Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 18, 2019 5:51 pm

The Impeachment hearings are a sad Dog&Pony Show & will likely strengthen Trump, solidifying his base like an impacted turd.This is not t say it is an act put on to beguile us dumb bunnies. Rather that it is just another example of The Democrats Are The Worst Party In History. These people ain't actors(well...), they are politicians as far as that goes. Which means that holding office is the purpose of their being & don't believe the bullshit. And even if they have strong ideological bent they still must hold office to effect their ideology. And so their behavior in this is utterly pre-ordained.

While the prez's behavior in this makes a weak but marginally acceptable basis for impeachment this effort was doomed to crash on the rocks of Republican Primaries. 'Witch-hunt' is hyperbole, but the partisan bent impossible to deny. They thought they could get over with the help of the imperial bureaucracy but those have hedged their bets, dunno why.

So the Dems have likely put their foot in it again because they pushed a weak argument even knowing the danger. Mebbe the fact that they got primaries too got something to do with that. There were plenty other thing they might have gone after Trump for, he's been a sleazy operator his whole life & didn't miss a lick when he moved to DC. Yet the Dems seem to ignore his myriad machinations, business & labor practices, likely at war with EPA over his filthy goof courses, taking full advantage of a tax code written with his class in mind & undoubtedly pushing the envelope there, his relations with women, his current abuse of office for personal gain. We hear the occasional muttering about these topics, investigations stymied in courts but the Dems scream nothing but "Russians, Russians< Russians!" A predilection, no doubt, but also the coin they pay for bureaucratic support. Because they will not convict Trump for being a capitalist, that will never do. Much of what is so objectionable is behavior common to his class. And having seen how his above average mind works can there be any doubt that if the Dems dared to 'go there' his response would be, especially in regard to taxes, "Everybody does it." He would be right and that would never do.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 19, 2019 12:45 pm

How The Deep State Sunk The Democratic Party
The House Democrats continue to party on their Titanic voyage even as there are clear signs that the impeachment iceberg will sink them:

President Trump’s job approval rating has ticked up 6 percentage points since the Democrats' impeachment inquiry began, according to a new survey.
The Gallup poll released early Wednesday found Trump’s approval rating at 45 percent, up from 39 percent when the inquiry was launched in the fall. The new findings mark the third-consecutive increase in Trump's approval rating, Gallup noted.
...
Gallup’s new poll found that 51 percent of respondents say they oppose impeachment and removing Trump from office, an increase of 5 percentage points since the Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced the impeachment inquiry into the president's dealings with Ukraine. By contrast, 46 percent of respondents now support impeachment and removal, down 6 points.

Not even the Democrats core supporters are enthusiastic about the step the House Democrats will take later today when they will vote to impeach Donald Trump:

Liberal groups organized more than 600 events from Alaska to Florida, following a familiar model of mass protest that has come to define the left during the Trump administration.
...
For all the passion among activists, the gatherings were notably smaller than many of the other recent mass protests ..
...
Some activists acknowledge that impeachment doesn't fire up people like life-and-death issues such as health care, guns or climate change.
The Democrats hope that by November 2020 the voters will have forgotten about impeachment and vote for Democratic candidates. But Donald Trump and other Republican candidates will take care that everyone will keep the issue in mind.

It is the reason why Trump's letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reads like an overlong campaign ad. Its content will be at the core of each of his campaign speeches. It is no holds barred but surprisingly factual.

Trump partisans are not the only to think that the impeachment articles the Democrats brought forward are astonishingly weak and not supported by the facts. The Senate will need little time to exculpate Trump.

So how did the Democrats get here? Trump's letter notes that talk about impeachment started as soon as he stepped into office:

Speaker Pelosi, you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party’s impeachment effort has been going on for “two and a half years,” long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office, the Washington Post published a story headlined, “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.” Less than three months after my inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters stated, “I’m going to fight every day until he’s impeached.” House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration ...
Since Trump stepped into office the Democrats were looking for something that would make him impeachable. The deep state delivered them Russiagate, the claim that Trump 'colluded' with the Russian government, by taking seriously an obvious fake dossier the Clinton campaign had ordered and paid for. FBI agents who hated Trump even faked FISA court certification submissions to be able to spy on the Trump campaign. They found nothing that supported the 'collusion' claims.

