Miriam and All believers in democracy and a World United.
Listening to Donald Trump spin his lie regarding his accomplishments
during his first two years in office, bringing a wave of laughter,
reminded me of the story, The Emperor Has No Clothes.
Except, the Emperor had only his Royal Guard, while Donald Trump has
the nuclear button.
The author writes, "The problem is not Trump. It is a
political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two
major political parties, in which we don't count."
How many times must this message be sent out before Americans come to
their senses and set aside the distractions beset upon them by a
greater and greater Controlling Oligarchy?
The American Corporate Empire(ACE) Will do whatever it takes to
maintain power. Lie, cheat, mislead, murder, defame and disgrace its
enemies. That smiling grandfatherly fellow on the TV screen, telling
you that his bank cares for you, is lying through his dentures.
Remember, corporations are the brainchildren of the rich and powerful,
not of the Working Class.
And again, knowing that it is an over simplification, I define a
Working Class member as anyone whose life is controlled by the Ruling
Class.
Carl Jarvis
anyone
On 9/25/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl and Roger, read carefully.
Miriam
The Establishment's 'Fear' Is Different From Yours
By Paul Street
Donald Trump waits to assume power before his inauguration in January 2017.
(Patrick Semansky / AP)
The instantly famous Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed (ATOE), published Sept.
5, in which a senior Trump administration official complained about the
brutish awfulness and incompetence of Donald Trump and claimed to be
working
with other White House officials to check Trump's worst impulses, has
evoked
a range of responses on so-called social media.
"The author is Mike Pence," a first correspondent wrote to me, because the
editorial's anonymous author (hereafter "AA") used the word "lodestar," an
unusual word that Pence has used many times in the past.
No-too easy. The word choice seems calculated to throw people off. Pence,
Trump's presidential heir apparent in the case of constitutional removal,
is
like the first suspect in every murder mystery. He's the person who
initially seems to make sense as the culprit and then fades as the
investigation gets more serious.
As William Saletan showed on Slate, moreover, there's a strong linguistic,
ideological and broadly political case for the AOTE's real author being Jon
Huntsman, Trump's ambassador to Russia.
The ATOE was "treason," a second correspondent-an online
Trumpenleftist-wrote me. Wrong. The ATOE wasn't treasonous unless we
idiotically conclude that the president (a global real estate mogul) and
the
U.S. nation-state are one and the same, as in "L'Etat, C'est Trump."
"It's an imperialist coup," another "left" Trump apologist (such
preposterous "red-brown" people are surprisingly common online) told me.
That was amusing. It conjured images of Trump-himself a foiled (so far)
billionaire advocate of a U.S.-sponsored coup to overthrow the
democratically elected Maduro government in Venezuela-as Mohammad
Mosaddegh,
Jacobo Arbenz, Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende or Manuel Zelaya.
It is not a "coup" or "treason" if top staffers in an administration turn
against the president of the United States (POTUS). It's an egregious
failure of that POTUS to achieve loyalty and consensus across the executive
branch. Trump is not owed such loyalty and consensus simply because of his
title. POTUS is not a king.
(You've got to hand it to the Trumpenleft: They say they want a revolution
and then they raise alarms about "the plot against the president," who
happens to be a creeping fascist and arch-plutocrat with openly
totalitarian
instincts and behaviors.)
"The op-ed only makes things worse," a fourth correspondent wrote me, "by
feeding the orange beast's conspiratorial 'deep state' paranoia and that of
his white-nationalist base." (I had the same thought at first. If the ATOE
had self-described lefties writing me feverishly about "treason" and an
attempted "deep state coup" against poor Donald Trump, imagine how it's
been
playing out in the minds of the president and his more fully right-wing and
armed white-Amerikaner backers!)
"This," a fifth correspondent wrote me, "looks like the biggest example in
history of 'cover your ass.' " In this correspondent's view, the AA and his
allies are aware that veterans of the current Insane Clown White House are
falling short of usual post-West Wing salary and career expectations when
they leave. The AA and his circle in the administration want be able to
tell
prospective future employers and/or voters and campaign funders that "we
tried our best to check the wacky tyrant. We were doing our duty to the
nation and the world by staying in the administration."
That is a workable hypothesis, one which makes a lot of sense to me. I
would
add here that the AA and his Times editors may be trying to cover not only
their own asses but those of the whole Trump-sullied U.S.-American
establishment, the Republican Party and the American Empire as well.
Whoever he may be (my money is on Huntsman), the AA is clearly no friend of
the left. He says this explicitly: "Ours is not the popular 'resistance' of
the left." (Of course, his notion of "the left" he's not part of absurdly
includes the corporate-neoliberal Democrats.)
The ATOE reflects a standard neoliberal, establishment Republican
perspective, one that seeks to align itself with traditionally Republican
victories attained under Trump while distancing itself from the malevolent
stink of associating with him.
The AA writes that "[w]e want the administration to succeed and think that
many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous."
He praises Trump's presidency for "effective deregulation, historic tax
reform, a more robust military and more."
