The performance of the stock market is the subject of daily news report under the general subject heading of ‘the economy’. Increased activity on the stock market is usually correlated with improving economic health. There is just one fundamental problem with that picture – the stock market is not the economy, and to present it as a barometer of economic well-being is seriously misleading.

The stock market fluctuations are all very interesting, but they are divorced from the pain and tribulations of a pandemic economy. Contributing editor at Pacific Standard magazine, Jared Keller, wrote that the stock market is divorced from everyday economic reality:

Day-to-day swings in the stock market don’t indicate anything about an economy’s long-term vitality. That’s because it only represents a small sliver of U.S. employment.

Stock markets booms are all well and good, but they are not the basis of economic recovery from recessions, including the pandemic-induced downturn. Stock market booms are no basis for constructing a renewed economy of shared prosperity.

Paul Krugman, Nobel prize-winning economist and professor, has commented that the post-Covid-19 recovery is bypassing those who need it the most. The pandemic is still rampaging through communities in the United States – and the stock market rebound is increasing the wealth of the existing ultra-wealthy financial elite. Why is any putative recovery not helping the most needy? It is because stock market rebounds assist the large multinational corporations, but leaves the rest of us behind.

Krugman elaborates further that the top one percent of Americans own more than half of all stocks. The bottom half of Americans own only 0.7 percent of stocks. The ultra-wealthy 1 percent are the major players and beneficiaries of stock market activity. This is far removed from the daily and practical realities of unemployment and poverty faced by millions of people.

Matt Phillips, from the NY Times, explains the disconnect between the Wall Street stock market and American working class communities:

Part of the reason is the makeup of the stock market, and the fact that the giant companies that make up the S&P 500 operate under very different circumstances than the nation’s small businesses, workers and cities and states. They are highly profitable, hold significant sums of cash and have regular access to public bond markets. They’re far more global than the typical American family firm.

Thomas Palley, economist and writer living in Washington DC, writes that stock market prosperity is an obsessive concern which promotes a toxic illusion. Share markets create wealth for their major investors, but that wealth is not shared with the rest of the population. This has implications for the Australian economy, structured as it is along neoliberal capitalist lines.

From 2003 until 2013-14, the corporate media in Australia hailed the mining boom, a period of continuous revenue generation through the sale of our mineral and natural resources. The duration of the mining boom is flexible by a few years at either end of the time period. Be that as it may, the Australian public was invited to celebrate the ostensible ‘good times’ of increased profits due to this mining boom.

Let’s accept that Australia experienced a resources boom, beneficial to the economy. Richard Denniss, chief economist from the Australia Institute, asks a pertinent question: with all this revenue from the mining boom, did anyone suggest building world-class mental health services, or improved domestic violence resources, financed by at least a portion of the profits from the mining boom?

Did the substantial majority of the profits from the resources boom go into the coffers of the giant mining and energy multinationals, with Gina Rinehart being a typical representative of this billionaire stratum? The most effective strategy of the billionaire class is convincing the rest of us that wealth will trickle down to all of us in a cascading waterfall of shared prosperity.

Cutting the budget deficit is presented as an all-important goal – except when the multinationals want subsidies from the government in the form of tax cuts. As Denniss explains:

When powerful groups want subsidies, we are told they will create jobs. When powerless groups want better funding for domestic violence shelters or after-school reading groups, they are told of the need to reduce the budget deficit.

Millions of Americans are food insecure, while the stock market experiences a resurgence. Food banks are delivering assistance to increasing numbers of unemployed and working poor families. How are any of these people going to rise out of poverty because of the increasing profits on Wall Street? It is time for governments to stop protecting the riches of the transnational corporations, and improve the lives and health of working people.

The Trump administration has been remorselessly hostile to scientific evidence, attacking institutional that dispute his claims, cutting funding for health and environmental bodies, promoted anti-vaccine nonsense, and repudiating public health experts. He has removed environmental regulations, opened up new areas for corporate plunder, and hampered efforts to protect endangered species.

Trump is no strange to climate change denial, denouncing it as a ‘socialist conspiracy’ to reduce American ‘freedom’. Reversing environment protections, he has consistently attacked the scientific consensus on human-induced global warming. His commitment to remove public impediments to untrammelled corporate expansion is unwavering.

There is no question that Trump is hostile to scientific evidence, but today describe his efforts as a ‘war on science’ obscure the political and ideological reasons why he has thrown evidence and rationality under the bus.