The FISA court is not amused about that:

"The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable," Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in an order published Tuesday.
For nearly two years the Democrats had hoped that the Mueller investigation would come to their help and deliver them the evidence they needed to impeach Trump. But Mueller did not deliver what the Democrats had hoped for. It turned out that the CIA and FBI driven Russiagate was a nothing-burger.

In 2018 eleven former intelligence and military operatives joined the House as representatives for the Democrats. This was presumably a planned invasion by the security state.

After the Mueller bubble had burst something else was needed to impeach Trump. The deep state delivered again.

A day after the Mueller act had played out Trump had a phone call with the new president of the Ukraine Zelensky.

A lunatic Lieutenant-colonel Vintman in the National Security Administration found that during the phone call Trump was not following the Colonel's preferred foreign policy. He informed a former colleague, the CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella, who then contacted two former colleagues who worked for the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff. They cooked up a scheme in which the CIA analyst would play a 'whistleblower' and accuse Trump of wrongdoing. When the legal review of the complaint within the CIA found that the 'whistleblower' had no case, the Schiff folks leaked the issue to the press to put pressure on the Trump administration to publish the complaint.

On September 23 2019 seven freshman Democrats published an op-ed in the Washington Post that called for impeachment.

CNN noted approvingly that all seven op-ed writers were (former) members of the security state:

The reason they made their announcement and explained their reasoning as a group, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, is because they had already formed a bond over their national security background -- especially the five women: Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, both ex-CIA officers; Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania who was in the Air Force; Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia were Naval officers.
...
The op-ed the women penned, along with Gil Cisneros and Jason Crow, two freshmen male veterans, opened the floodgates for others who had been resistant, and gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi critical political cover as she announced a formal impeachment inquiry on Tuesday.
Seven of the 11 security state representatives who had joined the Democrats in 2018 gave the impulse for impeachment. A day after the op-ed was published House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the opening of her 'impeachment inquiry'.

The 'whistleblower' claimed, solely based on hearsay and public sources, that Trump had pressured the President of the Ukraine during the phone call to deliver dirt on Joe Biden. His complaint was published and the deep state then used it to again push for impeachment.

Trump then ambushed Pelosi and the whole impeachment effort by declassifying and publishing the memorandum of the phone call in question.

Reading the memorandum it was immediately clear to us that the impeachment attempt was dead in the water:

The immediate impulse to start an impeachment investigation came from some whistle blower in the intelligence community who claimed that Trump did something nefarious during a phone call with the newly elected President of Ukraine Zelensky.
The White House published a memorandum of the phone call. The call was made on July 25 2019, a day after the final Robert Mueller testimony in Congress. There are two passages which the Democrats will claim are damaging:

...[analysis of the transcript]...

Trump asks for investigations and Zelensky assures him that those will happen. Trump applied no open pressure.
...
How the Democrats want to construct an impeachment out of this is beyond me.

It was therefore easy to predict this outcome that we are now seeing:

Pelosi has nothing. Six committees have investigated Trump issues but so far found nothing to charge him with. Nor did the Mueller investigation find anything damaging. How will combining all those nothing-burgers make an impeachment meal?
...
There is no case for impeachment. Even if the House voted for one the Senate would never act on it. No one wants to see a President Pence.
The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him.

The current polls, quoted above, seem to support that conclusion. A majority of U.S. citizens reject the Democrats' impeachment act while Trump's approval rating is back at its previous top.

The actions of the deep state, and the Democrats falling for them, will cost them the 2020 election.

Russigate was a false story, invented by the CIA chief John Brennan with support from MI6. The Steele dossier was recognizable as an obvious fake as soon as it was published. But the FBI still used it. To find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russiagate the crooks at the top of the FBI went as far as to make false sworn statements to the FISA court. It did not help.

As soon as Mueller busted the Russiagate bubble the deep state cooked up a new issue. A Brennan man in the CIA colluded with Adam Schiff to create Ukrainegate.

Seven representatives of the security state then pushed Pelosi into launching the impeachment proceedings. Schiff again sprang into action by holding abstruse hearings in which some deep state minions were allowed to vent their antipathy to Trump and to Russia. The hearings exposed the sham for what it was.

It is unlikely that any Republican will vote today in favor of impeachment. No Republican senator will dare to vote against Trump.

Russiagate, Ukrainegate and the impeachment nonsense were all driven by members of the deep or security state. The Democrats have been riding on these issues while neglecting the real life-and-death issue of their voters - health care, guns or climate change. They will be punished for it.

