The
Anti-Inauguration
Building resistance in the Trump era
a joint project of
Jacobin, Haymarket Books, and Verso Books
2017 Anand Gopal, Jeremy Scahill, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Naomi Klein, and Owen Jones
Published in 2017 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
info@haymarketbooks.org
ISBN: 978-1-60846-865-2
Trade distribution:
In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com
In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca
In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com
All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
Table of Contents
Naomi Klein
Anand Gopal
Jeremy Scahill
Owen Jones
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Welcome to the Anti-Inauguration
D onald Trumps shocking electoral victory could have had a very different outcome than it has. The millions opposed to what he represents could have been overcome by demoralization, paralyzed in the face of what will no doubt be a frightening four years.
Instead we have seen a very different response. Inauguration-day protests gave way to the historic Womens Marches the following day, which brought millions out across the country and the world. Just days later, as Trump began unleashing executive orders aimed at abortion rights and immigrants, tens of thousands more poured back into the streets.
Any movement, especially one in its infancy, needs ideas. And politics. To this end, Jacobin, Haymarket Books, and Verso Books came together to present The Anti-Inauguration, to provide some initial thoughts on what resistance should look like in the age of Trump and what kind of future we should be fighting for.
The number of people seeking answers to these questions has been surprisingly large. Just hours after Donald Trumps inauguration, over a thousand people gathered at the historic Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C. for The Anti-Inauguration. In the days since, over two hundred thousand have watched video of The Anti-Inauguration from their computers or at watch parties. To bring these important ideas to even more people, we produced this free book you are now reading.
The numerous threats posed by the Trump administration are not likely to disappear soon. It is our hope that the same can be said of the staggering number of people who are ready to fight against Trump, and for a world far better than the one on offer. We hope this book can help facilitate the important discussion about what politics our growing movements will need.
Watch the full night of speeches online: bit.ly/Anti-Inauguration
Its not enough to simply say no to attacks
Naomi Klein
W e saw some incredible work at the Inauguration Day protests: in the climate bloc and so many of the blocs, shutting down checkpoints; Black Lives Matter locking down what a day!
So we dont come together just feeling defeated, right? This was a powerful day, and we are going to build on that.
Lets pause to recognize what happened just now. The people who already possess an already obscene share of the planets wealth, and whose share grows greater year after year latest count: eight guys are worth half the world are determined to grab still more.
The key figures populating Trumps cabinet are not only the ultra rich we know that, and frankly thats not a big change. But they appear to have been selected on the basis of having made their money from knowingly causing maximum harm to the most vulnerable people on the planet. That appears to be a job requirement for entering. So these arent just ubercapitalists theyre, like, the junk capitalists.
Theres junk banker Steve Mnuchin, Trumps pick for Treasury Secretary, whose lawless foreclosure machine, as its called, kicked tens of thousands of people out of their homes, many of them people of color and the most vulnerable people in the United States.
From junk mortgages to junk food, theres Trumps pick for Labor Secretary, Andrew Puzder. As CEO of his fast food empire, it wasnt enough to pay his workers an abusive, non-livable wage; his company also stands accused in several lawsuits of stealing its workers labor by failing to pay them even those unacceptable wages for the work they did, for the overtime they worked.
Working from junk food to junk science, theres Trumps pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. Exxon, the company he worked for for his entire life, bankrolled and amplified garbage science and lobbied fiercely against meaningful international climate action behind the scenes. In no small part because of these efforts, the world lost decades when we should have been kicking our fossil fuel habit, making the climate crisis much, much worse.
And because of that, countless people on this planet are already losing their homes, to storms and rising seas, already losing their lives in heat waves and droughts, and countless millions will ultimately see their homelands and countries disappear beneath the waves because of the climate change weve locked in. As usual, the people impacted worst and first are the poorest, overwhelmingly black and brown people around the world, who did the least to cause this crisis.
Stolen homes, stolen wages, stolen cultures, stolen countries all immoral, all extremely profitable. And it is precisely because of these actions, because they have been so extreme, so brazen, that this gang and the sectors that they represent, were actually very worried about their respective parties coming to and end.
To put it bluntly, they were worried about the rising power of our movements.
Bankers like Steve Mnuchin remember the 2008 financial collapse and the open talk of nationalizing the banks. They witnessed the rise of Occupy Wall Street, and then the resonance of Bernie Sanderss campaign, with its central anti-bank message, attracting thirteen million votes.
Service sector bosses, like Andrew Puzder, are terrified of the rising power of the Fight for $15, which has been winning victories in cities and states across the country. And had Bernie won, that campaign would have had a champion in the White House. They came so close. Imagine how frightening this is to a sector that relies on exploitation so centrally to keep prices down and profits up.
And no one has more reason to fear ascendant social movements than good old Rex Tillerson. Because of the rising power of the global climate justice movement, Exxon is under fire on every front. Pipelines carrying its oil are being blocked, not only here in the United States but around the world. Divestment campaigns are spreading like wildfire on campuses and cities, causing market uncertainty, and over the past year Exxons various deceptions have come under investigations by the SCC and by multiple state Attorneys General.
Make no mistake. The threat to Exxon posed by meaningful climate action is an existential threat. The temperature targets that are laid out in the Paris Climate Deal negotiated last year are wholly incompatible with burning the carbon that Exxon has in its proven reserves. Thats how a company like Exxon is valued on the market, and they were facing increasingly vocal questions from their shareholders, asking them about the longevity of their business model, and if they were in fact not going to be stranded with a whole bunch of useless, unburnable carbon assets.
