(Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said he’s not considering a run for U.S. president, and said a report that he had given serious thought to a campaign was misleading.
“I tell people, I thought that I should think about it,” Dimon said Thursday, drawing laughs from the audience at a Council on Foreign Relations event in New York. “I never did any work or any polling or any of that. I did think about it and decided not to.”
CNBC reported earlier in the day that Dimon spent much of 2018 mulling a possible run for president.
“I didn’t do any real work. If I was going to really think about it, I would have spoken to 50 people. I would have done my homework, which I didn’t do any of that,” Dimon said. “So it was blown out of proportion.”
Socialism haunts the American ruling class
In the two months since Donald Trump vowed in his State of the Union Address that “America will never be a socialist country,” the right-wing demagogue president and the Republican Party have embraced anti-socialism as the defining theme of their campaign in the 2020 elections.
Speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee Dinner last week, Trump declared that he will be running in 2020 to fight a “socialist takeover” of the United States. “I love the idea of ‘Keep America Great’” as a campaign slogan, Trump said, “because the socialists will destroy” the country.
Trump’s rhetoric is increasingly being embraced by the Republican Party as a whole. Last week, Utah Congressman Chris Stewart announced the formation of an “anti-socialist caucus” in the House of Representatives. This “anti-socialism movement” would serve “as a bulwark to stop the advancement of socialist policies and legislation,” Stewart said.
“If we fail to recall those dangerous times,” he added, “the primitive appeal of socialism will advance and infect our institutions.” Socialism wants to “destroy freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” the congressman declared.
Republican ideologue Pat Buchanan went farther, declaring that the 2020 election would be a choice between Trump and socialism, in which “Trump would be the nation’s last line of defense against the coming of a Socialist America.”
While Trump and the Republicans express it in a particularly crude form, both major parties of the American ruling elite are united in their hatred and fear of socialism. Last week,
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who
was known as Barack Obama’s favorite
banker and who has been a major donor to
the Democratic Party, centered his annual
letter to shareholders on a denunciation of
socialism.
Dimon’s bank received tens of billions of
dollars in government bailouts and many
billions more from the Obama
administration’s ultra-low interest rate and
“quantitative easing” money-printing policies.
He told his shareholders that “socialism
inevitably produces stagnation, corruption”
and “authoritarian government,” and would
be “a disaster for our country.”
These statements express the fear that pervades the ruling class over the growth of political opposition within the working class to social inequality, which is fueling an international strike wave. Last year, more than half a million US workers went on strike, a 20-fold increase over 2017.
Last week, Ray Dalio, the former CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, published an essay warning that the United States may be on the brink of social revolution.
He wrote: “Disparity in wealth, especially when
accompanied by disparity in values, leads to
increasing conflict and, in the government,
that manifests itself in the form of populism of
the left and populism of the right and often in
revolutions.”
He added that “we are now at a juncture in which” the growth of social inequality, unless reversed, would lead to a “great conflict and some form of revolution.”
Stratfor, the private intelligence service, warned that the 2020 US election represents a “global inflection point,” marked by the intersection of soaring social inequality and a crisis of global dominance for the United States. “The ‘socialist’ label is being bandied left and right,” it wrote, “as a way of questioning the very survival and moral legitimacy of US capitalism.”
What haunts the ruling class is not left-talking figures within the Democratic Party such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but rather the objective impulse toward mass working-class struggle and hostility toward capitalism. Though only as yet in its initial stages, the growth of the class struggle will inevitably bring about a development of explicit anti-capitalist and socialist sentiment.
Facing an international economic, social and political crisis for which they have no answers, the ruling elites around the world are promoting extreme right-wing movements. All of these movements rose to prominence, like Trump, by promoting xenophobia and economic nationalism, but they are increasingly expressing their essential social character, in keeping with all fascist organizations, in their extreme hatred of socialism.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron has made overtures to the far-right National Rally and praised Marshal Philippe Petain, the war-time Nazi collaborationist dictator. In Britain, Brexit has been used to mobilize right-wing extremists, who murdered Labour Party MP Jo Cox, plotted to kill another Labour MP, violently assaulted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and repeatedly desecrated the grave of Karl Marx.
The efforts of the American ruling elite to promote a fascistic movement against the growth of socialist opposition within the working class underscores the critical importance of the meetings being held across the US by the Socialist Equality Party and the IYSSE, beginning this week, under the title “The Threat of Fascism and How to Fight
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