a super majority. And, of course, I think everyone knows what’s happened with Roe v Wade and Citizens United. And it’s, it’s really reshaped American politics and pushed it significantly to the right and taken over a large part of our judiciary.
John ReimannI want to skip to another aspect of American US politics that you mentioned, and that is lobbying. And I want to read just a couple sentences from what you write about that you say, “in so many ways, Russians were baffled by the unusual business practices they encountered in the West.” And then you talk about “an aspiring oligarch who was all too familiar with the dark practices in Bratva. And when lobbying was described to him, you say, then it was as if, light bulb went off. ‘You mean, you have firms with highly paid professionals who are paid to bribe Congressman?’ he asked. So seems to me that the whole practice of lobbying has played a big role in in how American politics works today.
That’s connected with with Trump’s connections internationally and so on.
Craig Unger
Well, absolutely, you have people like Paul Manafort, who, of course, was Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and Manafort and Roger Stone were essentially, they were known as the torturers lobby. This goes back 40 years. When they started out, they would hire themselves than any dictator across the world, anywhere in the world, for the highest bidder and be paid millions of dollars to put forth that dictator’s case in trying to get, say, favored trade relations, or whatever the case may be, and Manafort specifically was paid. His firm was paid over $75 million on behalf of lobbying for Putin’s candidate Yanukovich as president of Ukraine. So they were effectively paid agents for Vladimir Putin. And you see it again and again and when the period you’re referring to was the period at which the Russian Federation. This is just after the fall of the Soviet Union, but the Russian Federation effectively was becoming a mafia state. And during that period, you had oligarchs who controlled various industries, and they were sort of, they had to make sure they were in had a good relationship with Vladimir Putin, and if so, their their their great wealth, would be protected.
John ReimannWell, it seems to me that that is related to another issue that you raised in your book, and that is the Mueller investigation, which you say should have been a counter intelligence investigation rather than a criminal investigation. And one thing that I noticed in both that investigation and also the House Intelligence Committee is they never interviewed Felix Sater, so can you talk about those two issues, right?
Craig Unger
Well, as we were discussing earlier, I mean, this is the difference. There’s a huge difference between a criminal investigation and counter intelligence, and we’ve touched on some of those differences obliquely already. For example, the issue of laundering money for the Russian mafia. I think it would be very, very difficult to prosecute Trump for that. You have to be able to prove his state of mind, unless you have recordings. That’s going to be hard to do. But it’s easy to prove, from a counter intelligence point of view, that he sold those, apartments, to the Russian mafia, and that can then gives him very significant ties in the 10s of millions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars. So so you can see right in front of your eyes, from a counter intelligence point of view, how deeply tied Donald Trump is to Vladimir Putin and Russia, and that’s what I mean by going after him on a counter through a counter Intelligence investigation.
John ReimannI think you listed 59 individual Russian mafia, people that Trump had connections to, right?
Craig UngerWell, I’m sure I can’t name them all off the top of my head, but this was a significant part of his life. And you’re right in that it my book did become a New York Times best seller briefly, but it did not get to the point of changing the national conversation. That’s one thing I think is really gone. The power of the press has waned so much in recent years, and when I started out in journalism, there were stories like Watergate or the pentagon papers or the me lie massacre, where one piece of journalism could change the national conversations and change the series of events that would unfold and we would remember it 50 years later. Today, that’s harder and harder to do, and with social media, everyone’s in their little silo, and I’m sure the vast majority of Americans don’t know about Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia, but they’re important.
John Reimann
You know, it seems to me that, you know, in certain segments sectors of society, Trump is seen or is portrayed as being Putin’s puppy dog, and seems to me that that is the explanation for it.
Craig UngerOh, absolutely, he knows he can turn to Russia for help. And, you know, it was very interesting watching. I can’t believe he won the election, but if he’d lost, really, he would risk going to jail for the rest of his life. So he had everything at stake. And one had to wonder, if he had lost, would he leave the country? Would he go to Russia? What? How would the Soviet How would Russia bail him out?
John ReimannYeah, so that kind of brings us to the present, because barring a health crisis, he’s going to return to office in a month, or a little bit more than that. So What are your perspectives for the new Trump administration, I guess that’s the whole other 45 minute conversation, but particular some of his appointments, or proposed appointments, Tulsi Gabbard [for Director of National Intelligence], who is connected to both Assad and presumably Putin and and others,
Craig Ungerwell, I think it’s very, very scary. And I take almost all the appointments he’s announced show that we are risking the end of our democracy. Have Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. I mean, some of these are… Tulsi Gabbard, really…. You know, I can’t go cite chapter on verse, but I think it’s a huge security problem. Donald Trump is the biggest security problem. He already told us he trusts Vladimir Putin more than his own intelligence services. And he told us that back during his first term, putting Tulsi Gabbard in there only reaffirms it and would institutionalize it. And I cannot be imagine being an honest, patriotic American who’s in a CIA agent, uh, doing, uh, intelligence analysis of of Russia and having Tulsi Gabbard as your boss. I mean, it’s as if suddenly we’ve switched sides. I mean, and we’re working for the bad guys, and I think it’s going to be a huge problem.