The Democrats would be well advised to distance themselves from those services that invited them to travel on the Titanic. They should remember that historically they have been far more often the victims of CIA, FBI or military overreach than the Republicans.

As the failure of this impeachment affair is imminent the deep state will likely try to cook up a new issue that it can use against Trump.

If the Democrats want to prevent the further sinking of their ship they must avoid becoming associated with it.

Posted by b on December 18, 2019 at 20:47 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/12/h ... party.html

I disagree with 'b' on the following points:

The case was weak but not entirely without merit. If Trump didn't own the Republican primaries the results would be less partisan.

The 'Deep State' was not the prime mover of this fiasco, that would be the Democratic Party. All of the decisions were in their hands & nobody put a gun to their head(I guess...). The bureaucrats were there for the Dems, to be sure, perhaps a bit over the top in their performance, but lacking in meat. Problem with 'b' is he(?) has some belief in bourgeois democracy.

But yeah, the Dems are probably fucked in 2020 & down the ticket too. They might could win if they ran hard left, regardless as to whether they 'meant it' or not. BUt they have made it plain they will not do that, no slippery slope, no nervous big donors, utter fear of full on red-baiting regardless of the ridiculousness, no giving even an inkling that socialism is feasible. I anticipate with joy the candidacy of Bloomberg. That will make the nut.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 30, 2019 2:52 pm

FORMALLY ADVANCES TRUMP'S IMPEACHMENT: ANOTHER RED RAG OF THE EMPIRE'S ELITE
December 19, 2019 , 3:16 a.m. .

Image
Donald Trump is the third president to submit to a recall vote of the US House of Representatives (Photo: Getty Images)

This Wednesday, December 18, the House of Representatives of the United States Congress formally approved the impeachment against President Donald Trump. It is the third time that a formal charge of impeachment against a White House tenant occurs in the history of the American country.

THE "RATIONALITY" OF THE REASONS FOR THE IMPEACHMENT
The vote made official this first step, review the average American Politico , had the overwhelming support of the Democratic Party that dominates more than half of the seats in the lower house of Congress. In total, two articles (abuse of power and obstruction of Congress) that constitute the formal accusation against the president were voted; both articles obtained 230 and 229 votes, respectively.

The reasons for this accusation against Trump "come from the president's attempt to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, as well as Trump's effort to block Congress' investigation," says Politico about the impeachment .

As we know, the Democratic Party seeks to subject Donald Trump to a political trial since the manufacture of the so-called RussiaGate.

Having failed that route, after proving that there was no such "Russian interference" in Trump's electoral victory in 2016, they took advantage of the leak of a Trump conversation with Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski to put together an artificial case of political crime and abuse of power.

But that makes the political trial a maneuver tailored to the interests of the Democratic Party, lies in its own imperialist vision of things: Trump is not a "criminal" who deserves to be judged for his aggressive campaign of criminal sanctions against Venezuela or for supporting Saudi Arabia in its illegal war against Yemen.

No. What makes Trump a "criminal" is to have tried to take advantage in front of Democrat Joe Biden, trying to convince the Ukrainian president to investigate his corrupt family environment.

Although the following statement corresponds to the field of speculation, it should be done to represent the thinking of impeachment promoters: if Trump had decided to realize his repetitive threats of military intervention against Venezuela, or if, contrary to what he did, had doubled, or better, tripled the number of military troops in Syria, or if on a democracy feast he had bombed Cuba and Nicaragua on the same day, without a doubt the controversial US president would have gone from being an "enemy" of the fundamental values ​​of the United States to its most convincing defender in the 21st century.

The enemy of the United States is not a license of this rostrum, but a review of what Nancy Pelosi said, the Democrat who presides over the House of Representatives of Congress and one of the visible faces of Trump's political trial, in the last hours .

"The president is a continuing threat to our National Security," said Pelosi, making it clear that gringa constitutional democracy is an extension of that moral imperative called "national security," with which a complex system of illegal wars, global espionage, terrorism of State and corporate financialization has been imposed as the Empire of our traumatic political era.

THE NEXT STEP OF A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
The Western press has reviewed the formal impeachment vote as a "historic day." If the yardstick to measure that statement consists of events that occur from time to time, almost always reflecting exceptional circumstances, it certainly is: it is the third president in the history of the United States to undergo this procedure.

