And the winner is:  Wal-Mart!

November the eighth is Presidential Election Day in United States

By Daniel Paquet                                                         dpaquet1871@gmail.com

“In a last-ditch effort to rally his supporters and deter his opponent, Donald Trump repeatedly called Hillary Clinton a liar and denounced her actions as criminal as he sought to prevent the presidential contest from slipping out of his grasp.”[1]

However, the US remains the single most powerful democracy (sic) in the world.  A Hillary Clinton victory in November would mean an entirely different global environment to the one that would emerge if the US were to end up with a presidency of the type imagined in the 2004 Philip Roth novel, The Plot Against America, in which the pilot Charles Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt in the 1940 election.”[2]

How could we assess the current economical situation in the U.S.A. nowadays?

“The US economy is expected to strengthen in the second half of 2016 after growing more slowly than potential in the first half.  After five successive quarters of being a drag on growth, inventory investment is expected to contribute positively in the second half. In addition, business should regain momentum.  Specifically a rising oil rig count suggests an improvement in energy investment.  Residential investment also contracted in the second quarter as the composition of housing construction shifted toward smaller homes.  It is expected to resume growing, in line with demographic demand for housing.  Meanwhile, consumption growth has been strong, underpinned by robust consumer confidence and a strong labour market, with ongoing robust job gains over the past several years.

Economic growth is expected to pick up to about 2 per cent on average over 2017 - 2018, as forecast in the July Report.  However, the expected composition of growth has shifted.  Business investment is a projected to expand at a more moderate pace than previously forecast, and the profile for residential investment is expected to be lower.  Offsetting these revisions is a slightly faster pace of consumption growth.  Business investment is now projected to grow about 3 per cent per year over 2017-2018, in line with the anticipated recovery in aggregate demand.  Growth in exports should also pick up as the drag associated with the past appreciation of the US dollar continues to dissipate.

Core PCE (personal consumption expenditure) inflation has risen from its recent trough of 1.4 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2015 and is projected to reach 2 per cent by 2018, as wage pressures rise and the disinflationary effects of the past exchange rate appreciation ease.”[3]

The question is:  what would America look like after fascist-like governments having been in power?

“It may be that national populists and cynical autocrats, but new forms of resistance to bigotry are also emerging.  It may be that national populist have overreached (Trump’s racist and misogynist antics); or that memories of a dark past and the need to avert  political catastrophe have come to the fore (Germans wanting to counter the far-right Alternative for Germany, French citizens worried about Le Pen). (…)

But from Clinton’s lead to the surprising strength of Europe’s political centre-ground, and with the novelty of Russia being discredited on many fronts, the picture is not just doom and gloom for the democratically minded.  If this is an interconnected world, then the pushback against national populism may be stronger than we think.”[4]

“A vital lesson of the modern era is that internationalism (e.g. imperialism, -Ed.) has stabilized the world, while lapses into bellicose nationalism have wreaked havoc. (…)

Through the 1990s, for the most part, economies continued to grow, median incomes climbed, jobs were plentiful and markets signaled a bright future.  In 2007, the Dow Jones industrial average soared to a record high. A year later, the euro reached its maximum value against the dollar.  But within a few months, America’s banking and housing sectors had crashed, prompting the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.  Close to nine million Americans lost their jobs and a similar number of homeowners were forced to foreclosures, surrenders of their homes or distress sales.  The decline in national wealth hit the poor and middle class hardest. (…)

The election campaign in the United States has revealed a similar malaise.  Many Americans, especially in rural and blue-collar areas, are pessimistic about the future and nostalgic for a seemingly better past. (…)

(On the other hand), the NATO alliance needs beefing up to help prevent Europe’s political disintegration – and this must be a major priority for any incoming United States administration.

The next president will have domestic challenges as well, given the gridlock between the executive and legislative branches, and an inward turn in the public mood.  The current polarization and dispiriting presidential campaign may also cast a pall over the future.”[5]

As some Canadian columnists put it, there is a resemblance between Donald Trump and some candidates to the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada; out of them, Kellie Leitch. 