John ReimannI mean, if I were a spy for the United States, living in Russia right now, I’d be packing my bags, because I think it’s going to be a direct pipeline from the CIA to the FSB, right?
Craig UngerSo it’s very, very scary. And how this will unfold, I think, is anybody’s guess, but I’m think there’s going to be, it’s going to be bloody in one way or another.
John ReimannAnd just one last thing: I was talking with somebody recently, for instance, he’s a Russian refugee who doesn’t think that Trump is going to totally sell out Ukraine, because he said it’s not in American interest, and what’s your view of that?
Craig UngerWell, I would, I would be petrified that he would sell out Ukraine. I think I mean when he says he’s going to end Ukraine war on day one. He means he’s going to get Zelensky to capitulate. I can’t understand. I mean, I just don’t see any other way. Presumably he’s going to withdraw American aid for Ukraine, which will make it very, very difficult for them to continue the fight as they’ve been. And I would be stunned if I hope I’m wrong, but I would be stunned if there’s a different outcome.
John ReimannI would be too honestly. So with that, do you have any future plans, any books that you’re working on now or
Craig Unger
I’m still promoting “Den of Spies” And to me, it’s, it’s an important part. This is about the 1980 presidential election, and it shows, it puts in perspective, I think, what we’re going through now. This was a covert operation by the Republican Party that I believe was an act of treason and sabotage the 1980 presidential election on behalf of Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter. And at the time, Iran held 52 American hostages, and the Reagan administration made a secret deal with Iran in which they said, Look, we’re going to give you weapons, which is illegal. Iran was a hostile foreign power at the time, and in return for giving you those weapons, we want one thing, we want you not to return the hostages. We want you to prolong their detention, their incarceration, until after the election.
John ReimannWell, there you have it. There’s the book. And I thank you very much, Craig for your time, and we look forward to reading den of spies and other articles that you might be publishing on your website.
If you prefer to listen to a podcast of my latest article on the setbacks Trump has received, it can be found here.
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Trump-receives-setbacks.m4a
here is a podcast of my recent article on that issue.
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Podcast-Did-TrumpPutin-steal-the-election.m4a
Here is a video of my presentation to the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign on the Republicans’ plans to overturn November’s elections if they don’t win them. All too many people are ignoring this tremendous threat. Either that or they are simply relying on the Democrats to stop them. Below the video is a transcript of my presentation. You can also listen to the presentation as a podcast here.
If ten years ago you had told me we’d be seeing scenes like what we saw in this video which I just showed, I’d have said you were being hysterical. I learned something from that. But still, in reviewing what I’m going to present, I had to ask myself again if I was at least exaggerating the extent of the danger. This video should serve as a reminder of what is possible.
Trump & Co. have learned something from January 6 also. They learned that a direct, violent coup was not possible. They had to lay different plans.
(in)Justice Samuel Alito flies this flag of the Christian nationalist fascists at his holiday home.
So what they have been preparing for the last 4 years is a coup with a legal or Constitutional cover. That is what the recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity represents. In that ruling, the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court just simply made up what amounts to a new law out of whole cloth – that the president of the United States is above the law, that he can do whatever he likes and is not subject to legal prosecution.
I other words, this legalizes the overthrow of the rule of capital through democracy.
The owners of capital in the US have ruled through democratic means ever since the Civil War ended nearly 160 years ago. It’s been the most successful such rule in history. So the questions are:
- How did that base develop and how did capitalists like Yarvin, Thiel and Elon Musk develop such enormous conceit that they came to view the overthrow of this 160 year method of rule as actually possible and even desirable?
- What, exactly, are the means through which they intend to carry out this constitutional coup?
- And finally, what are some possible outcomes whether the coup succeeds or not.
What I am not going to get into is whether the outcome matters very much. Anybody who is not living in alternate reality knows the answer to that, as the video we just watched shows.
Now, normally we think of the establishment of authoritarian rule as happening when there is a crisis in society and when the working class is actually challenging the rule of capital. But I think that just the opposite is true in this case. Here is where that proverbial horseshoe concept comes into play. You have the opposite end of the spectrum, leading towards the same result.
I think what we have is an enormous crisis in the US working class. And incidentally we are not the only country with such a crisis. We’ve had a nearly 80 year war against all the traditions of struggle of the US working class. A leading force in that war has been every wing of the leadership of the US working class – that is to say, the union leadership. They have brought all the propaganda of the capitalist class directly into the only mass organizations the working class has ever built in the US. They have succeeded in alienating the vast majority of union members from their own unions. The union leadership has buttressed the capitalist propaganda of individualism, which is the exact opposite of working class solidarity. All this has created utter confusion within the working class. The nonprofiteers have also played their part in all of this.
