I wanted you to notice that Paul Street suggests that voting Democratic is
necessary because the Republicans are so dangerous, but that the real work is
organizing for change and that the fact that one takes two minutes to do this
necessary but unpleasant chore, doesn't negate one's commitment to change the
system.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 11:34 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Establishment's 'Fear' Is Different From
Yours
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.