Saturday 31 December 2016

Before the Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe -Part 22.

   Before the Age of the Donald - Part 22.


        So far most observers have focused in on what the new Trump administration will do in foreign policy when it takes power in January. I want to make a few predictions on what it will do to domestic programs. It's my belief that the Donald as president will launch an all-out assault on all social programs.
    He will scrap Obamacare as soon as possible. He will also try to privatize Social Security that distributes benefits to close to one in five Americans. If that fails I predict he will slash Social Security benefits by a whopping 25 per cent or more. Or perhaps he will do both. Then he and his Republican cohorts, aided by wimpy Democrats will radically cut back money going to food stamps and Medicaid. These two programs have helped poor people survive.
     As president, Donald Trump may slash funds for Medicare, a program that has paid for medical expenses that many seniors need.
    Public sector workers will lose their jobs or at least lose their job security. Newt Gingrich is one of the Donald's advisors on this issue  and he has insisted that government workers' job security must disappear. Then I believe that government regulation of big businesses will be relaxed or in some cases dismantled completely. All of this will be done against a constant backdrop of threats of war and violence targeted at Iran and China.
    The Donald will also cut taxes way back for high income earners.  "It was the best of times it was the worst of times," wrote Charles Dickens about life in the late 18th century. For poor Americans and the nearly poor, life under the Donald will be the worst of times. Yet for the rich and especially the richest 1 per cent, life will never be better.
     Meanwhile many working people and members of the middle class will have to struggle to hold on to what they already have. Many of them voted for the Donald. They may live to regret that they did.
    
   

Wednesday 28 December 2016

Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe; Part Twenty One.

   Before the Age of the Donald - Part 21.


    If the present Chinese government took away the number one powerful spot from the U.S., would the world be a better place? This is something that has to concern the Donald when he becomes U.S. president. It's hard to know how China will perform if it becomes the most powerful power on earth. Still China's past doesn't seem to encourage much hope.
     For centuries Chinese emperors ruled their peasant subjects with an iron hand. "The civilization of China," wrote Theodore White and Annallee Jacoby in the 1940's, "rested on the effective enslavement of the common man." And the common woman too.
    Under its communist ruler Mao Tse Tung, the Chinese government promised peasants and others that it would liberate them from the tyranny of the emperors. Yet under Mao's version of communism, most Chinese people saw only modest improvements in their lives. And many suffered terribly.
    Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' in the late 1950's killed over 25 million Chinese from starvation. Mao's 'Cultural Revolution' in the mid-1960's left one and a half million people dead and turned the lives of millions of other men and women completely upside down.
     "Religion is poison," Mao told the Tibetan Dalai Lama in the 1950's. Then Chinese troops killed about a million Tibetans. The Chinese army has also killed thousands of Moslems in the province of Xinjiang. The present day head of China, Xi Xinping, made it clear to the former Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd that he has no time for Western style democracy. Still,  Chinese people have made huge steps forward in the last forty years. According to recent reports over 600 million Chinese are now living a middle class lifestyle. Over 700 million Chinese people are still poor. Yet China's embrace of what some call 'State Capitalism' has enriched many Chinese citizens.
     China's treatment of its own people has improved in the past 40 years. Still, it is no model of democracy. So if the People's Republic of China becomes the number one power in the world there's no reason to believe that it will treat the rest of the world better than the United States has or Britain did or France.
    As the French say, "On verra." Or as we say in English, "We'll see."
    

Tuesday 27 December 2016

Before The Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe: Part Twenty

    Before the Age of the Donald - Part Twenty.