Now, normally, a certain tension exists under capitalist democracy between the drive of the capitalists to complete domination vs. the resistance of the working class and the oppressed, the latter of whom must ultimately depend on the support of at least a major sector of the working class. But what happens when one side fragments, when the working class no longer is any sort of independent power? Then a vacuum develops and something must fill that vacuum. That is what the forces for this potential coup represent – a drive to fill that vacuum.
The rise of the far right, and its support from a small wing of the US capitalist class, does not result from a threat to capitalism from the working class. On the contrary, it results from the crisis of confusion and fragmentation in the working class. This crisis has created a huge vacuum which, among other things, has strengthened some of the most aggressive and reactionary tendencies of some of the capitalists. This is what Yarvin, Thiel, Musk and others represent.
In fact, it is this crisis in the U.S. working class which put Trump into office in the first place.
Chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, making clear that he would disobey a Trump order to carry out a military coup.
Donald Trump discovered when he was president that he could not get the military tops to carry out a coup. On two separate occasions, he wanted the generals to call the troops out into the streets and on both occasions the top generals such as Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley made it clear that they would not obey such an order. So Trump and his MAGA leaders tried to overturn the elections by the legal route. But it was an unplanned, hit or miss plan and it crumbled like a house of cards, just as did the January 6 attempt at a violent coup – which was also hardly planned. Since then, they have had four years to organize and refine their plans and to seize complete control over one of the two main capitalist parties, the Republican Party.
Before I get into their known plans for a constitutional coup, I have to mention the plans that probably exist beneath the surface – plans for violent terrorist attacks on voting centers and the places where votes are counted. I think the video I showed demonstrates that such plans most likely are in the works. Trump and MAGA discovered that an outright frontal attack like Jan. 6 won’t work. They also found that there is a real risk of infiltration, like happened when these types planned to kidnap and murder the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. They went into a decline after Jan. 6, but they also reorganized themselves. One of the foremost groups is American Patriots Three Percenters or AP3, which is already active on the Southern border, “rounding up” immigrants. AP3 has connections with various sheriffs and police and has law enforcement members. The New American Journal quoted one of them as saying “The next election won’t be decided at a Ballot Box. It’ll be decided at the ammo box.” He said he is ready to force his way into voting centers if need be, or “whatever it takes.” A study by the Institute for Strategic Development shows how these terrorist groups have reconstituted themselves to make infiltration by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies more difficult. So we simply don’t know what their plans are or what they might do. But we have to keep that danger in mind.
Now, let’s look at their plans for a coup under legal cover.
To get a glimpse of those plans we should turn to what happened in Fulton County Georgia in the May, 2024 primary elections. Fulton County is the county in which Atlanta is located and it is the absolute epicenter of the Democratic vote in
The America First Policy Institute. They are at the center of the plans to overturn the 2024 elections if the elections don’t go Trump’s way.
Georgia because it contains the great majority of black voters in the state. If the Democrats are to win that state, they must get a huge majority in Fulton County. And something peculiar happened in the May primary in Fulton County. One of the election board members, Julie Adams, refused to certify the vote. Now, remember, this was the statewide primary which would just determine which two candidates would be in the November runoffs for state office. It had nothing to do with the presidential election nor even the presidential primary, which had been in March. So why would Adams refuse to certify the vote? The answer is to be found in understanding who Julie Adams is: She is the state head of the America First Policy Institute, the AFPI. This is a multi-multi million dollar institute tied in with Trump and with such foundations as Judicial Watch, which has done so much to enable MAGA to take over the judicial system. And Adams’ refusal to certify the vote in that key county for the state – and possibly the nation – was a test run for the federal election.
Adams is not alone. According to Rolling Stone, some 70 election deniers now serve on election boards in key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania . So, we can count on the effort of Julie Adams to be repeated 50, 60, 70 times or more. This, in itself, can tend to overwhelm the system.
Then, on top of that, we have had the harassment of and threats to election officials and just rank and file poll workers – those who actually count the ballots. According to the Brennan Center 38% of poll workers have reported such harassment and threats of violence, including threats to their lives and the lives of their families. This has caused mass resignations and retirements and as a result over 25% of those who will be administering the election will be doing so for the first time. The result of lack of experience can be seen in one simple mistake: In the 2020 election disrict of Wilkes Barre PA, poll workers didn’t have enough paper of the proper thickness on hand and this led to an hours long delay in voting. That, of course, led to all sorts of wild conspiracy theories. Now, multiply that by scores of times over, and you get a sense of the chaos that can result. You get a sense of the excuses the election deniers can seize upon to refuse to certify the vote.
However, we should not get carried away here. Again, according to the Brennan Center and others, certification of the vote results is not optional. The election boards are not created to interpret the law. Their role is purely to serve as human adding machines. And in all of the 60 plus court cases arising from the 2020 election, the courts ruled fairly quickly against the challenges. But such challenges can create a climate, a base for further challenges. Nor can we rule out the possibility that an entire local election board would refuse to count the votes. Normally, we can expect the courts to resolve this fairly quickly. That is not necessarily true in 2024 as we will see.
