Democrats Promote Trump By Claiming He Is A Criminal
Yesterday the Democrats launched their biggest fundraiser ever for Donald Trump:
Donald Trump and his 2024 White House campaign are cashing in on the former president’s indictment and Tuesday’s arraignment in New York City.
Adviser Jason Miller announced on Monday night that the campaign had hauled in over $8 million in fundraising since last Thursday, when Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to be charged with a crime.
The charges brought against Trump by a partisan District Attorney are extremely weak. Reliable anti-Trumpers like the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus recognize them as such:
[T]he fears I had in the weeks leading up to the indictment about the strength of the case against Trump were in no way allayed by Tuesday’s developments.
The indictment and an accompanying recitation of the underlying facts offers almost nothing in the way of new evidence against Trump. No surprise there — the tawdry details of Trump’s “catch and kill” scheme to suppress damaging information from adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal about their relationships with Trump have already been well-aired.
They include the guilty plea by Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who admitted to paying off Daniels at Trump’s behest and then securing reimbursement for the $130,000 in hush money by falsely describing the payments as legal retainers.
...
The theory is this: New York law makes it a crime to falsify business records. Ordinarily, that is just a misdemeanor. But if the falsification is done with intent to defraud and intent to conceal another crime, that act becomes a felony.
...
Okay, but what are the other crimes Trump is accused of covering up? The indictment doesn’t say, but Bragg was asked on Tuesday, and he offered a few possibilities. First, he said, the doctored records “violated New York election law, which makes it a crime to conspire to promote a candidacy by unlawful means,” including making false statements. Second, Bragg cited the federal election law cap on contribution limits.
Yves Smith picked these theories apart:
The indictment relates solely to Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s payment of hush money to National Enquirer to kill stories they had bought from Stormy Daniels and another woman, believed to be Karen McDougal. Those payments were reimbursed, some by Trump personally, some out of Trump Organization accounts. All payments were recorded in Trump Organization records (perhaps because Trump Organization also keeps records for Trump personally? Because all or some of the personal payments were later reimbursed by Trump Organization entities?). The indictment’s 34 counts all invoke § 175.10:1
§ 175.10 Falsifying business records in the first degree.
A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.
Let us stop and point out one elephant in the room. A big reason the DA has to try to bootstrap the alleged business records falsification into a first degree violation is that its statute of limitations is five years, versus two for a mere second class violation. If the Trump legal team can argue that there was no bigger crime this records hanky-panky was covering up, the case goes poof because the statute of limitations expired on the lesser offense.
...
To get to a first degree falsification, there has to be an intent to commit or aid in or conceal the commission of another crime.
...
The Statement of Facts [..] bangs on about the payoffs to American Media Inc. (AMI), the parent of National Enquirer, to kill the stories for the benefit of Trump’s election efforts, and depicts that as trying to illegally influence the election. As many readers know, there are a lot of problems with trying to make that the actual or intended crime that turns a second degree records violation into a first degree one.
The first is that the election laws in question are Federal, and a New York state prosecutor lacks standing to enforce Federal law.
...
The second is that Federal law requires that for a payment to be an election law violation, it must be made for the sole purpose of influencing the election.
...
Finally (although I have not parsed it super carefully), the Statement of Facts appears to rely on Cohen as the sole source for what Trump’s intent was. Cohen is not a reliable witness.
The question of intent is critical here. The details of the Cohen case show that the intent of his reimbursement by Trump was likely not the one the prosecutor alleges. As Yves extends in a comment:
Cohen did plead guilty to tax evasion, but none of that was related to the payoffs.
The detailed DoJ discussion of the payoffs makes it utterly clear that Cohen freelanced in negotiating with and paying AMI to kill the babe stories. Only AFTER did he go to the Trump Organization to seek reimbursement. So even if Cohen’s motivation was “primarily” to influence the election, that does NOT prove it was the Trump Organization motive. In fact, the Trump Organization had not motive because they did not cook up the scheme! Cohen was on his own!
So why pay Cohen? Wellie, the $60,000 bonus does say they appreciated his initiative. But that does not establish why. Note that the Trump Org could contend that since they has not authorized the payments to AMI, they couldn’t treat them as reimbursements. You can argue they were trying to have it both ways, not technically reimbursing Cohen but making him whole economically. We’ll see how this gets argued if it becomes an issue in the case.
The long-winded point here is that if Team Trump can argue they were paying Cohen for something other than election influence efforts, then it’s a legit tax deduction.
The prosecutor will have to prove that the Trump administration has falsified business records. That is a dubious claim in itself.
The prosecutor will then have to prove that Trump intent in doing that was to hush up another crime. If there was no other crime then the whole case is mute. The other crime the DA asserts Trump wanted to hush up could be one of two.
The first is a violation of New York election law which makes it a crime to conspire to promote a candidacy by unlawful means. The second is a violation of Federal election law for which the DA has no jurisdiction and which the Feds themselves did not prosecute.
All those points are weak. I can see them being argued in court but I doubt that any jury can be convinced that these were intended crimes.
If you shoot the king make sure you kill him. Accusing Trump of crimes that can not be proven in court will only make him stronger.
