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Vol. 81/No. 31 August 21, 2017
(front page)
Political crisis of US rulers stokes liberal drive to indict Donald Trump
BY SETH GALINSKY
Liberal Democrats and their allies in the mass media, consumed by
hysteria over the presidency of Donald Trump, are campaigning to get him
indicted, or at least impeached. Their real target is the workers who
rallied and voted for him, seeking change and to “drain the swamp” in
Washington. The propertied rulers see — and fear — the threat of bigger
class battles in the future. Getting rid of President Trump is a way to
tell them to stand down.
“Trump gives voice to a faction of America that also feels aggrieved,”
Charles Blow writes in his New York Times column Aug. 7. “Trump won
because he whines. He whines in a way that makes the weak feel less
vulnerable and more vicious.
“The way they see it,” Blow continues, “they are victims of coastal and
urban liberals and the elite institutions — economic, education and
entertainment — clustered there. They are victims of an economy evolving
in ways, both technical and geographic, that cuts them out or leaves
them behind.”
And you can find dozens of similar commentaries in the Times, the
Washington Post and CNN, as well as the morning “news” and nighttime
talk shows.
Their gripe isn’t really that Trump’s policies are so different. He’s a
billionaire who shares the goals of Democrats and Republicans alike to
defend the interests of U.S. capital at home and abroad.
Millions of workers have been pushed out of jobs, with the “labor force
participation rate” at record lows. They face a growing crisis in
finding — or affording — health care. Infant mortality is going up. Life
expectancy is falling. And there’s an explosion of opioid addiction.
For Blow and his ilk, workers seeking a solution to this state of
affairs are just the “waning power of whiteness, privilege, patriarchy,”
and a desire to go back to the “good old days” when women “got
back-alley abortions and worked for partial wages” and “coal was king.”
He and his ilk see workers — especially workers who are Caucasian — as a
big, dangerous mob of racists and reactionaries.
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson Aug. 3 tells workers who back
Trump they don’t much matter. “The voice of a laid-off West Virginia
coal miner is no more authentic than that of a Silicon Valley
entrepreneur,” Robinson says, “or — and this may be shocking — an
opinion writer for a mainstream news outlet.”
“Frustrated with a political system that seems incapable of getting much
of anything accomplished,” he says, “they decided to lob in a grenade,
blow it to smithereens and start over.”
That’s true.
Facts that don’t match their assumptions don’t matter to the liberal
media. After months of articles with the wildest insinuations of Trump
administration collusion with Moscow, they have little to point to that
makes the case, but that doesn’t stop them.
And they lionize Special Prosecutor William Mueller, former boss of the
FBI, the rulers’ political police, who’s been tasked with bringing Trump
down.
Mueller impaneled a grand jury at the end of July with power to subpoena
documents, grill witnesses and make indictments. He has assembled a gang
of FBI agents, prosecutors and hot-shot lawyers to do the job.
Workers have seen this type of operation before. The rulers pick a
target, then turn special prosecutors and grand juries loose until they
find something to pin on them. They spin off leaks and do everything
possible to make the victim look like a criminal.
Mueller decided he wanted some papers from former Trump campaign
chairman Paul Manafort. Instead of asking for them, he got the FBI to
carry out a predawn raid on his home to seize them. Then he got the raid
leaked to the Washington Post, which made it the lead story on its
website Aug. 9.
It turns out that Manafort had already turned over many of them to a
congressional committee also “investigating” Trump.
Big Trump rallies
Despite wishful thinking by liberals that support for the president “is
collapsing,” Trump has called out supporters in the face of this witch
hunt in big rallies in working-class cities like Youngstown, Ohio, and
Huntington, West Virginia.
“Are there any Russians here tonight?” Trump asked to laughter from a
crowd of thousands Aug. 3 in Huntington, in the heart of coal country.
“We don’t’ need advice from the Washington swamp,” he said to cheers.
“We need to drain the swamp.”
“The reason the Democrats only talk about the totally made up Russia
story is because they have no message, no agenda and no vision,” the
president said. Under his leadership, Trump promised, “American workers
will build the future and American energy and American clean coal will
power this future.”
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