In 2022, the federal presidential electoral count reform act was passed. That act provides for quick federal court action in case of disputes of election results – in other words, disruptions by election denying officials. It also provides for a means of preventing individual rogue federal judges like Aileen Cannon in Florida from playing a role. It also provides for quick resolution by the Supreme Court, but here a question arises. The act provides for a key role to be played by the state’s governor. That would seem to fly in the face of an extreme legal theory called the independent state legislature theory. This theory claims that the state legislatures are the one and only authority in everything to do with running elections, including determining its outcome.
The MAGA majority on the Supreme Court will go along with overturning the election if they think they can get away with it.
In a 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Moore v Harper, the Supreme Court majority rejected that legal theory. But (in)Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissented. They in effect accepted the independent state legislature theory. Since then, the rest of the MAGA (in)Justices, most especially Chief (in)Justice John Roberts, have gone further down that road. That’s what we saw in their ruling that a president (meaning Trump) is immune from criminal prosecution for any “official” act. To repeat: there is absolutely nothing in the law or in the Constitution that justifies this ruling. They in effect simply created a new law. In the past, Roberts was concerned that the court would retain some degree of credibility, that a majority of the public would see the court as being above politics. This ruling was a declaration by him that he didn’t give a damn how the court was perceived any more. He sensed a MAGA victory and that was that.
So, whether the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority could travel down the road of the independent state legislature theory after the coming election is an open question. I will return to that later.
Now, as we remember, in 2020, the electoral count in congress was challenged by a couple of senators and a few Representatives. The federal electoral count reform act tightens that up to require one fifth of members of each house for a challenge to be considered. I think it’s pretty likely that there will be such numbers if Harris wins. For such challenges to succeed, the Republicans would need a majority in both houses. That was why Trump held his first election rally in weeks out in Montana in early August. He is sure to win Montana by double digits, but there the incumbent senator is Democrat John Tester, and Trump was campaigning for his Republican rival. A key to overturning the election, should that be necessary, will be for the Republicans to gain a majority in the senate, and the Montana senate race gives them a good chance.
Democrats’ strategyNow, what is the Democrats’ strategy for preventing the MAGA Republicans from overturning the election and instituting a constitutional coup? A few weeks ago, liberal TV personality Rachel Maddow interviewed “progressive” Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, and Maddow posed this exact question to her. Warren gave two answers: First is to run up the votes for Democrats all up and down the ballot so the result is so “overwhelming” that they cannot overturn it. Second is to take it to courts. It is not ruled out that they can get an overwhelming victory but that is by no means assured. In fact, at this time the result is up in the air.
I think if the Democrats do gain an overwhelming victory, that will intimidate the election deniers, including those on the election commissions and many of them will back off from trying to overturn the election. Even the MAGA (in)Justices on the Supreme Court would feel the pressure. A recent article in CNN detailed how the (in)Justices negotiate and compromise among themselves just as do the elected politicians. In other words, while they are more insulated, the (in)Justices are also subject to political pressure.
To get elected, a presidential candidate must get at least 270 electoral college votes. What would happen if Harris got that number or only slightly more? I think that situation, which is entirely possible, would send the election deniers into overdrive. It is exactly such a contingency for which they are planning. It cannot be ruled out that so many challenges could be made at the county level that state boards could be overwhelmed and one or two could simply find it “impossible” to rule. All sorts of delays and confusions are possible. The MAGA majority on the Supreme Court is waiting for that like a fox waits for a gopher to emerge from its hole. Waiting, waiting, and then the predator springs. It’s impossible to predict exactly how court challenges could reach the Supreme Court or what pro-MAGA decision the majority could reach.
Another route for a legal coup could be this: if Harris wins a slim majority of electoral votes, then because of the electoral math it’s most likely that the Senate will swing Republican. Because of gerrymandering, the House could stay in the Republican’s grip. In that case, and if the vice president – who is Harris – declares a Democrat victory, it’s certain that the results from at least one state would be challenged. The challenge would be to the results in one particular state or a series of states, maybe Wisconsin, for example. In that case, it’s most likely that the challenge would win in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Also, keep this in mind: All the Republican majority has to do is deprive the Democratic contender of the majority of potential electoral votes. If there are enough states that cannot send in electoral votes by January 6 so that neither candidate gets a majority of all the 538 possible votes because 538 total votes are not sent in, then the House of Representatives chooses the next president. Each delegation from each state gets one vote. It doesn’t matter if the delegation has two delegates, as Montana has, or it has 52 as does California. Each delegation gets one vote, and since the majority of states are rural and the MAGAists are in the majority in those states, it’s certain that the House of Representatives would install Trump.