Science is not overtly political, and no ideology can restrain scientific research for its own purposes. However, scientists cannot remain indifferent to the political and economic decisions that impact the wider society in which they operate. Ideology should not narrowly dictate what research scientists can and cannot do; but scientific research has political repercussions and ideological underpinnings.

Trump’s dismissal of science that does not meet his conservative ideological requirements has produced a compound crisis, especially in the aftermath of his poor handling of the current pandemic. However, Trump is only the latest politician in a long line of far right ideologues who have undermined public confidence in science.

Since coming to office, Trump has repealed – and is actively reversing – 100 pieces of environmental regulations and laws. From removing obstacles to the drilling and extraction of oil and natural gas, to the reduction of air pollution and emissions restrictions, the Trump administration is fast-tracking the opening up of the environment to exploitation by large corporations, ignoring the scientific evidence that increased dependence on fossil fuels will exacerbate global warming.

Trump, in line with his ultrarightist libertarian views, cynically portrays any kind of government regulation as ‘tyranny’, against which his fight is one of promoting ‘freedom’. Those government regulations – the ones that uphold public health and environmental safety – are the targets of corporate hostility. Exploiting noble sentiments for ‘freedom’, the Republican Party and conservative commentators ignore, dismiss and attack the scientific evidence that underpins these kinds of laws.

The current administration is overhauling the laws governing the definition of a critical habitat designation. Currently, the Endangered Species Act provides for the protection of endangered species by designating a habitat’s status critical. Under Trump’s proposed changes, corporate plunderers would have a veto over any decision to declare critical habitats, thus further imperilling rare species.

The Environment Protection Authority (EPA) is the nation’s foremost environmental watchdog, yet its powers have been weakened by the Trump administration. Scott Pruitt, the current EPA chief, has installed industry representatives to replace scientific advisers. Pruitt advised Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate accords, and roll back the Obama-era rules for creating clean power plants.

While Trump made the laughable claim that his administration’s handling of the pandemic is ‘phenomenal’, the death toll from the COVID-19 virus reaches 200,000. It is no secret that even politically conservative commentators have denounced the incompetence and wilful neglect exhibited by Trump and his colleagues. Melvin Goodman, former CIA analyst and currently professor of government at John Hopkins university, wrote that:

Trump’s ignorance and indifference toward the novel coronavirus, which is causing tens of thousands of additional deaths, is ironic, given his attacks on Barack Obama for the Ebola outbreak in 2014.  Trump proclaimed that “President Obama has a personal responsibility to visit & embrace all people in the US who contract Ebola.”

Trump’s disdain for the science of COVID-19 has its origins and parallels in the decades of climate change denialism. The energy and fossil fuel conglomerates, having spent billions of dollars in promoting misinformation and obfuscation regarding human-induced climate change, prepared a template which today’s Covid deniers follow. The echo chamber of denial has been a long time in the making.

Denouncing scientists as part of a vast ‘socialist conspiracy’ (and China is thrown in for good measure to increase racial paranoia), the fake climate skeptic groups, astroturf citizen organisations and their billionaire backers have undermined public confidence in science. This pattern is being implemented by right-wing politicians in current pandemic began, downplaying and denying its impact and condemning quarantine measures as a conspiracy by duplicitous socialists and big-government tyrants.

Am I suggesting that scientists are our infallible lords and masters? No, I am not. Am I suggesting that every politician needs to be a scientist prior to holding public office? No. Public policies need to be informed by, and based upon, scientific evidence. Trump’s attacks on science have created a compound crisis – in health care, the environment and adverse economic impacts. Lives have been lost because of official neglect.

We need a new climate policy, based on the scientific consensus. The United States has a long history of basing government initiatives on science – the development of computers, space exploration, medical innovations, and modern conveniences to improve our quality of life. A Green New Deal is neither naively utopian nor radically unrealistic, but a practical blueprint to achieve a socially just, ecological and equitable society.

While current US President Donald Trump is known for providing a platform for white nationalist views, he is certainly not the first and definitely not the worst. Nominating a president who espoused racist views, reversed black American progress, all the while maintaining an aura of ‘progressive’ politics, we can look no further than the 28th president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.