Consistent with the Republican Party establishment's long and noxious
embrace of racist-nativist dog-whistling and climate denial, the ATOE says
nothing about the Trump administration's two most egregious sins beyond its
shocking and relentless hyper-Orwellian practice of the "permanent lie"
(the
constant and maddening distortion of facts and truth): (1) its racist and
even creeping fascist rhetoric and actions regarding immigrants and people
of color and others, and (2) its zealous carbon-capitalist acceleration of
the Greenhouse Gassing-to-Death of Life on Earth, a crime that promises to
make even the Nazis look like small-time criminals.
The second problem-state-capitalist ecocide-is being advanced with
noteworthy efficiency by the Trump administration. "While the Trump
administration swirls around in a vortex of Tweets, lies and Russiagate,"
Joshua Frank noted on Counterpunch last weekend, "one thing is for certain,
while we are all distracted and perplexed by the daily mayhem, Trump and
his
fossil fuel buddies are getting away with environmental plunder." The
administration's infamous incompetence and dysfunctionality (much bemoaned
by the AA) does not extend to the ecocide project, curiously enough-a topic
that fails to receive significant media attention despite its status as the
biggest issue of our or any time.
The AA fears and loathes Trump for ruling-class and imperialist reasons,
not for ones that ought to most concern people who care about democracy,
social justice and prospects for a decent future.
He is typical among establishment political actors from both major
capitalist and imperialist U.S. parties in that regard. As I've been
writing
and saying from before the Trump presidency, the establishment-from people
like Huntsman, George Will, the late John McCain, Dick Cheney and Jeff
Flake
on the right to folks like Rachel Maddow, Bob Woodward, the Clintons,
Barack
Obama, Tim Kaine, John Kerry and Anderson Cooper on the so-called
left-hates
Trump for reasons different from those that ought to most concern we the
people.
What are the mainstream ruling class' problems with Trump? The main wealth
and power elite policy complaints are that the "populist," "isolationist"
and "protectionist" president is woefully ignorant about, and even
strangely
opposed to, the standard institutional structures of U.S. empire and of
U.S.-dominated global trade and investment.
Then there's the explicitness of Trump's racial bigotry and sexism; the
openness of Trump's authoritarianism and totalitarianism; and the
transparent "beyond the pale" malignancy and childishness of his
Twitter-addicted narcissism (so extreme that he feels compelled to deny the
number of Puerto Ricans who died in the wake of Hurricane Maria last year).
There's also the remarkable extent of Trump's stubborn idiocy, deepened by
his ridiculous (if textbook narcissist) faith in his own superiority; and
troubling connections between "the House of Trump," Russian state-connected
oligarchs and "the House of Putin" going back many years.
Properly restrained divide-and-rule racism has long been OK for the ruling
class, but Trump is far too seriously invested in toxic racial bigotry for
an American elite that has learned to cloak persistent white supremacism in
the flags of diversity and tolerance.
Standard "imperial presidency" authoritarianism has always been fine with
the establishment, but Trump takes it to preposterous levels by
transparently attacking the rule of law and the independence of the
corporate media.
The U.S. establishment has long tolerated and even cultivated fascism in
Third World client states but not in the "homeland" itself, the supposed
exceptional headquarters and beacon of so-called capitalist democracy and
liberty.
Presidential lying has long been tolerated and even applauded in the
national media-political culture, but Trump goes far beyond acceptable
elite
norms with his wild and shameless advance of untruth. He averaged 16 false
and misleading statements per day in June and July of this year. His
astonishing record of grotesque, self-serving falsehood (e.g., the
ridiculous charge that he was denied a popular vote victory by illegal
immigrant ballots and the sickening claim that the Puerto Rican death toll
from Hurricane Maria was tiny) includes numerous "permanent lie"
fabrications that he repeats again and again-long after they've been
exposed
as fictions.
The U.S. remains a patriarchal and sexist nation, but the beauty pageant
pussy-grabber-in-chief is a disturbing embarrassment.
Standard presidential narcissism (i.e., Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) is
fine, but Trump's constant Twitter-weaponized shame-fest and his endless
reality-television drama are just too nationally humiliating. He's been
turning the executive branch of the world's most powerful state into
something on par with "The Apprentice," if not "The Maury Povich Show."
It's OK for the president to be stupid as far as the ruling class is
concerned. Look at George W. Bush. He was an abject dolt who thought God
had
told him to invade Iraq. But "Du[m]bya" had the decency to know that he was
a figurehead for purportedly smarter establishment actors and let himself
be
managed by ruling class "adults" like Cheney and Robert Gates.
Corruption and captivity to wealthy elites from the U.S. and some other
rich, U.S.-allied nations is one thing. Potential captivity to a "hostile
power" (as Russia is officially designated by the U.S. foreign policy
establishment and media) is another.
Above all, perhaps, Trump is just too unpredictable and impulsive for the
ruling class. It's hard to make decent investment decisions when the White
House is a fickle and capricious horror show that might (for example)
impose
(or roll back) a whole new set of tariffs or insult a "valued trading and
investment partner" on a foolish tyrant's bizarre whim from one day to the
next.