The first was former president Andrew Johnson, in 1868. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Johnson, his vice president, assumed power in a country warmed by the aftermath of the Civil War that consolidated the victory of the Union over the slave states of the South . The political and economic instability, and its supremacist orientation, caused the triumphant abolitionist sector of the capitalist elite to take it to political trial by not representing their interests, a process that was acquitted by the Senate some time later.

The same happened with former President Bill Clinton, who received a recall vote after lying in front of a grand jury after being accused of sexual harassment by Paula Jones, a worker from the state of Arkansas. Clinton then lied about whether she slept with her secretary Monica Lewinsky, causing a set of leaks that revealed how, in fact, she did have extramarital affairs with her. Finally, Clinton was acquitted by a Senate dominated by Republicans.

Amid the iconic Watergate scandal, former President Richard Nixon was forced to resign by his Republican colleagues before the House of Representatives voted to impeachment. This example does not count because the voting was never carried out.

Trump is confident that the impeachment against him will culminate like the Johnson and Clinton cases. Senate Republican leaders Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell make him feel confident about this after warning that the process will be thwarted. "The political consequences of this will be felt in the next elections ... Play this tape on election night. I will make a prediction here: the accusation of this president by Nancy Pelosi, Schiff and Nadler will do so much for Donald Trump be re-elected, " said Graham.

Regardless of Trump's security and the electoral objectives pursued by the Democratic Party (undermining Trump's support primarily), each look in the process explores the dark areas of an institutional civil war combined with a constitutional crisis. And it is that the elites in the United States are in a violent confrontation over the control of a middle-declining Empire in a rising multipolar world.

Both Trump's controversial figure, as well as the cynical impeachment promoted by the Democratic Party, are symptoms of a political and economic system that cannibalizes itself by not being able to export its internal contradictions (through illegal wars) and plunder the wealth of the Global South with the ease of the past decade.

As American business leaders claimed in 1942 to justify the country's participation in World War II: "The economy of the United States has never shown that it can work without the periodic injection of new and real wealth. The entire border saga (referring to the colonial war against Mexico), in fact, focused on this economic imperative. "

The corporate media of the time, serving as spokesmen for the industrial capitalist class of the United States, accurately reflected how the Empire adapted the colonial principles of the Founding Fathers (expropriation of land by military means) to configure the deployment of its hegemony to world level

WHY IMPEACHMENT IS THE LEAST IMPORTANT RIGHT NOW
A few days ago The Afghanistan Papers , a colossal package of confidential documents from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan (Sigar) that were leaked by The Washington Post, came to light .

The leak, which according to The Guardian is comparable to the secret files about the Vietnam War in 1971, exposes how the administrations that preceded Trump (that of Bush Jr. and Obama) cheated the American public about the actual results of the illegal war in Afghanistan, sold at the time to public opinion as "necessary" and "urgent" to eradicate world terrorism.

Broadly speaking, this mega filtration summarizes how the military commanders and special delegates of the United States in Afghanistan from the administrations prior to Trump's administration modified statistics and indicators to sustain the lie that they were winning the war against the Taliban.

The false progress they showed in the military, political and diplomatic arena justified an increase in defense expenses that went directly to the pockets of the national security establishment and allied companies of the industrial military complex.

During the last 18 years of "War on Terrorism" in Afghanistan, the American elite and its capitalist class developed a powerful public relations campaign to transform military and political defeat on the ground into a mechanism of original capital accumulation. The logical result of this modus operandi was an orgy of defense expenses, budgetary devaluation, drug trafficking growth and geopolitical dysfunctionality that was held by deceiving public opinion for almost two decades.

The magazine War On The Rocks affirms after the leak that "the cost of Afghanistan to the American public, the army and the government has been enormous. Almost $ 1 billion spent on federal money, more than 2,300 lives lost and another 20,000 wounds, and two generations of destroyed Afghans is possibly too high a price to pay for a war that seems like the country cannot win. "

The publication escaped commenting on the relationship that military intervention had in the exponential increase in poppy crops (heroin base), and how this factor has been key in the opioid crisis that kills Americans every day, homeless by a public health system underfunded after the budgetary looting that produced the war against Afghanistan.

This fatricidal war based on a false account has cost Afghanistan nearly 150,000 dead, according to official UN figures.