Princeton University decided to remove Wilson’s name from their School of International and Public Affairs – a decision taken last June. Wilson built up a reputation as an expert on global affairs, a peacemaker, principal advocate of the League of Nations and, among the ultrarightist Armenian diaspora at least, a hero for advocating an enlarged Armenian territory in the aftermath of World War One. How can Wilson be considered a racist?

Unrepentant white supremacist

Wilson was an unrepentant white supremacist, and his racism informed his foreign as well as his domestic policies. Perhaps we are judging his views and conduct with today’s standards – Wilson surely, was a product of his time and place. Even conceding that point, by the standards of his day, Wilson espoused white nationalist policies, and repudiated the efforts of civil rights advocates to rectify American racism.

The term Wilsonian has entered the lexicon as a description of American foreign policy geared towards democracy promotion and the implementation of nation self-determination. Though Wilson spoke of self determination, it extended to white European nations, such as the Serbs, Poles, or other Eastern Europeans. He denied anti-imperialist aspirations for black, Asian and nonwhite peoples of the world.

At home, Wilson re-segregated the federal government and its agencies, sacking black employees, and defending segregation to a group of African American civil rights leaders who visited the White House to question the president on this issue. Wilson was a vocal defender and admirer of the Ku Klux Klan, advocating a neo-Confederate view of history.

A descendant of Confederate soldiers, Wilson condemned the Reconstruction period after the civil war. He lamented the defeat of the Confederacy, and denounced ‘liberal’ northern industrialists who encouraged the supposedly racially inferior peoples to dominate American society. Sympathising with the KKK, Wilson regarded the Confederate ‘lost cause’ as a righteous venture, and helped that monstrosity enter the mainstream American society.

Wilsonian hypocrisy

He spoke eloquently about the equality of nations, and proposed the establishment of the League of Nations to set out international laws. These laws would govern the conduct of international actors, and avoid devastating and catastrophic military conflicts, such as the terrible global conflagration of WW1. These proposals were motivated, not by humanitarian concern, but by coldly calculated economic and political interests.

Wilson supported the self-determination of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other subjugated Eastern European nations for the purpose of creating a cordon sanitaire, a bloc of anti-communist nations to isolate Soviet Russia. His advocacy of Wilsonian Armenia, at the expense of the defeated Ottoman Turkish empire, had more to do with establishing a ‘Christian’ and reliably anti-communist Armenia as a southern bulwark against Soviet Russia.

In the United States at the time, being a Christian from the Middle East was a portal into transformation from unacceptable nonwhite migrants – namely Muslim – into legally tolerable Christian, if not completely white, migrants. Wilson did not hesitate to deploy troops, along with 13 other nations, to grab territory from Russia during that nation’s civil war. Wilson’s long-standing reticence to get involved in WW1 quickly evaporated when the opportunity arose to annex Russian Siberia, and oppose the Communist state, in the immediate aftermath of the world war.

All notions of the equality of nations disappeared in 1915, when Wilson unhesitatingly sent US troops to militarily occupy the nation of Haiti. The US authorities, under Wilson’s instructions, assumed control of the key sectors of the Haitian economy, installed a president friendly to US interests, and displayed racist attitudes towards the predominantly black Haitian population.

Defeating the racial equality proposal

This invasion does not correspond to the portrayal of Wilson as an idealistic and anti-imperial statesman. Indeed, when provided the opportunity to enshrine racial equality as a founding principle of the League of Nations, Wilson did his utmost to manoeuvre behind the scenes to defeat such a proposal. During the Paris Peace Conference, the new imperialist power in the game, was Japan. The latter was obviously nonwhite, and had the strength to put their case during the 1919-1920 peace conference.

Japan suggested including a Racial Equality Clause in the foundational document of the League of Nations. It was a modest proposal, and to be sure, Tokyo was concerned with the mistreatment of Japanese migrants in America, and not motivated by general anti-racist consciousness. Be that as it may, the United States and the UK jockeyed behind closed doors to oppose this clause.

The loudest and most obnoxious opponent of the racial equality clause was Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes. Bombastic and stubbornly racist, Hughes was a committed white supremacist, and strenuously opposed Asian migration to Australia. Wilson, while maintaining a formal neutrality on the issue, deployed a procedural manoeuvre to squash the racial equality clause – the vote on it must be unanimously affirmative, otherwise it would be rejected.

No other proposal in the League of Nations required a unanimous vote – with Australia firmly opposed, the racial equality clause was defeated. Wilson’s democratic idealism demanded white racial homogeneity. Anti-colonial struggles were all well and good, but were outside the realm of approval for Arab, Asian, black and nonwhite peoples.

