WTF Series #10 - A Little Civil War?

Impeachapalooza or the Criminality of the Whole System

Are you carefully following the long testimonies and talking heads on CNN, NPR or MSNBC about impeachment, day after day, hour after hour, week after week? The legal ins and outs? Didn’t think so.  Has anything else happened in the world other than disasters and crimes?  Doesn’t seem so.  What is funny is that Trump withheld military equipment like Stinger missiles that even Obama didn’t want to sell to Ukraine.  So…Trump interfered with U.S. military aid, which was keeping the war against Russia in eastern Ukraine alive. The U.S. is against a diplomatic solution, as they already torpedoed one between Europe, Ukraine and Russia years ago.

This Leader?  Or...

Hunter Biden sitting on a board of directors of the key Ukrainian energy company is just business as usual – seeking influence with U.S. politicians by hiring their kids.  Especially in the context of U.S. demands (Trump included) for Europe to use U.S. gas, not Russian gas.

Is this really a ‘high’ crime?  This quid pro quo is more factual than the ridiculous attempt to impeach Clinton in the 1990s for lying about an affair.  As it is, this is political Kabuki, as the Senate will not vote for impeachment.

What else is going on in the world?  What else could Trump be impeached for recently – for real high crimes?  This impeachment is like accusing Al Capone of tax evasion.  I’ll give just a few:

     1.     688,000 U.S. citizens are going to be thrown off food stamps due to new work rules instituted by the USDA and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue recently.   Seasonal holiday workers, workers in Northern Michigan’s tourism industry, and workers with unreliable hours like waiters and waitresses are the kinds of workers hurt by this proposal.

     2.     The Washington Post just dropped a monstrous story on government lying about the 18 year war in Afghanistan in the midst of the impeachment hullabaloo.  After a 3 year lawsuit they gained access to internal military documents similar to the Pentagon Papers that revealed the Pentagon and White House continually made stupid and rosy predictions without any basis, while not even knowing who the enemy was.  This extended over 3 administrations – Bush, Obama and Trump.  So the real default – which any leftist already knew – is that the U.S. government lies on a continual basis.  As Rumsfield said in 2003: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq.”   The U.S. has spent nearly $1T on the war, while 2,000+ U.S. soldiers have died and 20,000+ have been injured.  Remember, Obama called Afghanistan ‘the smart war.’ (!)  That must be what they teach Rhodes scholars.

3.     Democrats and Republicans, in a bipartisan love fest, just voted for an additional $88B in military funds.

4.     Democrats and Republicans, in another bipartisan love fest, are preparing to endorse the new corporate-slanted NAFTA, the USMCA. 

5.     Denying climate change and actually accelerating it by enabling the oil and gas industries  This might be Trump’s most bloody crime.

6.     Stacking his administration with department heads whose real purpose is to destroy their departments and instead privatize society. Which has been going on for years.

7.     Attempting to overthrow governments that displease the U.S., which is business as usual.

8.     Opening the door to white nationalism and fascist organizations.  His unique contribution.

9.     Supporting the NSA, which is business as usual.

10.  Enabling the rich and corporations, etc. etc.  Business as usual.
11.  Violating the emoluments clause big-time.  Another unique contribution.

FASCISM?
Impressionistic left-liberals like Chris Hedges, Henry Giroux, Paul Street and others think Trump is already a fascist.  By doing this they seem to have little understanding of U.S. or European history or the concepts of the state or class.  What Trump is doing is no different from what many U.S. presidents and U.S. laws did in the past  - remember Asian internment, Latino bracero programs, Jim Crow, the KKK, the Tulsa pogrom, gay discrimination, women not being able to vote, strikes and abortion being illegal, unions forbidden, Marxists in jail etc.?  They are not calling the U.S. fascist over the whole of the 20^th Century are they?!  This is just normal bourgeois functioning in a class society.   

What is different is that Trump has disturbed the bourgeois positivist idea that things are always going to get better. Dialectics and class struggle determine history, not abstract tendencies toward 'the good.'

...this Leader?  (Francisco Franco)

The classical Marxist analysis of fascism is that capital will use fascism when it has no other way to rule.  This impeachment, like the Clinton impeachment, represents a procedural faction fight within the ruling class.  So the ruling class is not united behind actual fascism, behind one policy as yet.  They can still rule through the charade of voting for one of their two parties – the ‘two party system.’  Note this terminology is not really about democracy.  Nor is there any real massive left, as in Germany, Italy or Spain that needs to be crushed.

What is more accurate to say is that the Republicans are trying to control the legal and military system.  They are stacking the courts and judges with Federalist and ‘Constitutionalist’ plants all the way up to the Supreme Court.  Trump has just forced out the head of the Navy in order to tolerate Navy Seals involved in war crimes.  Fascists are already recruiting in the police and now are trying to infiltrate the U.S. military – which is why the ‘sign throwing’ at the Army-Navy football game was indicative.  The military recently dropped screening for 'white nationalists,' which certainly sends a signal.  If Trump can get lackeys of his into positions of leadership in the military, then what is laying out here is more a 'little civil war' than fascism, more Franco than Mussolini.  If Trump loses the election – and at this point he is likely to – this may trigger armed rightists into violence.  So be prepared...

Which is why the Democrats are in such a love fest with military generals, the FBI, the NSA and the CIA now – a love fest that will not turn out well.

In this context, the ‘bi-partisanship’ of Democratic candidates like Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Klobuchar should really be called collaborationism.  The word 'bi-partisan' itself reveals that politicians from both Parties are actually on the same page over and over again, ultimately part of the same class project.  Even though the Republicans will have nothing to do with ‘bipartisanship’ (!!) unless it benefits them and the corporations they represent.  Only Democrats actually talk about bipartisanship, which is indicative. The national Democratic Party has even endorsed 3 former Republicans for Senate according to The Intercept.  What threatens this bipartisanship is any threat from the left, even from a moderate social-democratic left.  It has to be destroyed as the present corporate press ban on Sanders shows.  The corporate press will turn to constant vitriol if Sanders gets closer to the nomination.

Impeachment, like Russia-gate, is another failed Democratic Party leadership tactic run by lawyers.  In a way it is their pretense of actually being an opposition party. Instead of looking at the system, they look at moronic actions by Trump. The Democratic leadership prefers scandal over politics, because politics also implicates them.

P.S. - Ralph Nader in Alternet details how the Democratic Party leadership, in a bipartisan agreement, continued to 'fund' the U.S. government days ago.  How?  By giving Trump $1.4B for the wall, weakening the ACA, giving $22B more for the military.  Nader-Alternet-Budget Deal

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box upper left with these terms: "Giroux," "Russia-Gate," "Trumpolini," "fascism," "Afghanistan."

Red Frog

December 17, 2019