“Long on bombast and short on details, Ms.Leitch’s Canadian value s proposition (to the House of Commons, -Ed.) has a certain Donald Trump-like whiff to it.  And much like Mr. Trump’s various utterings, it might play well for a segment of her party’s base but hasn’t yet proven to be successful with the voting public at large.  Even so, that she sees dividends in exploiting Canadian values says more about that old cliché than many would care of admit  If Ms. Leitch’s campaign gains support, it would as in the case with Mr. Trump’s candidacy, make Canadians acknowledge the level of their hostility toward the  very kind of people who built the country in the first place.”[6]

Surely, several Sanders’ organizers regret even more deeply the resignation of their candidate.  They probably think that he would have done it better. Ms. Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street confirms it unfortunately.

“Some of Mr. Sanders’s admirers have been compelled to consider again what might have been.  With a couple of beaks and more fortunate timing, many of t hem believe, the rumpled socialist really, truly could have been president.  (He had the support of unions, such as) the National Nurses United… (They said) ‘It’s going to look like change.  But it’s not change’.”[7]

Nevertheless, it seems obvious that many voters will express themselves by electing the less of the two evils. 

One commentator wrote:  “I just wish more of that (meaning strongly in favour of capitalism, -Ed.) Hillary were campaigning right now and building a mandate for what she really believes.  WikiHillary? I’m with her.  Why?  Let’s start with what Wikileaks says she said at Brazil, Banco Itau event in May 2013:  ‘I think we have to have a concerted plan to increase trade… and we have to resist protectionism, other kinds of barriers to market access and to trade.’  She also said, ‘My  dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, sometime in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.’  That’s music to my ears.  A hemisphere where nations are trading with one another, and where more people can collaborate and interact for work, study, tourism and commerce, is a region that is likely to be growing more prosperous with fewer conflicts, especially if more of that growth is based on clean energy.”[8]

Nevertheless, “we must also note that Engels is most definite in calling universal suffrage an instrument of bourgeois rule.  Universal suffrage, he says, obviously summing up the long experience of German Social-Democracy, is ‘the gauge of the maturity of the working class.  It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state”.[9]

“What is now happening to Marx’s teaching has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation.  During the life time of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander.  After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes ad with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.  At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the working -class movement concur in this ‘doctoring ‘of Marxism. They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of t his teaching, its revolutionary soul.  They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie.”[10]

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[1] Slater, Joanna, Trump, Clinton trade attacks in final debate showdown, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Thursday, October 20, 2016, front page

[2] Nougayrède, Natalie, Backlash against bigotry is under way, The Guardian Weekly 21.10.16, page 19

[3] Bank of Canada, Global Economy, Monetary Policy Report, Ottawa, October 2016, page 3

[4] Ibidem, Nougayrède, page 19

[5] Solana, Javier (former foreign minister of Spain, high representative for the European Union’s common foreign and security policy and secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization); Talbott, Strobe (president of the Brookings Institution and a former United States deputy secretary of state), How to stop the decline of the West, The New York Times, International Edition, Thursday, October 20, 2016, page 12 and 14

[6] Patriquin, Martin (Québec bureau chief for Macleans’s), TheTrump side of Canada, The New York Times,  International Edition, Thursday, October 20, 2016, page 12 and 14

[7] Flegenheimer, Matt; Alcindor, Yamiche, Some Sanders backers still feeling regret,  The New York Times, International Edition, Thursday, October 20, 2016, page 4

[8] Friedman, Thomas L., Supporting WikiHillary for president, The New York Times, International Edition, Thursday, October 20, 2016, front page

[9] Lenin, V.I., The State and Revolution, Foreign Languages Press, Peking 1970, Reprinted by Red Star Publishers, U.S.A., 2014, page 10

[10] Ibidem, Lenin, page 3