The American capitalist elite tries to transform the impeachment against Trump into the pattern of public discourse, not only American but also on a global scale. The liberal imperialists and national security hawks who set up the plot of looting, cynical robbery and lies in Afghanistan, organize themselves in one side to try to sweep Trump.

The reasons for this dramatic movement have nothing to do with the erratic foreign policy of the White House tenant on different fronts (Venezuela, Iran, Syria, North Korea, China, Russia, among many other target countries), or with their appetite for illegal sanctions as a mechanism of destruction by economic and financial means. These actions were even backed by those who try to dethrone him from power.

The problem really, and is what they try to convince us, is that Trump is an eccentric homophobic racist who is shaving the face of a corrupt American Empire, in structural crisis and in the midst of internal decomposition. Those who promote this discourse are the same politicians and representatives of the capitalist elites who have bombarded and killed dozens of countries in recent years.

While global public opinion collides uselessly against Trump's impeachment, the Empire's elite replicates the same plot of corruption and deception to the American people, applied in Afghanistan, in their current war of attrition (through illegal sanctions) against a Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela That resists.

But this and other similar situations are not a matter of importance, because the most "urgent" thing is to get the energumen from the White House, which does have enough of that.

Because this war is also being lost and they want, as soon as possible, to charge Trump that failure.

http://misionverdad.com/trama-global/av ... el-imperio

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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 03, 2020 11:22 am

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

In order to get elected,
@BarackObama
will start a war with Iran.
2:48 PM · Nov 29, 2011
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 01, 2020 3:32 pm

Meet the new prez, same as the old prez.

A genuine dog& pony show is drawing to a close in the US Senate. The outcome never in doubt, the millionaire blowhards relentlessly spewed their propaganda, burnished their cred with relevant parties and wasted everybody's time. This Democratic fiasco cannot help but solidify OrangeMan's base and likely will get him some sympathy from those numbnuts known as 'independents'.

Everyone knew this was a 'fail' from the gitgo, so why did the Dems do it? They had to, after all of the rhetoric they were compelled by partisan necessity to 'do something'. Their method a madness imposed cognitive dissonance. Because as a capitalist party them could not convict him of corruption, that being so entwined with accepted capitalist practice that people might get ideas were the typical machinations of the ruling class be brought to light. Of course his response to charges of playing fast & loose with the tax codes would be "Everybody(in his class) does it." And I'm sure that is right, so that couldn't be allowed. OTOH, going with the 'Ukraine' angle(and Russian angle before) was right in the comfort zone of the historic War Party. More important than their comfort it gained them allies in the imperial establishment. The parade of officialdom would have been more impressive had they anything but misdemeanors to report. Misuse of office is impeachable without criminal charges but ya gotta have either the sheer partisan 'ass' to pull it off or have a ruling class consensus and they had neither. Not beforehand & proly not even with a Bolton "Hail Mary'. So they have gone through the motions and can say "we tried" to their pissed off base and now back to your regularly programmed abuse.

People throw 'fascist' around a lot these days and while every liberal & conservative has a little fascist in their soul they are largely smart enough to prefer bourgeois democracy as the most efficient means of rule. The value of consent, however superficial, should not be underestimated, it smooths all the rough spots. Also continuity and stability are watchwords for capitalism. And we never forget Rome, the breaking of the 'gentlemen's agreements' which regulated ruling class conflict marked the beginning of the slide into civil war which the patricians lost. Which explains why 'more robust' means have not been employed to dispose of the CheetoMan.

Proly a majority of the ruling class would be happy to see him go for a variety of reasons, most especially because his trade policy is a disaster for most of them. Of course the 'extractive industries' and the Pentagon vendors got his back but not much else I think. Those, his popular base & Republican pols dependent upon his goodwill in the primaries are the basis of his survival. That first leg ain't going nowhere unless he drastically changed his budgets, the second is dependent upon the Dems being the worst political party in history and the third dependent upon the second. The second would be the weak spot if the Dems were not The Worst Political Party in History. Hilary sealed it in 2016 with 'deplorables' a masterstroke of ineptitude. We can expect more of the same, seems the DNC is greasing the skids for Bloomberg. In my fever dreams I see a Bloomberg candidacy with a Bernie Sanders endorsement. Perhaps that, along with the impending crash, would make the nut.