The Democrats made a huge mistake in pushing this case. It will drag out over many months giving Trump all the media time he needs.
During the 2016 campaign the media were filled with 'bad stuff' Trump was allegedly doing. The endless promotion helped him to win the election. In 2024 the media will again be filled with endless stories about Trump and the trial against him.
The media like to do this because anything about Trumps increases their viewership. But it is also promoting him as the anti-establishment candidate. This at no cost for his campaign.
It is unlikely that the government can win the trial against Trump. What other means will the Democrats then use to fulfill Biden's promise that Trump will no again come to power?
Posted by b on April 5, 2023 at 15:34 UTC | Permalink
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/04/d ... .html#more
Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Trump in the dock: What his indictment means for the working class and U.S. politics
Eugene PuryearApril 7, 2023 232 6 minutes read
Download PDF flyer https://flyer-generator.herokuapp.com/? ... sts/112379
The world first heard of Donald J. Trump in 1973, when the New York Times ran a frontpage story detailing a Justice Department lawsuit about how he and his father had conducted a Jim Crow-style policy across their apartment empire. So Trump in a way was coming full circle when he appeared in a Manhattan courtroom this week, again accused of shady business practices. Trump’s indictment, arrest and arraignment has created a political firestorm as the criminal-legal system enters the unchartered territory of trying a former president.
The charges from the Manhattan DA are just one of several legal problems facing the 45th President linked to his business practices and attempt to steal the 2020 election. Since Trump remains the front-runner in the Republican primary, the implications of these prosecutions on the 2024 election are already significant. Liberals are, of course, jubilant – gleeful at anything that even appears to take Trump down a peg. Millions of people across the country who hate Trump’s bigoted, hyper-capitalist politics also took something of a victory lap seeing Trump turn himself in.
The various cases against Trump are indeed “political”, but this is only a revelation for those naive enough to think prosecutors and the criminal justice system have ever been apolitical. Every day, prosecutors make a range of decisions for political reasons, mainly to look “tough on crime.” Trump supporters are now saying what many have known for some time – that the legal system is arbitrary, capricious and often unfair. This is the exact behavior these same people seek from the criminal-legal system when its targets are working class Black, Latino and Indigenous people who are the victims of the “law and order” politics they love. It’s also somewhat rich for Trump supporters to cry about “persecution” when Trump, as President, was an avid advocate and practitioner of political prosecutions against those he deemed enemies, often urging his officials to pursue blatantly illegal actions.
The Manhattan case also reflects the vacuous liberal elite “opposition” to Trump that focuses on the least consequential matters. This is a strategy that reflects the desire of the “Democratic” section of the ruling class to fold a section of Republican Party voters into their electoral coalition without changing their views on any substantive issues. The hoopla over District Attorney Bragg’s indictment has also obscured the much more consequential legal inquiries into Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election.
Ultimately, Trump’s legal trouble in New York and elsewhere is a reflection of the ongoing tussle among the ruling elites over how to right the sinking ship of U.S. capitalism.
Are they out to get him?
While “persecution” is a stretch, clearly Trump’s legal problems are wrapped up in his political struggles. Trump’s enemies in the political elite hate him not so much because of his policies, but because the way he pursues them threatens the social cohesion of the country.
The plutocrat dominated two-party system is manifestly failing to deliver sustained social gains for any subset of society. It is precariously balanced around two increasingly bankrupt “conservative” and “liberal” ideologies which utilize a massive propaganda ecosystem to argue that the American system is fundamentally sound, and that any problems are only the result of the “other side.” Under this framework, instead of seeking fundamental change to society, all that is necessary to do is switch the party in power. But especially since the Bush administration, faith in the underlying strength and legitimacy of the existing political order has been eroding as it fails to address the pressing problems facing different sectors of the population.
Trump is a symptom of this decay. In many particulars, Trump’s program comports well with broad currents among the ruling elite. The economic core of his program includes eviscerating tax obligations for massive corporations and the ultra-wealthy; the crushing of unions and elimination of health, safety and wage regulations for workers; and totally ignoring climate change so that saving the planet does not stand in the way of profits. These were all core elements of the Republican Party program prior to Trump. Republicans have always built a coalition in support of these unpopular policies by linking them to opposition to the civil and human rights of Black people, women, the LGBTQ community and increasingly immigrants of all types.
Trump, however, took this to extremes. He operated with a very openly racist public presentation that jettisoned the decades of work Republicans had done to make their racist policies appear simply “race-neutral.” Even more, Trump rhetorically promoted a pre-WWII style imperialism, harkening back to the more “isolationist” Open Door Policy where American military and economic coercion was used more narrowly to “open” or keep open markets around the world – but with fewer pretensions to shape the world order ideologically. These things taken as a whole were disruptive to the precarious balance of the political system.
By laying many of the starkest contradictions bare and seeking to resolve them in a semi-fascistic manner, Trump opened up real space for the emergence of resistance to the current order. By questioning the imperialist consensus, he further opened up space for internal challenges to the unipolar world order beloved by the U.S. ruling class who created it. So, Trump is in no way a threat to capitalism or the ultra-rich in general, but he is uniquely disruptive to their mode of governance. As a result, Trump, while assembling a pirate-ship style collection of ruling class figures around him, has become a significant target for a wide subset of the ruling elite.
