CPP: On the defeat of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following Nov. 8 statement from the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

The American people deserve praises for voting against US President Donald Trump in the recently concluded presidential elections and preventing another four years of Trumpian fascism, militarism, racism, misogyny and bigotry. While the electoral contest was tight, it saw the defeat of a sitting president. Any attempt by Trump to question and overturn the results through legal maneuver will surely be met with greater resistance.

The elections were carried out amid widespread criticism of the Trump government’s disregard and response to the Covid-19 pandemic which has resulted in large numbers of deaths and infections among the American people. He implemented economic policies that promoted tax cuts and further concentration of wealth in the hands of monopoly capitalists and causing millions of working-class Americans to suffer widespread joblessness, low wages, lack of access to public services, indebtedness, homelessness and other social ills.

Under Trump, US imperialist militarism and aggression intensified. He continued to employ and expand economic sanctions against countries asserting independence. He expanded the US “war on terror” to push US military aggression. He ordered armed strikes in Iraq. He supported resurgence in production of nuclear weapons. He aggressively pushed for sales of US weapons to oppressive regimes. He walked back on US commitments against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles and contact-detonated mines, as well as to the Paris Agreement on climate change.

US President-elect Joe Biden rode on the crest of a gigantic wave of democratic mass movement which has engulfed the entire country. The Black Lives Matter movement since the start of May is the latest display of mass opposition following the show of mass resistance by American workers, immigrants, women, youth and other sectors of American society. Over the past few months, hundreds of thousands of workers have taken to the streets to protest racism, police brutality and attacks against civil rights, as well as to amplify the clamor for jobs, higher wages, work safety, subsidies for health and education, housing, proper public health response to the pandemic and other urgent demands.

The American working class and people must continue to organize and mobilize in their numbers to make the Biden government act swiftly to respond to these urgent demands. Conditions are ever favorable for proletarian revolutionaries to strengthen their ranks and expand the scope of their leadership.

Biden will now head the US imperialist state amid worsening crisis of the global capitalist system. Over the past two decades, the US has been reasserting its global hegemony through military might to protect and expand its economic interests to the detriment of workers and people and sovereign countries around the world. For more than ten years now, the US government has deployed its troops and its armada of aircraft carriers in the Middle East, Europe and Asia and has waged wars of aggression and intervention. It continues to build up military presence in the Asia-Pacific as it counters the build-up of China’s military and economic strength.

In the Philippines, the US military continues to maintain facilities and troops across the country, and extend military funding, training and support to the AFP and the Duterte government. US military support to the Duterte regime goes to expanded and intensified drug war sham and counterinsurgency operations that have resulted in thousands of killings, widespread abuses of human rights, incessant murder of activists, unlawful arrests, torture and imprisonment of critics and opposition forces.

With the ascendancy of Biden, the Filipino people and their friends in the US must strengthen the call for an end to military support to the Duterte fascist terrorist regime. They must double their efforts to convince the American people that continuing US military support for the Duterte regime equals support for his tyranny, his bloody reign of murder and state terrorism against the Filipino people.

They must demand an end to the Operation Pacific Eagle-Philippines under which US military troops are deployed in the country in the name of “counter-terrorism” but which actually provide support to the AFP in its campaign of suppression against the Filipino people. At the same time, the Filipino people must demand complete abrogation of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) and other military treaties which perpetuate unequal military relations between the US and the Philippines.

As the global capitalist crisis and imperialist conflicts intensify, the Filipino people must continue to carry forward their struggle for genuine national freedom and seek an end to US neocolonial rule in the country.