Well, I'm no legal expert, but I've read the suggestion in articles made by
legal experts. Regardless of our opinions, it's obviously not going to happen.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Frank Ventura
Sent: Sunday, February 14, 2021 10:13 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] RE: [blind-democracy] RE: [blind-democracy] As Biden
returns “civilization” to Washington…Capitalism Cannot Be Reformed
Miriam, that would actually be unconstitutional. A president can only be
charged for crimes committed as president by the impeachment process. However,
that doesn't prevent any state from bringing state charges against him, like
may happen in New York.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2021 1:01 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] RE: [blind-democracy] As Biden returns
“civilization” to Washington…Capitalism Cannot Be Reformed
One of the other splinter socialist groups is calling for Trump and others to
be criminally charged with conspiracy to commit sedition which would be more
meaningful than the show trial we've seen.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2021 12:17 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] As Biden returns “civilization” to
Washington…Capitalism Cannot Be Reformed
As Biden returns “civilization” to Washington…Capitalism Cannot Be Reformed
https://socialistaction.org/2021/02/09/as-biden-returns-civilization-to-washingtoncapitalism-cannot-be-reformed/
February 9, 2021
By Jeff Mackler
Capitalist “civilization” returned to the nation’s capitol on Jan. 20, Joseph
Biden’s Inauguration Day. Replete with 25,000 troops forming an iron ring
around the few thousand establishment dignitaries gathered to pay homage to the
new president, with deep roots in America’s racist, warmongering past and
present, the event aimed at reassuring the world that Trump-era
unpredictability/insanity had come to an end. Aside from the armed troops, more
than the combined U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria that daily rain
death and destruction on those beleaguered nations, the streets of Washington
were largely empty.
Public transportation was shut down tight; the area was enclosed in steel
fences and barriers designed to withstand a virtual army of potential Trump
invaders. No one came, either to Washington or to the other 50 state capitols
where handfuls of blustering rightwing bigots had promised armed mobilizations
to challenge the “stolen election.”
The day was conceived by the ruling class as a declaration that U.S.
capitalism would not be bullied or besieged by the likes of the Jan. 6
Trump-inspired mob of several hundred white supremacist, fascist wannabes,
small groups of self-described paramilitary neo-Nazis, including the Oath
Keepers and Three Percenters, some off duty police, off duty or retired
military personnel, a sprinkling of fanatic Republican elected officials, and
some 100 Proud Boy Hitlerites.
These political hucksters had combined two weeks earlier to violently push
aside a handful of Capitol Police to occupy the Capitol building, unimpeded for
several hours. More than a few noted that the violent invaders, partially armed
and explicitly organized to nullify the Nov. 3 elections results, were allowed
to peacefully exit the Capitol – no names taken or ID requested. A few heads
rolled instantly at the top echelons of the federally-funded D.C. Capitol
Police and House and Senate officials, who had made near zero security
preparations.
Embarrassed officials, vulnerable to having handled this internationally-viewed
“insurrection” spectacle with kid gloves to say the least, subsequently
organized a Justice Department and FBI-led national “manhunt” to round up some
250 Trumpers to date to face a variety of initially lesser charges – “unlawful
entry and obstructing official proceedings.” These have now been expanded to
include more serious felony charges of conspiracy to violently storm the
Capitol building to disrupt the proceedings of Congress.
Trump’s mania
The blatant absence of Capitol Police on Jan. 6, who had been forewarned days
earlier about the mob’s Capitol take over plans, according to now widely
published reports, could only be attributed to orders from their superiors,
Trump likely included. A deranged, increasingly isolated and desperate Trump,
pumped up with psychopathic delusions of grandeur, had already fired or
excluded from his inner circle several of his closest cabinet officials. He was
also deserted by his Pentagon chiefs, top national security advisers and the
FBI/CIA hierarchy when they balked at one or another of his schemes to negate
the Nov. 3 election results. We leave it to future historians to reveal how
Trump’s desperate mob, or Trump himself, intended to impose their will had they
miraculously succeeded in holding the Senate and House members hostage.
Regardless, the U.S. ruling class, this time acting in concert, in all its
multi-billionaire corporate manifestations, its kept media and associated
Pentagon and National Security personnel, would have none of it, at least for
now. D.C became an armed camp akin to the Green Zone in Iraq, replete with
squadrons of U.S. jets policing the skies as if another 911 air strike was in
the realm of possibility.