The Dems could win with that lying sheepdog Bernie Sanders but would rather lose than give an inkling of legitimacy to anything remotely associated with socialism, however bogus in practice. Norms must be maintained.

The Worst Political Party in History
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 14, 2020 2:17 pm

Retail Politics

I listened to the entire speech on the radio and when it was done my brain was squirming like a toad. The full transcript here:

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/do ... -emergency

The first thing that struck me was that he went straight to deregulation and lowering of standards, rather arcane logic but instinctive and reflexive, 'Deregulation for the Hell of It'. And what gifts to Big Pharma! One or two of those items might have made sense but I visualized the scene in a hospital for the indigent in Panama City, Panama, where a friend was recovering from a diabetes related grand mal seizure some years ago. The hallways were jammed with gurneys people on drips, people crying out, people moaning , weeping. You could hardly walk thru. The staff was overwhelmed and appeared numb. This was 'normal', I was told. I think that's where we're headed. Because purpose built emergency facilities are out of the question, but more on that...
Using federal emergency authorities, the FDA approved a new test for the virus. We did this within hours after receiving the application from Roche, a process that would normally take weeks. We therefore expect up to a half a million additional tests will be available early next week. We’ll be announcing locations probably on Sunday night. I want to thank Roche, great company for their incredible work. I’d also like to thank Thermo Fisher. The FDA’s goal is to hopefully authorize your application within 24 hours. It’ll go very quickly. It’s going very quickly. Which will bring additionally 1.4 million tests on board next week and five million within a month. I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.
Does anyone but fools believe these delivery schedules? Does anyone think 5 million will be enough?

The parade of CEOs and other hacks was something to behold, Trump was like the MC at an awards ceremony. Except the awardees , instead of thanking parents, 'the little people', thanked the MC. Profusely. Especially Pence, holy shit whadda nobjob. Ms Brix, "a highly respected person"(wtf?)babbled just like the prez. Is that catching? A train of corporate speak and hedging followed.All very upbeat from masters of keeping the Board on-board.I feel better now.

We should be eternally thankful that multi billion dollar companies deign to make a small portion of their parking lots available for the health of the nation.Drive-thru testing, what could be more American? (tough shit if ya don't have wheels but ain't that always the case?) But unless I missed something there was no mention of costs, that there would be any or how much. Swipe & swab, I figure. Better have that debit card stocked. Internet diagnosis, what could go wrong?

After the usual patriotic horseshit and into the questions from the press and the obligatory racist cheap shot at Obama we are again admonished that 'the system' ain't up to the job cause it's over-regulated. Reality is quite the opposite and the inadequate system is capitalism and of course they'll never go there. No talk of following Chinese practice but instead this corporate dog&pony show cause Trump is determined that capitalism should show itself superior in handling the pandemic. If there was ever a chance of that(there wasn't) it is long past and he sets himself and Capital up to take the rap. Which of course would be 'nasty' and 'unfair'...The priorities of Socialism and Capitalism will be coming into stark relief.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 25, 2020 2:29 pm

I said earlier today that I hope we can do this by Easter. I think that would be a great thing for our country and we’re all working very hard to make that a reality. We’ll be meeting with a lot of people to see if it can be done. Easter is a very special day for many reasons for me, for a lot of a lot of our friends. That’s a very special day and what a great timeline this would be. Easter as our timeline. What a great timeline that would be. My first priority is always the health and safety of the American people. I want everyone to understand that we are continuing to evaluate the data.
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/do ... t-march-24
Priorities...it's all showbiz
Markets surged Tuesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average posting its biggest point gain in history, as investors cheered the nearing agreement on a $2 trillion economic rescue package in Congress and President Trump’s statement that an economy stalled by coronavirus could be revved up again by Easter.

The Dow soared 2,112 points, or 11.3%, to close at 20,704. It was the index’s biggest one-day percentage increase since March 1933, and its largest point gain ever.

The S&P 500 soared 9.3%, and the Nasdaq jumped 8.1%.

***

The president attributed the market comeback to his expressed goal that most areas of the country could reopen for business by April 12, less than three weeks away, and to the looming deal in Congress to provide a massive infusion of cash and loans to workers and businesses idled by the coronavirus outbreak.