          Trading African slaves and making money from this deplorable business sprung to life in the 16th century and only ended in the mid-1800's. Eric Williams was prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago for many years. In his book 'Capitalism and Slavery' Williams claimed that the money British merchants made from the slave trade, enabled them to start the Industrial Revolution.
      True or not, British merchants gained  a lot of money from trading slaves.
     "The sun never sets on the British Empire," my British parents' generation used to say. But the empire that Britain gained was won by force and violence. After defeating France in the 1760's and then the French again between 1793 and 1815, Britain did rule the world for a time. Yet it surely did some terrible things when it was top dog.
     It forced opium from India onto the Chinese and when China refused to allow this to happen, Britain waged two wars against China until the Chinese emperors gave way on this issue. British troops seized India and then brutally crushed the Indian Mutiny in 1857. British troops then gunned down Africans in parts of the African continent and then turned the conquered lands into colonies. It also crushed many rebellions in Scotland and Ireland.
     France was no angel either as its troops went around the world. It grabbed chunks of Africa nd turned them into colonies. Belgium did the same as did Germany. The U.S. as I've shown on some of my past blogs did many bad things as it piled up power and wealth. One episode I haven't mentioned yet occurred near the end of the 19th century.  U.S. troops  crushed the Spanish army in 1898 and then moved to annex the Phillippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba. All these countries were revolting at the time against Spain and wanted to be free.
     That didn't bother the U.S.. It simply invaded the Philippines and killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and thousands of Cubans. "America has no colonies," an American historian told me. "We're not like the European powers." Technically that may have been true. Still, the three above countries were basically ruled by the U.S. government and both Puerto Rico and the Philippines are still under the thumb of Washington. Only Cuba has any independence and even here the Cuban government had to fight hard to keep out of the U.S.embrace.
      So it's clear that every ruling power in the world has done terrible things. Yet would China do any better if it became number one in the global power system?
     
   

Saturday 24 December 2016

Before The Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe : Part Nineteen

          Before the Age of the Donald - Part Nineteen


         More than 500 years before the Donald became the 45th president of the United States, the world started to take its present shape. John Judis is an American political analyst. He sees the world as a heirarchy. The U.S., he says, sits at the top of the world as the globe's most powerful nation and all the other countries lie below it.
     Judis is right, at least at this date of late 2016. In the last 500 years the nations at the top have changed places. "In 1492," went an old rhyme, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Christopher Columbus helped start what's called 'The Age of Discovery'. Yet it should more truthfully called 'The Age of the White Man's Imperialism'. Soon after Columbus and his ships landed on an island in the Caribbean, Spain  sat at the top of the global heap. Yet then Holland pushed Spain aside and took over the top spot.
      After that France then led the pack. In the 19th century it was Great Britain's turn to edge out the others. "Rule Britannia," British youngsters used to sing when I was a child. "Britannia rules the waves." But by then in 1950 the United States had strode forward to rule the roost and the waves. Its position at the top seemed secure especially when its main rival, the communist-ruled Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
    "We won the Cold War with the Soviet Union," one American told me. "Now we're number one in the world." Yet maybe the U.S. won't be number one for long. Now China has emerged as the second most powerful nation on earth.  Will this be good or bad for the world's people? If the past is any guide, it may be no worse or better than when other countries headed the pack.
    Let's take a quick look back at things other countries did when they were number one or two or three on the list of top dogs. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish conquistadores sailed all over the globe, colonizing one group of peoples after another. Hernan Cortes landed in present day Mexico and killed thousands of Aztec tribes people. Then he and others turned Mexico into a colony of Spain. A few years later Pizarro conquered Peru for Spain while slaughtering thousands of Inca indigenous people.
     Then Portugal took a huge slice of what is now South America and turned that land into a colony. To-day this former colony is called Brazil.  Spain ended up ruling the rest of South and Central America. Dutch privateers and merchants seized thousands of islands in the Pacific Ocean. To-day those islands are called Indonesia. Holland also became rich from trade which included trading many slaves from Africa. The Dutch weren't the only ones doing this. Business people from Britain, France, Spain and other European countries made fortunes in trading slaves.
     This was truly the Age of European imperialism.
    
     
     

Thursday 15 December 2016

Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe: Part Eighteen.