There are limits to just how malevolent a U.S. president can be before he
turns into an imperial public relations liability.
I caught Bob Woodward's appearance on Rachel Maddow's widely viewed MSNBC
talk show last week. The remarkably dull and uninspiring Woodward was there
to pitch his recently released instant bestseller "Fear: Trump in the White
House."
Neither Maddow nor Woodward said anything about Trump's racism-fascism or
about Trump's acceleration of ecocide (though Maddow preceded her Woodward
interview by helping break the news that the Trump administration had
diverted $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay
for
building racist immigrant detention centers-no small story as Hurricane
Florence bore down on the Carolinas).
The basic theme of the segment was that Trump is bad at U.S. "global
leadership" (also known as U.S. imperialism), as well as at what Woodward
and Maddow risibly called "avoiding World War III," and at ensuring U.S.
domination of global trade. Maybe they should have complained that Trump's
anti-immigrant stance was helping shrink the reserve army of easily
exploitable cheap labor.
Trump is a dangerous monster who needs to be removed from the White House
and the nation's political life. On that all decent people can agree. But
we
can't stop there. The Fake Resistance and Inauthentic Opposition Party (the
Democrats and some traditional Republicans) seek the removal of Trump, to
be
sold as a great victory for popular democracy while preserving the reign of
the nation's unelected and interrelated juntas of capital, empire, race and
militarized police-state repression.
And that's not good enough, not with the species teetering on the edge of
full environmental catastrophe under the soulless command of the profits
system. We need a rebellion, indeed a revolution (and not just a political
one) that goes much deeper than merely the amputation of the malignant
symptom of Amerikan cruelty, plutocracy, sexism, racism and stupidity that
is Trump.
We need to undertake a giant popular uprising that targets the whole U.S.
state-capitalist societal order and its vast imperial and repressive
edifice
at home and abroad-the broad institutional and cultural structures of
oppression (including the Democratic Party) that made something as noxious
as a Donald Trump presidency possible in the first place. Chris Hedges
noted
on Truthdig last May:
"
The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half
shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of
political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed
democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a
functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him
are
somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election,
the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a
political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two
major political parties, in which we don't count. We will wrest back
political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means
massive
and sustained civil disobedience.. If we do not stand up, we will enter a
new dark age.
The "real issue to be faced," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his final
essay, "is the radical reconstruction of society itself."
That's the last thing you'll hear from establishment elites. They have a
simple fake-fix: Vote for Democrats in the midterms. "The best way to
protest," the deeply conservative former president Barack Obama told
University of Illinois students three days after the ATOE, "is to vote. .
When you vote, you've got the power. ."
Really? We get to vote, yes, but mammon reigns nonetheless in the United
States, where, as the mainstream political scientists Benjamin Page and
Martin Gilens note in their important book "Democracy in America?,"
"government policy . reflects the wishes of those with money, not the
wishes
of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose
among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal
office"-candidates like Obama, who blew up the public presidential campaign
finance system with record-setting contributions from the likes of Goldman
Sachs and Citigroup in 2008.
Am I saying you shouldn't vote for Democrats in the midterms? No, I'm not.
It's important to try to oust the openly ecocidal and creeping fascist
Republican Party from its control of the U.S. Congress and the state
governments. Trust me, fellow workers and citizens, you do not want to live
under Trump if the GOP keeps both the House and the Senate. So suck it up
and vote if you live in a contested district. But do so without any faith
in
the notion that voting under the oligarchic U.S. electoral and party system
is anything close to the real and democratic politics that matter most or
anything like what Obama called in Illinois "everybody doing their part"
for
"this whole project of self-government." Our greatest intellectual, Noam
Chomsky, put it very well on the eve of the 2004 elections:
"
Americans may be encouraged to vote, but not to participate more
meaningfully in the political arena. . A huge propaganda campaign is
mounted
to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and
to think, 'That's politics.' But it isn't. It's only a small part of
politics. . The urgency is for popular progressive groups to grow and
become
strong . by steady, dedicated work at all levels, every day, not just once
every four years. . You can't ignore the elections. You should recognize
that one of the two groups now contending for power happens to be extremist
and dangerous and has already caused plenty of trouble and could cause
plenty more. . So in the election, sensible choices have to be made. But
they are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to create
a
genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and
after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome.
Chomsky's good friend Howard Zinn said it even better nearly four years
later, as the Obama phenomenon had engulfed the entire society, including
"the left," in the nation's quadrennial "Election Madness":
"
I'm talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election
madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two
minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting
booth. . But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy,
should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in
the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be
to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when
it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White
House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and
social justice. . Let's remember that even when there is a "better"
candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George
Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the
people
asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it
dangerous to ignore. . Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we
should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.
There has long been a self-destructive and frankly pathetic degree of
intra-leftist bloodletting on how portsiders can best respond to the
absurdly narrow range of choices on offer in the U.S. party and elections
system. This venom among progressives and radicals is badly misplaced. It
must stop. The real and serious political action is about what we do before
and after, not during elections.