Trump’s 2016 inauguration
Four years earlier Donald Trump’s inauguration was celebrated by some
100,000 admirers while another million, mostly women, mobilized nearby to
protest the crudely misogynist racist bigot’s installation. Another four
million simultaneously mobilized across the country in solidarity, making that
anti-Inaugural action the largest coordinated democratic rights/human rights
protest in U.S. history. Until last summer, that is, when Black Lives Matter
mobilizations in 2000-plus cities saw some 20 million of the nation’s most
vibrant working class youth and oppressed nationalities take the streets to
denounce the horror of the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd and U.S.
society’s systemic racism.
Chris Hedges on Biden’s presidency
Pulitzer Prize journalist and former New York Times foreign correspondent for
15 years, Chris Hedges captures today’s Biden Democratic Party political
perspectives well. Hedges’ Feb. 1 article entitled, “Papering Over the Rot,”
begins:
“The staggering concentration of wealth at the top has deformed our governing
institutions. New window dressing will not end oligarchy. The death spiral of
the American Empire will not be halted with civility. It will not be halted
with the 42 executive orders signed by President Joe Biden, however welcome
many are, especially since they can, with a new chief executive, be immediately
revoked.
Hedges continues: The American Empire “will not be halted by removing Donald
Trump, and the crackpot conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists and racists
who support him, from social media. It will not be halted by locking up the
Proud Boys and the clueless protestors who stormed the Congress on Jan. 6. and
took selfies in Vice President Mike Pence’s Senate chair. It will not be halted
by restoring the frayed alliances with our European allies or rejoining the
World Health Organization or the Paris Climate Agreement.”
“All of these measures,” Hedges properly concludes, “are window dressing,
masking the root cause of the demise of America — unchecked oligarchic power
and greed. The longer wealth is funneled upwards into the hands of a tiny,
oligarchic cabal, who put Biden into office and whose interests he assiduously
serves,” Hedges concludes, “ we are doomed.”
Hedges details how today’s “staggering concentration of wealth and the obscene
avarice of the very rich dwarfs the hedonism and excesses of the world’s most
heinous despots and wealthiest capitalists of the past.”
His documentation is eye opening:
• In 2015, shortly before he died, Forbes estimated David Rockefeller’s net
worth was $3 billion. The Shah of Iran looted an estimated $1 billion from his
country. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos amassed between $5 and $10 billion. And
the former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was worth about a billion. Jeff
Bezos and Elon Musk are each at $180 billion. (Emphasis in italics added.)
• The new wealth comes from a cartel capitalism… made possible by Presidents
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who, in exchange for corporate money to fund
their campaigns and later Clinton’s foundation and post-presidency opulent
lifestyle, abolished the regulations that once protected the citizenry from the
worst forms of monopoly exploitation.
Bill Clinton’s “unregulated capitalism” Hedges argues, “… resulted in financial
anarchy… where everything, including human beings and the natural world, is a
commodity to exploit until exhaustion or collapse… The new robber barons peddle
the classless identity politics of the Democratic Party to deflect attention
from their stranglehold on wealth and power, as well as their exploitation of
workers, especially those that make their products overseas.”
This “unregulated capitalism,” Hedges argues “is sold as ‘enlightened
liberalism’ as opposed to the old pro-union class politics that [previously]
saw the Democrats heed the voices of the working class… It has also pushed the
human species, along with most other species, closer and closer towards
extinction.” (Emphasis in italics added.)
Here we differ significantly with Hedges’ otherwise sweeping indictment of the
unprecedented ravages of modern day capitalism, including its system racism,
endless wars, “identity politics” posturing, environmental destruction,
unprecedented concentrations of wealth, and daily degradation of working class
life.
Capitalism’s inherent contradictions
But it is not Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan or any other titular head of U.S.
capitalism, or a break from the Democratic Party’s alleged “old pro-union class
politics” that are responsible for the current and multiple horrors facing the
world’s people. These horrors are inherent in the contradictions of the
capitalist system itself.