       Before the Age of the Donald -Part Eighteen


          By 1900 or so, most indigenous Canadians had been moved off their territories that they used to wander on. Now the lands of Canada were turned over to other more powerful interests. Canada's natural resources ended up in the hands of rich white men. 12 of the largest resource companies  in the world have their head offices in Canada. Yet the wealth of these firms has rarely gone to Canada's first inhabitants.
    Often First Nations people left their reserves where it was impossible to make a decent living. Many of them today work at jobs like other Canadians. Others have drifted into inner city areas in places like Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Regina and Calgary. Here, many of them end up doing illegal drugs or drown their sorrows in alcohol. They also face racism from white people and violence sometimes from the police.
    Some Indian women who live in the inner cities become prostitutes and white murderers like Robert Pickton in B.C. stalk them and kill them. Meanwhile across Canada, in the 3100 reserves
where many indigenous people live, life goes on. Rodger, a well-travelled Canadian lives on Vancouver Island, near two or three reserves. "I've never seen such poverty and squalor," he said after canvassing for votes on a nearby reserve. "It really shocked me."
   Hundreds of kilometres to the east, across the Salish Sea and over at least two mountain ranges, you can find the Okanagan area of British Columbia.This is where the Westbank First Nation has its home. This is a prosperous community where people run businesses, children attend decent schools and many people have done well.
   Other reserves have also enjoyed the prosperity that has swept across Canada since the Second World War. Still many of the reserves across Canada are mired in poverty and just stagnate. At this time, First Nations people and indigenous people have woken up. They demonstrate, start court challenges and square off against governments and corporations that have hurt them many times. Now there are indigenous lawyers, activists, anthropologists, and other educated aboriginals. These people can go head to head with white officials,
      An anthropologist I'll call Stanley got a Ph.D in anthropology by writing his thesis  on a native band. Then he turned around a few years later and testified against the band's right to get back its ancestral land. "We know of quite a few anthropologists like that," one First Nations activist told me. "But these people can't do that anymore because we have our own anthropologists now."
    Donald Trump nor his government are responsible for the treatment of native Americans or of First Nations people, Inuit and Metis in Canada. Yet it's doubtful he would support their struggles to reclaim their lands or their dignity. We must remember that before the Age of the Donald there was racism, poverty and social justice. He didn't invent these things. He may make them worse or maybe even better. Yet he is not responsible - at least not yet - for their persistence.
     

Wednesday 14 December 2016

Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe. Part Seventeen

          Before the Age of the Donald. Part Seventeen.


         Long before Donald Trump was elected America's 45th president, many people in North America felt the lash of white racism. One group that surely got hurt by this wave of hate were native Americans or First Nations as they're known in Canada.
     Trump's home state of New York had many native Americans four hundred years ago. Today white people and others rule the state.
     So-called explorers from Europe ranged across North America from the 16th century on. In their wake they spread wars, violence and disease among native peoples. Indigenous people fought back. Yet in the end, the white man's weapons crushed most native resistance. Soon white settlements sprung up across the United States on land that once was native Indian territory. Things were no different in Canada.
    "We will be just in our time," Pierre Elliot Trudeau said shortly after his election as Canada's Prime Minister in 1968. Soon after this, Trudeau assigned his eager Liberal ally Jean Chretien to wipe out the status of indigenous Canadians, now known as 'First Nations'. First Nations people, Trudeau believed, should be completely absorbed into the Canadian mosaic. This meant stripping them of any special status they had. Trudeau also aimed to wind down all the First Nations reserves, where many First Nations people lived.
     The First Nations didn't agree with this. They protested and forced Trudeau and Chretien to give up their plans. "You gave me hell," a still ambitious Chretien told a First Nations crowd in effect, when he first ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1984.
    To-day there are close to one and a half million indigenous people in Canada. Some are First Nations people. Others are Metis. Across northern Canada, there are quite a few thousand Inuit, formerly called 'Eskimos'. Like their brothers and sisters across the U.S., First Nations people have been hammered by white racist policies. So-called explorers from Europe used them to find their way across Canada. Then white people's diseases often decimated one nation after another. Soldiers attacked the indigenous people and then herded the survivors onto ever shrinking reserves. As writers Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey have shown, in the late 19th century tens of thousands of young First Nations were jammed into so-called 'Residential Schools'.
      Here far from their homes, children endured loss of their language, molestation, sexual abuse and murder. "Over 60,000 First Nations children died in residential schools," says the defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett. Annett was thrown out of the United Church for uncovering the brutal treatment of aboriginal children at the hands of United Church, Catholic and Anglican clergy and church women. Other experts think Annett's figures are too high. Still, there's no doubt that thousands of First Nations youngsters did die while attending the residential schools. It was just another example of white racism.
      