“They [investors] see we’re working very hard on that [restarting the economy], that’s a very big factor I think in today’s historic gains,” the president said.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... assurance/
The business of America is Business.
"Look, you're going to lose a number of people to the flu. But you're going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression. You're going to lose people. You're going to have suicides by the thousands. You're going to have all sorts of things happen," he said. "You're going to have instability. You can't just come in and say, 'Let's close up the United States of America, the biggest -- the most successful country in the world by far.'
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/coronav ... d=69768265
jump!

Image

The fatality numbers gonna go 6 figures, economy collapse, but the
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Tue May 26, 2020 2:21 pm

Trump, Covid-19, and new steps towards authoritarian one-man rule
BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON MAY 17, 2020 • ( 5 COMMENTS )


With each twist and turn in events, with each step he takes, Trump is driven ever further down the road of one-man authoritarian rule. His recent steps in that direction have flown somewhat under the radar because of the Covid-19 crisis. That should not be allowed to happen because these steps are directly linked with his policy regarding the pandemic.

That policy is to drive everybody back to work, allow as many workers as necessary to sicken or die, just so long as profits and the stock market rebound. This is a natural outgrowth of his anti-science policy. As part of that, he’s driven scientists out of the federal agencies, just as he’s done with career “professionals” in most other agencies. And he has appointed a Christian fundamentalist, Robert Redfield, as head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

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It is exactly this crisis, and Trump’s disastrous strategy in dealing with it that show how serious is the threat of his authoritarian drive.

Trump’s previous steps
In February, Oaklandsocialist posted this article which discussed Trump seizing direct, personal control over the National Security Council (NSC) and the State Department. It is vital to understand the role of these two agencies of the federal government. The NSC is like the gate-keeper between the president and all the federal agencies. They set the agenda, and the one who sets the agenda controls the process. The State Department’s ambassadors play a similar role between the US government and the government where they are posted. Normally, they are staffed by people who are loyal to the interests of the main wings of the US capitalist class. Yes, they carry out the policies of whoever happens to be president, but when those policies directly and regularly conflict with the interests and strategy of the main wings of the US capitalist class, when these policies conflict with the traditional way that US capitalism has ruled both at home and abroad, and when the main wings of the US capitalist class disagree that such a change is necessary, then these staffers cannot be completely trusted by the president.

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Trump loyalist and political hack, Richard Grenell

So, as the article referred to above explains, Trump has vastly reduced the number of these staffers while at the same time replacing the “professionals” at the top with those directly loyal to him. In March, Trump replaced , Joseph Maguire, the head of the National Intelligence Service (NIS). Maguire was a long-time intelligence “professional”. In other words, he carried out his duties to the main wings of the US capitalist class. He was replaced for doing exactly that, and in his place Trump appointed Richard Grenell, a far right political hack who is directly loyal to Trump. (See this article for an accounting.)

Inspectors General
Now, he is taking a further step in replacing a series of Inspector Generals (IG’s). These are the individuals within each federal agency that are supposed to ensure that corruption and malfeasance is kept to a minimum within their agency. Recently, Trump has replaced a series of these IG’s. According to the NY Times:

Trump replaced the State Department IG, Steven A. Linick, with Steven J. Akard, the director of the Office of Foreign Missions. Linick was reportedly looking into a whistleblower complaint that Mike Pompeo, head of the State Department, had used that department’s employees to work on his own personal residence. Akard reportedly has close ties to Pence.
“On May 1, even as the coronavirus pandemic continued to ravage the country, Mr. Trump moved to oust Christi A. Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, whose office had issued a report revealing the dire state of the nation’s response to the pathogen.
“A month earlier, the president ousted Michael K. Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community… Mr. Atkinson had infuriated the president by insisting on telling Congress about the whistle-blower complaint that prompted the impeachment inquiry.
“The president also took steps to remove Glenn A. Fine, who has been the acting inspector general for the Defense Department since before Mr. Trump took office, so that he could not be installed as the leader of an oversight panel intended to keep tabs on how the Trump administration spends trillions of dollars in pandemic relief approved by Congress.”
With his usual stupidity, Trump even went on record explaining why. He wrote to Nancy Pelosi, “it is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General. That is no longer the case with regard to this Inspector General (Linick).” No, actually, the IG’s are supposed to be independent of the president. That is exactly why they are there.

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Mike Flynn (with hand to ear) appearing at the RT gala in Moscow with Putin. (At lower right is Green Party’s Jill Stein.)