Or they would if the Democrats’ game plan as outlined by Elizabeth Warren, among others, is adhered to. That’s where a movement from below comes in. A popular black Instagramer in Atlanta, “Talia”, who has some 25,000 followers, was asked on Instagram what black people in Atlanta would do if the Republicans tried to steal the elections. Her answer was succinct: “They’re gonna riot,” she wrote. It seems pretty certain that there would be mass protests throughout the country. In fact, that could happen even before the election if the fascist groups conduct terrorist attacks on voters or on black or Latino populations.
What would be the response of the Democrats and their fronts – the NGO’s and the union leadership? In 2000, the Republicans in Florida moved to prevent a recount that would have led to the victory of Al Gore. The Republicans staged what was called the “Brooks Brothers riot” (named after the Brooks Brothers brand of suits) to ensure there would be no recount. The AFL-CIO leadership discouraged any street protests in Florida because their masters, the Democratic Party, didn’t want to encourage lack of faith in the system. They made sure that nothing went beyond the legal challenge. (By the way, the lead lawyer for Bush and the Republicans was none other than present chief inJustice John Roberts, and he based his argument on a version of the independent state legislature theory.) In 2020 the Democrats carried out the same legal-based strategy successfully. What Elizabeth Warren explained in her interview with Rachel Maddow is what a New York Times article had already reported on for 2024. This time the stakes are far higher than they were even in 2020, and I think it’s possible that if a mass protest movement develops a wing of the union leadership could break from the present strategy and jump to the head of that movement. Same with some of the NGO’s. What would happen then? Would the country be paralyzed, with transportation – rail, shipping and the air industries shut down? How would MAGA respond? I’m inclined to think that in the face of a mass movement they would tend to back off, especially if the unions are involved. But who knows. Maybe MAGA would carry out terrorist attacks. If that happens, it would probably spur the resistance to even greater heights.
If Harris/Walz win, I think there would be a crisis inside the Republican party. Hundreds of Republican officials would suddenly discover that they never did support Trump. Already we see signs of that, such as the several Republican speakers at the recent Democratic convention. There will be a movement to put the Christian nationalists and similar types out of power in the Republican Party. If that succeeds, then where would the MAGA movement go? Or if it fails, what would the mainstream Republicans do? In either case, it seems to me that a split in the Republican Party would be possible and a new party could develop. That would shake up the entire bipartisan monopoly that already is on its death bed.
As for the Democrats, there already is pressure on Harris to try to return to “bipartisanship” and even appoint some mainstream Republicans to her cabinet. That’s what we saw in the DNC with the Republican speakers. If Harris gets in by “normal” means, I think it’s entirely possible that she could turn in that direction. However, if she gets in through a mass movement in the streets, that fact will serve as pressure on her to move “left”.
Of course, if Trump/Vance get in, then all bets are off for what might happen, as Cheryl Zuur showed in her presentation back on Aug. 4.
Organize!What role can those who understand the extreme danger of MAGA and a possible MAGA coup play?
Right now, the overwhelming mood of those who want to fight MAGA is to elect Harris and the Democrats and hope for the best. If the Democrats get in, they are sure to disappoint many millions. And if they don’t, MAGA will feel enormously empowered and become even more aggressive. No matter what the outcome, MAGA is not going away and, in fact, increased violence from groups like AP3 I think are likely, and the Democrats will prove (once again) incapable of dealing with it adequately. I think, I hope, that that will lead to a transformation of the mood among at least a sector of the working class and working class youth.
That is what we have to look for.
It seems to me that the unions have to be at the center of such a resistance, but the union leadership will be reluctant (at best) to act. So central to any plans is to find some union members who might be willing to bring it up inside their unions and in their workplaces. The goal could be for the union to organize a meeting of all union members and supporters to discuss this danger and what the unions can do to counter it.
Maybe we can start discussions around this in our communities and/or in schools and through that find the ones and twos of union members.
Through that, MAGA Resistance Committees could be built. Such committees absolutely must be organized democratically, with regular meetings and an elected leadership. That way, no matter what the outcome of the November elections, the beginnings of a working class based movement could develop.
That is a possible avenue of approach for now. As events proceed, who knows what will develop? For example, if there is a terrorist attack, that could lead events in a very different direction. But either way, we have to start looking for ways of organizing now.
Here is the concluding part of my series on why Marxism opposes individual terrorism. In this part, we talk about the dead end of alternative to individual terrorism. That alternative is international, working class socialism. We discuss how a movement along those lines could develop in South West Asia North Africa (SWANA).
Third part in a 4 part series on why Marxism opposes individual terrorism. In this part we discuss how and why that strategy came to dominate in Palestine, how the PLO and Hamas evolved politically, what were its results, and some hints for an alternative. That alternative will be discussed in the last part of this series, or read the full article “Why Marxism opposes individual terrorism” on the Oaklandsocialist.
Indian ethno-nationalist Narendra Modi received a bit of a setback in the recent election in that country. Here, Oaklandsocialist talked with Indian socialist and campaigner for democratic rights, Kavita Krishnan, about those elections.