Survival for all capitalists rests with their capacity to extract value in the
form of unpaid labor, or profit from working people. No serious capitalist
would hire a single worker without this expectation. But with the
ever-increasing substitution of machines/robots and computer technology for
human labor, the world capitalist order finds itself in constant crisis and
decline. Intense competition forces all capitalists to introduce new
technologies to survive. In time, the average amount of human labor embodied in
all commodities is reduced and with it, average rates of profit.
Technological advances, especially those of a clean and environmentally
sustainable nature, in a rational society should pave the way for social
advances. In a socialist society, where human needs, not capitalist profits are
primary, clean and sustainable labor saving technology portend a major increase
in leisure time for all working people, time for the fullest engagement of all
in the highest levels of free education, time for the fullest development of
the human potential, time to explore a broad range of cultural, scientific and
educational interests, time to encourage the best aspiration of humanity for
freedom and equality.
In capitalist society, technological advance, in time, portents mass
unemployment, layoffs, subjugation to the gig economy, restricted access to
education, health care and housing, not to mention endless wars for new
markets and profit.
Marx’s explanation of capitalisms horrors
Karl Marx explained this apparent contradiction in endless detail in his three
volumes of Capital. He described it as the “Law of the tendency of the rate of
profit to decline.” Sounds contradictory! How can an economic law be a tendency
at the same time? How can technological advance portend social disaster – mass
unemployment, recession/depression, war? Marx explained this seeming
contradiction in great detail. Fully aware of the operation of this economic
law in the daily workings of all corporate enterprises, the boss class engages
in endless efforts to thwart it – to try to counter the inherent contradiction
in their system. The sum total of all their efforts on a world scale amounts to
making working people pay, to their constant immiseration, to their repeated
subjection to recession/depression cycles that permeate capitalism’s history.
Whether it be overt union busting, obliteration of pensions and health care
benefits, workplace speed up, offshoring plants to low wage nations,
imperialist conquests to secure vital resources, cutbacks in social services,
“elimination of welfare as we know it,” tax relief of the rich at the expense
of workers and the poor, or pumping $billions and $trillions of taxpayer money
into corporate bailout schemes, the objective is the same – to preference the
corporate elite at the expense of the vast majority – a preference driven not
by any moral failings of the super rich, but by the necessities imposed by the
very operation of
the system. This has little or nothing to do with capitalist greed and
avarice, however much these are built into their psyches. Whether capitalists
are well-intentioned or evil, they must deploy one or another or all of the
above measures aimed at workers to keep their businesses afloat in the face of
the incessant competition that drives them to survive or perish. Even when
powerful monopolies act to eliminate national competitors, U.S. capitalists
face ever intensifying competition from Europe and China.
In the long term, all capitalist efforts notwithstanding, the rate of profit
with regard to the production of the world’s commodities inexorably declines
and with it the numbers of employed workers.
Frenzied stock market speculation
Today, this has reached historic lows, hence the resort to the financialization
of capital – the increasing investment by capitalists not in new plants or
needed infrastructure repair and replacement but in frenzied speculative
trading in the stock market, hedge funds and related securities. Today, this
casino capitalism has exceeded all previous limits whether the government is
headed by Democrats or Republicans. Both parties fuel the fires of speculation
by endless injections of near zero interest rate “loans” to failing or low
profit corporations. This virtually free money is then quickly transferred to
stock market ventures where rates of return are far higher than the initial
near zero cost of borrowing. In today’s casino capitalism, as in the gambling
casino variant in Las Vegas, the house always wins! Trump’s skyrocketing stock
market boom, and Obama’s before him, had no reflection in the improvement of
the quality of life of working people.
But the core group of the nation’s 600 odd billionaires amassed $trillions
nearly overnight, while workers suffered as never in recent memory. Real
unemployment today stands at close to 40 percent based on the government’s
official “labor participation” statistics.
Today, capitalism’s crises are multiple and worldwide. In the face of a deadly
pandemic the ruling rich, with few exceptions calculated that sending their
wage slaves back to unsafe workplaces or sending students to unsafe schools to
free their parents for work, was worth more in profits gained than the
calculated loss in human lives. Workers are expendable; profits are not! While
Trump’s “survival of the fittest”
herd immunity “theory” and his opposition to mandated mask wearing were a crude
reflection of this idea – that corporate profits trumped human lives – the
Democrats were never far behind, with all 50 state governors at one time or
another deciding to prematurely reopen businesses and schools, knowing full
well the deadly consequences.