     

Monday 12 December 2016

Before the Age of the Daonald - Part 16 by Dave Jaffe

    Before the Age of the Donald - Part 16.


        British Columbia has never needed lessons in how to grow white racism. The Japanese immigrants who started coming to B.C. in the late 19th century learned that quickly enough. In 1907 anti-Asian riots swept across Vancouver as white working people tried to trash the Japanese community. Japanese people fought back and routed the white mob.
     Yet in the 1940's the white racists got their revenge. By now in 1942 the Second World War was three years old and Japan, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were allies in the conflict. Japanese troops swept across East Asia in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Canadians fought alongside British troops in their defense of Hong Kong but the Japanese soon prevailed.
    Panicked by Japan's victories, many British Columbians insisted that native  Japanese could not be trusted. In June 1942 Canadian police rounded up all Japanese-Canadians in B.C. The Japanese were then herded into makeshift camps in the Kootenays. At war's end, they were not allowed to remain in British Columbia. They were scattered all across Canada or were deported back to Japan.
     The Canadian government sold off all the Japanese property and gave them back virtually nothing in return. It took many of the Japanese still alive in the 1980's to get compensation for their lost property.Nor was the Canadian government above causing more problems for their Japanese subjects even after no more Japanese were left in B.C..
    When the government tried to deport another 10,000 Japanese back to Japan, mainstream Canadians protested and the plan was dropped.
    "By 1946," writes George Woodcock, "a general shift in Canadian politics was taking place." The racist policies of the Nazis, says Woodcock, had made British Columbians and Canadians, "uneasy about their own prejudices and discriminatory policies in the past." Also to make up for its past racist policies, the Canadian government finally gave the right to vote to all Asian Canadians. Later in the 1960's, Ottawa changed its immigration policies and opened its doors once again to immigrants from Asia.
     Once again white racism raised its head and by 2015 many people in Metro Vancouver blamed the Chinese immigrants for sky rocketing housing prices. The B.C. Liberal government heard the outcry and slapped a 15 per cent tax on anyone from outside Canada buying a house in Metro Vancouver.
     This didn't halt anti Asian feelings in B.C. "Racism is really hard to fight," said Joyce a Japanese-Canadian said. "I have felt it often." As this part of my blog shows, Donald Trump can't be blamed for racists in B.C. Yet it would be sad if his insults to Mexicans and Muslims would give white racism even more strength in Canada's most western province.
   

Thursday 8 December 2016

Before The Age of the Donald - Part Fifteen by Dave Jaffe

   Before the Age of the Donald - Part Fifteen
     


    The wealthy people of B.C. hired many Chinese immigrants to work in their homes or at their companies. Yet they too didn't like the Chinese. "Their religion, notions of honour and rank, mode of thought, dress, amusement, and sense of beauty are not to our taste," said the famous judge, Matthew Baillie Begbie of the Chinese. "Their language appears to us ridiculous."
      The Chinese, Begbie said, despised the achievements of white people. "Yet they work more steadily, and with better success than white men."
    White working people and some small business people were far more racist than the judge. They hated the Chinese and felt threatened by these people whom they called 'Orientals'. Anti-Chinese riots broke out in Vancouver in 1887 and again in 1907. In 1907 white people also attacked the growing community of Japanese immigrants. But the Japanese, unlike the Chinese community fought back and routed the hostile mob.
     A racist Anti-Exclusion League was founded and lobbied the federal government to act against all Asian immigrants. It also found support among provincial politicians. The federal government slapped a head tax on Asian immigrants that soon climbed to $500 a person by 1903. This was an immense sum  at that time, worth thousands of dollars to-day. It surely discouraged many Asian immigrants from coming to Canada.
     White racism was also unleashed against Sikh immigrants. The Japanese ship the 'Komagata Maru' tried to stop in Vanouver in 1914 and unload its passengers. Yet with more than 350 Sikhs on board, this proved impossible to do. The officials at the port refused to allow the Sikhs to come on shore.
       The Sikhs quite rightly objected to this racist act for as they pointed out they came from India and were British subjects. After fights and violence between the Sikh passengers and police, the Canadian navy ship towed the 'Komagata' out to sea. It left Canada forever.
     In 1923 the federal government passed the Chinese Immigration Act and no more Chinese people came to Canada until the late 1960's, when Canada changed its immigration laws. By this time say the early 1920's, all immigration from Asia was stopped. It only started up again in the late 1960's. Yet more racist acts fell on the Japanese in the 1940's.