Oaklandsocialist presentation to forum of Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign:
TextComrades, a few weeks ago, Israeli columnist Amira Hass wrote a column in the Israeli daily paper “Haaretz” in which she asked “What enables the majority of Jewish Israelis to support this systematic and mass erasure?… What enables the majority of Jewish Israelis to remain unshocked by the fact that in about two months we’ve killed around 7,000 children (a provisional figure) with the help of America’s improved bombs?”
To answer that question, we have to go back to the early history of Zionism, which in its earliest origins created a system of European, Jewish supremacy, and sowed deep, deep divisions in the working class of Palestine and in essence labeled the Palestinians as “others”.
I am going to discuss the history of Zionism, and especially what was called “labor Zionism”, through a socialist lens. This history not only laid the roots for Israel today, it also holds lessons for present day movements elsewhere, including the issue of identity politics. We will also see how global events played themselves out in Palestine. That includes global revolution (the Russian Revolution) and counter revolution (the rise of the Nazis).
By the end of WWI, a young-ish Hungarian born bourgeois Jew, Theodore Herzl, had established the Zionist movement. Herzl believed that gentile (that is, non-Jewish) society was inevitably anti-semitic and that the answer was for Jews to create their own homeland. In practice, that meant that all Jews – capitalists, small business people and workers alike – were united. Today, Zionists claim Israel/Palestine is theirs based on the word of god, but at one point Herzl considered the idea of a Jewish homeland in South America. Ultimately he settled on Palestine as the Jewish homeland, but more specifically a homeland for European Jews. Originally the Jewish homeland was conceived as being under Ottoman rule and then after WW I under British rule. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration the British imperialists declared Palestine as a Jewish homeland, in the political sense.
British imperialism saw an increased Jewish population in Palestine as being a population base through which they could rule, just like they used or got some support from the Protestants in Ulster in Northern Ireland to rule. In fact the first British military governor of Palestine, Sir Ronald Storrs, put it very clearly. He saw the potential for a growing Jewish population in Palestine to be “our loyal little Jewish Ulster”.
Another wing of political Zionism other than that led by Herzl that developed in the post WWI era was Zionist “revisionism”, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. He called for an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Jabotinsky ended up as an outright fascist whose supporters paraded around in Nazi-like brown shirt uniforms. He was quite clear. He wrote that “Zionism is a colonizing adventure, and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.”
During the Russian civil war (following the 1917 Revolution), Jabotinsky offered to collaborate with the Ukrainian counter revolutionary general Simon Petliura, of Cossack heritage. Jabotinsky offered his forces to patrol anyJewish regions that Petliura’s army conquered. Petliura’s armies had led pogroms in Ukraine that slaughtered some 30,000 Jews from 1917 to 1920. (About 60,000 Jews were killed in pogroms in Ukraine during those years overall.) Jabotinsky’s offer to collaborate with Petliura created such a scandal within the World Zionist Organization that Jabotinsky actually withdrew from it rather than be investigated. We will see where his so-called Zionist revisionism forces led in a later period.
Jabotinsky’s traitorous role towards the Ukrainian Jews was not unique in Zionism and today he is a highly revered figure in Israel.
At that time the Jews were scattered throughout Europe, America and SouthWest Asia and North Africa, with the majority in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and Russia. They did not live in one contiguous land mass. They spoke different languages, ate different foods and in essence had different cultures. In other words, the Jews were not a people-nation in the same sense that the Kurds or the Uighurs are. As far as Palestine being their “homeland”, any Jews who were not living within Palestine had had their links with that part of the world broken thousands of years earlier. Therefore, the Zionist project did not correspond to the material conditions of Europe’s Jews and as a result Zionism was just a fringe movement among them.
As with all other peoples, the Jews were divided by class. The working class majority followed another political tendency – social democracy. It was the Jewish Bund, a Jewish social democratic party, that the majority of Europe’s Jews supported. As social democrats, the Bund had a class-based analysis. They saw society as basically divided up between capitalists and workers whereas the Zionists saw all Jews – workers and capitalists alike – as being united. And in every single nationalist movement that seeks to unite workers and capitalists, the capitalists dominate and control the movement. That is exactly what’s happened with Zionism.
Now, let’s turn to what was happening in Palestine in those early years. It’s important to stress that there had been Jews in all of the region long before Zionism arose and contrary to what we’ve been told there were no major conflicts between the Jews and the Arabs.
Also, at that time, the particular experiences that molded the Arab majority into Palestinians was just beginning, so they, themselves, referred to themselves as Arabs rather than Palestinians.
In Palestine, the Arab majority was called Fellahin – rural small farmers who either worked their own small plots or worked for a large landowner. The issue of Jewish settlers steadily encroaching on the Arab land was a huge one. However, for reasons of time, I won’t be able to deal with that issue. Instead, I am going to focus on developments within the working class – wage workers. That’s because I believe that under capitalism it is the working class that is the key force for change. And that was reflected in the fact that a dominant Zionist force in Palestine was labor Zionism as we will see.