Environmental catastrophe
Fossil fuel giants threaten the very survival of life on earth, yet they press
on, unimpeded. Biden assured his corporate backers that there will be no
serious Green New Deal under his administration. These are impossible under
capitalism, where the likes of Exxon Mobile, soon to be merged with Chevron
Corporation, plan and prepare fossil fuel extraction long into the future, at a
time when serious scientists already ponder whether it is already too late to
avoid catastrophic insults to the world’s people.
Obama’s Democrats opened the door wider than ever to offshore and Arctic
drilling in addition to the promotion of unprecedented deadly fracking that
made the U.S. for the first time a net exporter of fossil fuel.
Imperialist wars inherent in capitalism
War is a central element in advancing the economic interests of the ruling
elite, no matter the cost and regardless of which capitalist party is in power.
The ever-promoted rationalizations regarding U.S.
“responsibility” to thwart “worldwide terrorism” – which the U.S. is the chief
instigator – or to conduct “humanitarian wars” that destroy nation’s
infrastructure to “save innocent lives” have long been exposed as lies. But the
U.S. war machine presses on with $1 trillion spent annually to line the pockets
of the largely monopolized military-industrial complex while defending U.S.
capitalism’s “right” to rape and pillage worldwide.
Democratic Party President Lyndon Johnson presided over the genocidal Vietnam
War that slaughtered four million Vietnamese. He extended full support and U.S.
collaboration to the 1965 Indonesian military coup that slaughtered one million
alleged communists in a single year, literally clogging that nation’s rivers
with murdered innocents. Democrats and Republicans take turns in presiding over
mass slaughter for profit, installing one after another compliant dictators to
defend “our interests.” Two world wars that cost the lives of 100 million
people saw U.S. imperialism emerge as the dominant world power. Endless wars,
U.S.-backed coups and interventions followed without interruption around the
world and to this day: Korea, Iran, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile,
Brazil, Argentina, Yugoslavia, Yemen, the Middle East, Africa and more. It
mattered not whether the U.S. head of state was a Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Bush
or a Clinton, Obama, Trump or Biden.
Regulation or de-regulation: deficit hawks or not
The rules of the economic-political game are adjusted, bent or discarded in
accord with the needs of the ruling rich. Two decades ago in 2001 the
1890 Sherman Anti-trust Act, supposedly protecting citizens against monopolies,
was interpreted by the Supreme Court to allow Microsoft’s monopoly to continue
when the nation’s top courts essentially ruled that its monopoly was needed to
defend U.S. corporations against foreign competition. Apple’s offshoring
billions to avoid taxes was essentially ignored as with its near slave labor
million member Chinese work force.
Pfizer’ and hundreds of other U.S. corporate entities that offshored their
headquarters to avoid taxes did so with impunity, minus or plus an occasional
slap on the wrist. Republican “deficit hawks” disappeared under Trump when
$trillions in bailouts were gifted to the elite. None winced when the Treasury
Department combined with the Federal Reserve, to literally gift them back some
$6 trillion in bailouts for their first quarter 2020 losses. This was a
bi-partisan affair as was Trump $1.9 trillion tax cut for the rich only.
Here we conclude with the simple proposition that capitalism cannot be reformed
regardless of which combination of corporate behemoths hold the presidency or
one or another houses of Congress. Biden’s pledge to seek bi-partisan unity
affirms once again that this unity resides in the common exploitation of
working people in the U.S. and worldwide. His reign will see no challenge from
his party to America’s systemic racism, sexism and LGBTQI discrimination. The
deepening degradation of the environment and capitalism’s endless wars for
profit and plunder will continue as will its guarantee of yet another round of
deadly pandemics that originate in capitalism’s failure to establish a rational
ecological balance between nature and human society.
Today, the capitalist beast has inadvertently set into motion a new generation
of radicalizing youth intent on challenging ruling class prerogatives on
multiple fronts. Their success in charting a new and independent course aimed
at challenging and abolishing capitalist rule will prove decisive in the years
ahead. Central to their success is the construction of a mass revolutionary
socialist party deeply rooted in all the struggles to come. Join us!
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exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an
attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly,
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