Wilson drew the racial colour line, both domestically and globally. He did his utmost to maintain a system of racialised economic inequalities. That is the legacy which must be rejected.

The growing and persistent anti racism protests in the United States have faced opposition from two primary quarters. US President Donald Trump, representing the federal government, has vociferously attacked the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, denouncing it as a ‘Marxist-inspired’ plot. The second source of opposition does not originate from the US authorities, but has been encouraged by federal and state law enforcement.

White nationalist militia and vigilante groups – organised loosely as ‘Blue Lives Matter’ – have violently confronted BLM protesters, usually with the connivance of the police. These racist militia groups – which are accurately described as racist terrorist organisations – trace their ideological origins to the mass white racist violence directed against African American and anti racist movements for greater equality.

Armed ultrarightist militia groups have long vented their vitriol against federal government tyranny. They have denounced what they consider the steady erosion of individual liberties and accumulation of power by the US federal government. Stockpiling military-grade weapons was rationalised as a necessary backstop measure to fight an impending battle for freedom and the ‘true’ US constitution. How ironic it is that these white vigilante groups are currently fighting alongside US law enforcement agencies, and have a friend in the White House.

Indeed, white terrorist vigilantes have helped to enforce the very tyranny they claim to oppose – omitting to mention that they are the shock troops of white racist tyrannical order.

White nationalism has produced radicalised killers in the past, and the latest, Kyle Rittenhouse, is no exception. The 17 year old Rittenhouse traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he murdered two people. He did this with the approval of his parents, and under the watchful eye of the police. This was a killing motivated by the political agenda of the racist Right, enabled by the gun-toting militia groups that have rallied against the BLM protests.

People such as Rittenhouse do not emerge out of nowhere. They are created by a culture of armed white vigilantism, police connivance and facilitation of racist violence, and the circulation of racially-paranoid conspiracy theories. Throughout American history, the lines between law enforcement and white vigilantism have always been blurry. In fact, white vigilante racism has found a friendly and reception environment in the police.

President Trump has done his utmost to encourage the far right militia groups, rationalising their actions and expressing a broad ideological continuity with the white nationalist philosophy that underscores them. Hostility to the BLM protests, and the issues of systemic racism and economic disparities they have raised, has united the various strands of the ultranationalist Right.

When far right militia organisations were protesting the Covid-19 lockdown measures implemented by various states, Trump tweeted his support for the collection of anti-quarantine groups, encouraging them to ‘liberate’ their respective states. Trump has recycled white nationalist conspiracy theories, pushing unsubstantiated and outlandish claims about the origins of the Covid-19 virus, and attacking BLM as a result of a socialist plot funded by George Soros.

White vigilantism is nothing new in American history. As a colonial-settler project, white nationalism requires the cultivation of a culture of preemptive violence, particularly against the indigenous people, but also against ethnic minorities. Jonathan Obert, an assistant professor of political science at Amherst college, wrote that white vigilantism has been an adjunct of American law enforcement, upholding racial and economics hierarchies.

When ultranationalist militias have struck out to enforce white supremacy, law enforcement agencies have at best kept their response muted and quiescent. During the civil rights movement, when white vigilante mobs attacked black communities, police authorities quietly kept their distance, allowing the perpetrators to commit their crimes.

Vigilante violence flares up as an armed response to the assertion of African American communities and their demands for equality and representation. Police authorities have a long history of active collaboration with armed militia groups, and it is not only in the ‘Deep South’ where the lines between law enforcement and racist vigilantism are blurred. Bigotry has marched proudly through the streets of the ostensibly liberal North.

Ishaan Tharoor, writing in The Washington Post, states that ultranationalist terror groups are becoming more mainstreamed under the Trump administration by posing as ‘victims’ of encroaching black and ethnic minority power. Fear-laden manifestos, issued by white racist killers, speak to a culture of reactionary grievances and racially-resentful driven politics.

The eruption of xenophobic nationalism, encouraged and used by the police, exposes the racist underbelly of American capitalism. Indeed, racism and capitalism are conjoined twins, relying on and sustaining each other. It is time to revisit the writings of WEB Du Bois, who spoke about the colour line as the great unspoken division of modern society. The surge of ultrarightist extremism is not outside of the mainstream in American society.