In Palestine under British rule, the Zionist project faced a problem, because to have a Jewish homeland settled by Jews from Europe – and Zionism was a European-based project – it must attract Jewish workers from Europe. And to attract those Jewish workers, it was necessary to provide them with a standard of living that was above what the workers in the Arab world had at that time. But no capitalist, British, Arab, Jewish or anybody else, is going to offer pay above what they have to. And the extremely low wages that they could get away with paying Arab workers served to drag down the pay of Jewish workers also, which meant it was nearly impossible to attract Jewish workers from Europe. So the Zionists had two different strategies to deal with that: One was to establish what amounted to two different economies – one low value and low pay economy for Arab workers and a higher value and higher pay economy for Jewish workers. It was a form of economic apartheid. The other strategy was at times to help Arab workers raise their pay in order to raise the floor for all workers, Jewish and Arab alike. For this, some form of unionism was needed, and that was the basis of what was known as labor Zionism.
But the very term “labor Zionism” is inherently contradictory. That’s because a labor movement necessarily means uniting all of “labor” – all workers – regardless of race, gender, nationality, etc. While on the other hand, Zionism was an explicitly Jewish project aimed at building a Jewish homeland at the expense of non-Jews, meaning Arabs. In the workplace it meant building a Jewish work force that often necessarily involved replacing Arab workers with Jewish workers. So, it was impossible for Zionists to build a real labor movement, to build real unionism. And that was the contradiction that labor Zionism represented. It was an absolutely essential ingredient to the Zionist project, which absolutely had to betray real worker solidarity.Backed by the British imperialists, the labor Zionists had a lot of influence and power with the Jews coming from Europe.
In 1920, the labor Zionists held the founding conference of the Histadrut. The Histadrut was a so-called union federation, basically an alliance of various workers’ unions..
The Histradut’s full name was the “General Organization of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel”, and they meant Hebrew workers exclusively. There were struggles around Arab exclusion, but it was not until 1959 that the Histadrut accepted Arab, which is to say Palestinian, workers as full members. In other words, the Histadrut literally was a form of Apartheid or Jim Crow unionism, which means it wasn’t really unionism at all. At times the Histadrut did organize Arab workers, but as we will see, they always did so under the control of the European Jewish supremacist Histadrut leadership.
As a result of the role of labor Zionism, to this very day, the Israeli working class has a very weak tradition of genuine unionism and solidarity between Jewish and Palestinian workers. This helps explain in part the enormous divide between today’s Palestinian and Jewish workers and the low level of class consciousness.
David Ben-Gurion, who was Israel’s first prime minister and was Labor Zionism personified, said that the creation of a labor front was – quote – “the mission of the Jewish workers”. Not the common task of both groups, just the Jewish workers.
That said, the Histadrut did at times organize Arab workers to struggle for better pay, but what they did not do, and what they always opposed, was the self organizing of the Arab workers themselves.
While labor Zionist leaders saw raising the wages of the Arab workers as being in the interests of the Zionist project, they also saw all Arab organizing as a threat to their Zionist project.
In part, Arab self organizing was a threat because it went against the Histadrut’s organized efforts to replace Arab workers with Jewish workers. Also, in part, because it risked fomenting Arab nationalism, which Zionism opposed.
The Histadrut also operated as a capitalist employment agency. It was directly involved in setting up some of the Kibbutzim, or farms. These were farms owned by the Jewish Agency, a capitalist entity formerly known as the World Zionist Congress. The Histadrut also set up a Jewish construction employment agency to hire Jewish construction workers in the building of a deep water port in Haifa.
Not all Jewish workers were totally and hopelessly racist. There were a couple of political parties that expressed a drive for unity, but both of these parties tried to square the circle; they tried to align Zionism – the creation of specifically Jewish homeland – with working class unity.
The only working class party in Palestine that unequivocally rejected Zionism and tried to help Arab workers organize was the Palestine Communist Party, which belonged to the Third International. The Palestine Communist Party in part owed its existence to the revolutionary wave that swept the world working class following the 1917 Russian Revolution. But the Palestine Communist Party party had to swim against every single other political tendency in Palestine. And also by the early 1920s, that revolutionary wave was receding and in my opinion this also weakened the Palestine Communist Party.
So, now, as I begin to wrap up, let us look at how these dynamics played out in the railway industry, which was very important in Palestine at that time. The Histadrut founded the Railway Workers Association (a railway union) in 1919. Although this union belonged to the Histadrut, it also directly recruited Arab railway workers as full members. And therein lay the problem: The Arab workers reacted to the fact that the Histadrut, the parent body,only accepted Jewish members. So, while some Arab railway workers did join the union, the apartheid position of the Histadrut was a barrier to major recruitment into the railway union.
In the 1920s, there was a struggle within the Railway Workers Association for it to leave the Histadrut. Only the Palestine Communist Party advocated leaving the Histadrut. This was an uphill battle partly because the Histadrut played a major role in financing the railway workers union. The Histadrut leadership ultimately expelled the communists and then got them fired from the railways.