Wednesday 7 December 2016

Before the Age of the Donald - Part Fourteen by Dave Jaffe

    Before the Age of the Donald - Part Fourteen


        Some U.S. presidents change their country or the world after becoming president. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Ronald Reagan, fit into this category. Others like James Earl Carter, or 'Jimmy Carter' as he called himself, tried to change the world in office and after they'd left the Oval Office. Then there's Donald Trump who may be changing things now even before he's taken power.
    Frances which isn't her real name is a Canadian of Chinese descent. A few days ago she was walking down a Vancouver street on the west side of town. A man approached her. "Go back to where you came from," this young man shouted at her.
    "Excuse me," Frances answered back. "I was born here, right in the Vancouver General Hospital. I'm a Canadian."
    The man disagreed. "We're going to send you straight back where you came from. The Donald's in power now and you people are out of here."
      Donald Trump has promised  to deport over 11 million illegal Mexican immigrants back to Mexico. The 45th president of the United States of America may well do this. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election Trump demonized Mexicans and Moslems. Now no one can prove that Donald Trump is inciting racists in Metro Vancouver . Yet Frances has been insulted at least twice since Trump won the election.
    "I've spoken to the police about two of these incidents," Frances says. "We'll see what they dso."
     I must be fair here. Long before Donald Trump appeared on the scene, B.C. racists unleashed hate on immigrants from Asia. Let's review a little of this history here and it doesn't make for pleasant reading.
     Anti-Asian racism emerged in British Columbia in the 19th century. As historian and writer George Woodcock pointed out in his history called 'British Columbia', white working men became virulent racists in the 1880's and later as Chinese immigrants filtered into British Columbia.. The Chinese men were used as strikebreakers or scabs by their rich bosses in forestry, fishing and mining strikes. The more wealthy British Columbians also hired Chinese people as servants and workers and admired their strong work ethic. Yet that didn't mean that they liked them.
    

Saturday 3 December 2016

Before The Age of the Donald - Part 13 by Dave Jaffe

       Before The Age of the Donald -  Part Thirteen

     Anyone who's been patient enough to read this blog, should know by now that the U.S."s foreign policy isn't going to change when Donald Trump becomes America's 45th president. The U.S. of A.'s foreign policy workers will still work overtime to topple any left wing government anywhere in Asia, Africa or Latin America. The Donald hated Fidel Castro' loathes progressives in Venezuala and will be happy to see most progressive governments vanish from the face of the globe.
     Mexican refugees in the U.S. will be shipped back home, Moslems will be demonized and so on.
The wars in Syria and Iraq may be wound down but the U.S. will remain the number one military power in the world. The Donald is planning to boost spending on the country's $540 billion annual military budget.
    The Donald is also planning to make big cuts to taxes on the rich and the super rich. These people are folks just like Donald Trump. If his administration slashes spending on Medicare, Medicaid, social security and food stamps, no one should be surprised. Past Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan on, have done this also.
     Yet in contrast to when previous Republican presidents were in the White House, anti-Trump protestors will have nowhere to go but into the streets. Republicans now run everything at the federal level: the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Presidency and soon the Supreme Court. Judging from the promises Trump made on the campaign trail, a Trump presidency will be brutal and totally top-down.
     "America has imposed some terrible governments on people around the world," a friend of mine said. "Now the U.S. could get a government as bad as those ones." Donald Trump can do a lot of bad things. In any case he now runs the most powerful company in the world. It's called the United States of America. And he is now its CEO.