Mike Flynn
It is in this light that we should understand the move of Trump’s flunkey at the Department of (in)Justice, Attorney General William Barr. He just recently moved to get Trump’s original pick for head of National Intelligence, Mike Flynn, off the hook for lying to the FBI. Trump claims that Flynn was illegally set up by the “deep state”. His partial supporter on the “left”, Glenn Greenwald, who also believes in this silliness of a “deep state”, parrots that claim. No, Flynn was, in fact, a paid agent of the Turkish government, which he did not report. That is a crime according to US law. And Flynn did, in fact, participate in Trump’s secret dealings with the Putin government before Trump actually took office. Those dealings stem from Trump’s long term role as a money launderer for the Russian Mafia. And Flynn’s secret call to Kislyak was but one of many then-secret contacts between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime. The FBI agents who interviewed Flynn were in fact carrying out the interests of the main wings of the US capitalist class, exactly as they are hired to do. That is their job. The issue lies in the fact that that job conflicts with Trump’s own personal interests at times.

“Concentrating the mind”

As they say, “the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.” And a crisis concentrates the tendencies of any president. That’s because the room for error is drastically reduced. So Trump is accelerating his drive for direct, one-man authoritarian role (AKA Bonapartism).

All this is the background to the increased speculation that Trump may “postpone” November’s election. Biden speculated on it. And Trump advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner refused to rule it out.

There are a lot of steps to enable him to do that, but who six or eight years ago would have even thought it might be possible? In any case, he and his party will definitely try to throw the vote by voter suppression. And the Democrats will do nothing but whine and complain and possibly go the the Trump-controlled Supreme Court.

That is what makes the wave of worker strikes and protests important beyond what it is (important enough as that is). What’s necessary is to find a way to start to unite this wave of separate actions into one national worker movement – a movement that can ward off the worst of the health and safety violations at work and start to take a political role for the US working class.

https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/05/17 ... -man-rule/

Yes, yes, all true, but should we be surprised? He is the Naked Emperor, and in his nudity well represents his class, to the dismay of many of them. The arrogance, avarice and solipsistic ignorance of his class distilled without flacks or fixers to put lipstick on the pig, it is what attracts & repels many given to superficiality.

The reference to "concentrates the mind" does exactly describe his motivation. The accusations enumerated above are more likely than the cockamamie crap of the 'Russian Probe". Will he attempt to postpone elections in order to keep his flabby ass outta the hoosegow? I don't think it will be allowed, for the damage that would do to bourgeois democracy on top of the damage he's already cause it. Could be wrong though, the partisan divide, leaving aside the so-called 'issues', is deep, the Republican Party is desperate to stay in office. And the Democratic Party, in it's historic mission to 'go along in order to get along' is certainly capable of being the piss that sets the Republican dye once again. It cannot happen without their acquiescence. Anything, absolutely anything better than giving space to class warfare, because they know whose side they are on.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Sat May 30, 2020 2:34 pm

What's this, a liberal finding context?
But the truth is that if you are Donald Trump, artlessly calling for people to take up arms against Hillary Clinton, as he did in 2016, or calling for citizen protesters to LIBERATE their states from beneath their governor’s public health directives, as he did last month, whether you understand the meaning and context of your statements and whether you intend for them to be read as inviting violence just doesn’t matter. Trump is the most obvious and careless beneficiary of the ultimate manifestation of white privilege: Like the law itself, anticipation of consequences and understanding of context are for suckers. If you’re wealthy, white, and devoid of a worldview that contemplates the reactions of others, you can exist in this way, without knowing what you are doing, and still never, ever be held to account.

more...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... acism.html
Now then dear Dahlia, apply that to his class peers.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Sat May 30, 2020 2:40 pm

What's this, a liberal finding context?
But the truth is that if you are Donald Trump, artlessly calling for people to take up arms against Hillary Clinton, as he did in 2016, or calling for citizen protesters to LIBERATE their states from beneath their governor’s public health directives, as he did last month, whether you understand the meaning and context of your statements and whether you intend for them to be read as inviting violence just doesn’t matter. Trump is the most obvious and careless beneficiary of the ultimate manifestation of white privilege: Like the law itself, anticipation of consequences and understanding of context are for suckers. If you’re wealthy, white, and devoid of a worldview that contemplates the reactions of others, you can exist in this way, without knowing what you are doing, and still never, ever be held to account.

more...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... acism.html
bolding added

Now then dear Dahlia, apply that to his class peers.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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