For obvious reasons, the Arab railway workers distrusted the labor Zionist leadership of the union. As a result, they then came under the influence of Arab middle class nationalists and formed a railroad workers union exclusively for Arab workers – the Palestine Arab Workers Society (PAWS). Ultimately, this proved to be no solution either.
In order to counter the Palestine Arab Workers Society, the Histadrut set up an organizing effort for Arab workers called the Palestine Labor League, and the PLL. Through the PLL, they partly succeeded in undermining any organizing of Palestinian workers outside of their sphere of control (such as PAWS, the middle class nationalist group).
During this entire period there were efforts at class solidarity by Jewish workers in one work place after another, for example among Haifa Jewish port workers. But without a central organization, these efforts were defeated time and again by the Histadrut. And even if they had had a central leadership, the balance of forces by that time was against them.
One final example of the racist role of labor zionism and the Histadrut in decimating working class consciousness in Palestine is that of the construction and then operation of the Nesher Cement Plant, which still exists to this day.
The plant was constructed from 1922-1924. The Histadrut succeeded in getting the construction crew to be all Jewish.
When Nesher opened in 1925, the plant employed only Jewish workers. But the quarry that supplied the raw material employed both Jewish and Egyptian Arab workers. The Histadrut tried to and did ultimately get that crew to be all Jewish.
Now here global counterrevolution played a decisive role in Zionism taking hold. In February of 1932, Hitler came to power in Germany. This resulted in a massive increase of Jewish immigration into Palestine. From the 4,000 Jews who immigrated in 1931, the number of Jewish immigrants swelled to 62,000 in 1935 alone.
There followed an economic boom in Palestine. The Histadrut campaigned for the replacement of Arab workers at the ports, in agriculture, and in construction. In all those industries, those campaigns included picketing work sites and even assaults on Arab workers.The legacies of labor Zionism and the Histadrut in particular are nothing but European Jewish supremacist apartheid and intentional misuse of the terms “labor” and “unionism”.
In conclusion, To sum up and stress my main points once again:
1) The Jewish people were not a national minority and consequently Zionism never had a mass base among European Jews prior to the rise of Hitler.
2). In placing Jewish workers under the control of Jewish capitalists, Zionism always was a reactionary and pro-imperialist movement.
3) Zionism both represented and relied upon British imperialism in this period.
4) In Palestine, Zionism completely perverted and undermined any true working class solidarity.
5) In doing so, Zionism created deep divisions between the Arab and Jewish working class, and this devastated class consciousness at that time and continues to do so to this day.
Oaklandsocialist John Reimann was interviewed by well known DJ Davey D on KPFA’s Hard Knock Radio. Listen to it here.
The chaos in the US House of Representatives will have immediate effects at home and longer term domestic and global effects. This crisis is an example of the crisis of U.S. politics as a whole. Here’s why.
audio of interview with labor activist Vitaly Dudin in Ukraine. Full interview including text coming soon. Here this post on our podcast.
Podcast On theory of permanent or uninterrupted revolution as it applies to Afghanistan
Podcast of interview with Kieran Knutson, running for president of CWA Local 2750 and Cliff Willmeng, running for Board of Directors of Minnesota Nurses Association.
Here is the audio recording Part 2 of the meeting of Workers International Network at which Rob Wallace spoke. It can be found on the oaklandsocialist podcast.
First of two parts of the presentation of Rob Wallace on capitalism and Covid 19. Also see posts as video.
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Rob-Wallace-speaks-to-the-Workers-International-Network-Part-1.mp3
Here is an interview that this blog site’s administrator, John Reimann, did with popular radio host Davey D Cook on the environmental causes of Covid 19 – how this and other viruses jump the species barrier.
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Davey-DHard-Knock-Radio-interview.mp3
Kieran is a union member and a long-time activist in Minneapolis. Here he explains who it is who has been out in the streets, how the police and the politicians are reacting and the possible future of the movement. He also talks about the presence of some of the militia types and how this movement has the potential to split some of that far right movement. Overall, he concludes that this is an uprising of the poor and the dispossessed. “It’s a beautiful thing,” he concludes.
Oaklandsocialist comments: News is now coming out of the burning of a library in Minneapolis. Also the destruction of small family-owned businesses. We don’t know exactly who did it – whether that was provocateurs or not – but this sort of thing does not serve the movement nor the community. The capitalist class is using this to counter-attack. All sorts of confusions are inevitable in this period. First and foremost we have to blame the union leadership, which has spent the last 50 years repressing working class solidarity and all the best traditions of the labor movement. Is it any wonder that we see these confusions and mistakes?
https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/inerview-with-kieran.mp3
Podcast of Oaklandsocialist introduction to Zoom meeting of this title. The meeting was hosted by the Workers International Network (WIN). https://oaklandsocialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/covid-19-the-rise-of-new-zoonotic-diseases-and-the-capitalist-disaster.mp3