Monthly Archives: July 2020

US President Donald Trump has sparked outrage by suggesting the US presidential election should be postponed. Though he later seemingly back-pedaled the idea, the comments nonetheless faced fierce criticism from Democratic and Republican political figures alike.

Trump’s comments are certainly outrageous, though at the same time utterly unsurprising. His pathological tendency to lie and his overt authoritarian tendencies have long been apparent to anyone who pays the slightest attention to US current affairs.

But beneath the outrage of political opponents from within the two major US political parties lies a deep web of hypocrisy and false assumptions. Because the US has never really been a democracy. And nor have any of Trump’s predecessors been whiter-than-white when it comes to authoritarianism and dishonesty.

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A committee of the US Democratic Party just voted on its policy position regarding aid to Israel. The proposal would continue to fund Israeli security forces generously. This should come as no great surprise given that, with a handful of exceptions, both major US parties have been staunch supporters of Israel and its foreign policy.

But this year, a crucial amendment was roundly defeated by a majority of the committee’s members, which casts serious doubt on the Democratic Party’s commitment to the two-state solution. And this in turn raises the question of whether the US political class has ever really supported it in the first place, or whether it has simply served as a convenient political smokescreen for a much more sinister project.

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The Canary recently reported that Tory MPs defeated an amendment which would have committed the government to protect the NHS from privatisation in a new trade deal with the US.

This raises the obvious question of whether we’re about to see the end of the NHS’s founding principle of ‘free at the point of service’. But there’s also a more elementary question worth exploring – whether it’s even possible to maintain social reforms like universal healthcare when economic decision-making remains in private hands. With corporate power over political systems becoming more entrenched and the media serving as its mouthpiece, the answer to this question increasingly seems to be a resounding ‘no’.

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Tory MPs have defeated an attempt to protect the NHS from the effects of a UK-US trade deal. This provides definitive proof (as if any more were needed) that the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson’s leadership doesn’t care one iota about the NHS’s founding principle. And it’s not just ‘free-at-the-point-of-need’ that is at stake.

The US trade deal could affect the UK’s healthcare system in all manner of ways, and none of them for the better. Given the strong public support for the NHS, this highlights the Conservative Party’s degeneration into an increasingly far-right party under Johnson’s leadership and even raises questions about the validity of the UK’s claim to be a democracy.

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The Canary has previously reported on some of Joe Biden’s eyebrow-raising backers from the world of politics. The fact that his presidential campaign is receiving money from such quarters casts serious doubt on his already highly dubious progressive credentials. Now, emerging reports that he’s also receiving campaign contributions from family members of one of the world’s wealthiest corporate media barons could hammer the final nail into the coffin of his credibility.

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An open letter in a major US current affairs magazine has provoked a storm of debate about so-called ‘cancel culture’. The letter’s general thrust is that today’s public sphere has been severely damaged by a decline in open discourse due to a culture of political correctness. According to its proponents, this in turn poses a huge threat to ‘free speech’, or perhaps even to the foundations of open discourse itself.

There’s certainly something superficially attractive about this argument. After all, who could possibly be against free speech and open discourse? But in reality, the letter has a gaping blind spot. Because though it doesn’t name ‘the left’ or ‘left-wingers’ specifically, the message clearly implies that there is some kind equivalence between our conduct and that of the Trumpian faux-populist right. Ironically, this insinuation is not just completely outrageous but also is far more dangerous to public discourse than any of the letter’s own ominous and misplaced apprehensions.

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US President Donald Trump’s latest speech was one of his usual rambling and semi-coherent rants. It was filled with the standard litany of misrepresentations, half-truths, and outright lies we’ve come to expect of him. But one comment stood out as particularly revealing.

Though certainly a falsehood, it wasn’t the kind of falsehood that is confined solely to the tangled mind of Trump or the ignorant worldview of his followers. Rather, it has formed one of the centerpieces of right-wing thought in the US since long before Trump entered the political arena. This shines a revealing light on the fundamental nature of the right-wing mindset that is deeply unsettling. And it raises profound questions for progressives about the obstacles that stand in the way of radical change and how we might work to overcome them.

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The US capital city’s American football team has officially dropped its historic name and logo following decades of criticism. The name has been widely condemned as a derogatory racial slur against Native Americans while its logo has come under fire for playing on racist stereotypes. This move should be welcomed and is indeed long overdue. But it represents just a small symbolic first step. Because there’s still a great deal of work ahead to mend the historic injustices committed against North America’s indigenous peoples.

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US President Donald Trump recently intervened in the case against his former campaign adviser Roger Stone. This represents just the latest example of Trump abusing his presidential powers to overrule a court decision. In fact, it forms part of a long established modus operandi in which Trump acts more like a cross between a tinpot dictator and an organised crime boss than the leader of a major nation.

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Earlier this year, former vice president Joe Biden effectively won the Democratic Party primary contest. As The Canary has previously argued, his victory is nothing to celebrate given that his progressive credentials are paper thin. Throughout his political career, Biden has been a prolific supporter of war and cuts to social security. He’s also a friend of some of the most reactionary elements in the US congress.

Now, his campaign has started receiving funding from former officials of a previous Republican Party administration. And this shows decisively what has long been suspected by progressive political analysts and commentators – that the US essentially has two right-wing major parties.

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