From “Russiagate” to the Manhattan indictment and the Justice Department probe into Trump keeping some documents in his mansion, forces led by the Democratic Party high command have sought to consolidate the elite opposition to Trump and to isolate his wing of the Republican party electorally. These Democratic Party forces are calculating that they can rely on Trump’s anti-worker program to keep their base in the labor unions and nationally oppressed communities onside. And at the same time, the Democrats’ leadership hope to use their total support for imperialist adventures abroad to rope in the “neo-con” wing of hardline militarist Republicans. Adding general revulsion to Trump’s boorishness on top of that, the Democrats have sought to construct a center-right electoral majority that maintains the upperhand in national elections by leaving Trump with only a minority MAGA base.
Because the Democratic Party elite refuses to challenge Trump on the basis of his pro-corporate policies, various legal and media-based attacks have been launched around issues that are of far less consequence. The working class can’t simply stand aside here. The liberals’ strategy empowers the most vicious war mongers, and pulls the overall political space further towards dangerous and damaging policies like expansion of the military and police. It continually elevates the most fascistic elements of the Republican Party into contention in two-horse political races, furthering the spread of far right ideas in society.
All cases not created equal
All the legal attacks against Trump, however, are not created equal. In fact three of the four cases he is facing have important, positive implications for the working class. First and foremost are the Georgia and federal probes into Trump’s attempt to steal the election. While it has become caught up in the partisan back-and-forth, it is unequivocal that Trump’s attempt at imposing a presidential election result is deeply anti-working class. Trump was attempting to impose an agenda consisting of the total evisceration of workers’ rights, unions, a woman’s right to choose, and taxes on the wealthy. In Trump’s vision, this would all be enforced by a massively empowered police state with presidential sanction to shoot and kill, with all major opposition crushed by military force.
On top of that, he tried to achieve this vision through a massive series of lies like the claim that China sent tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots (made of bamboo paper), and Black and Latino working class people voted illegally in staggering numbers. Even more, when his totally fraudulent efforts failed in the courts and the recounts, he assembled a mob to invade Congress to prevent them from certifying the vote.
For Trump not to face any sort of serious sanction on that front sets a dangerous precedent. As the history of Reconstruction following the Civil War teaches us, this will only lead to more drastic rollbacks of democratic rights. Defending these rights preserves our ability to fight off capital’s worst excesses and organize to transform society.
Clearly, Trump only represents a fake opposition to “elites.” Behind the rhetoric is simply an extreme pro-capitalist agenda. It is also clear that the rest of the “mainstream” political system is no better option, and their tactics are essentially just paving the way for a slower drift to the right. What is needed now more than ever is to arrest this inexorable pull towards the politics of total destruction for the people and the planet. We need a real resistance rooted in an understanding of the true causes of the problems facing working and poor people. From there, we can only conclude that capitalism has outlived its usefulness, and that the only answer is a socialist reorganization of society.
https://www.liberationnews.org/trump-in ... rationnews
I generally agree with this analysis, though a quibble here and there. I think Trump's 'isolationism' weighs more heavily given Mr Biden's war on Russia and the impending war on China. The policy hawks could probably bring him around to agreement but it would be a hassle and might not work. Things are getting tight, I suspect Trump, thru his ineptitude at imperialist policy set the timetable back a couple years.
The point about Reconstruction is a good one, crackers like Wade Hampton got away with many murders, the question is whether the bosses of either party have the will to stand up to the racism which they have nurtured over the centuries. But where would US capitalism be if not for racism?
The way the two parties switched their apparent racial politics shows no attachment to either stance but rather an ambivalence based upon utility. The Dems were in power in the early 60s when things came to a head. In order to 'keep the peace' the Voting Rights Act was adopted, moving black voters firmly into the Dem camp, to the dismay of most Southern Dems. At the same time the Republicans were losing their traditional hold on the Midwest and New England. The utterly amoral Richard Nixon had the solution: his so-called Southern Strategy. It sure as hell saved the Republican Party as a political entity, tough shit Mr Lincoln.
Nixon and Reagan made MAGA and it fit Trump like a glove. Oops, they didn't see that coming, couldn't imagine street level democracy mucking up internal party politics. They need the MAGAs but not Trump. The Dems need Trump to run against cause they got nothing to vote for.
Consider how the Dem elite burned Bernie Sanders, the popular choice, in the last two elections...that's how you run a democracy in this country.
Eugene PuryearApril 7, 2023 232 6 minutes read
Download PDF flyer https://flyer-generator.herokuapp.com/? ... sts/112379
The world first heard of Donald J. Trump in 1973, when the New York Times ran a frontpage story detailing a Justice Department lawsuit about how he and his father had conducted a Jim Crow-style policy across their apartment empire. So Trump in a way was coming full circle when he appeared in a Manhattan courtroom this week, again accused of shady business practices. Trump’s indictment, arrest and arraignment has created a political firestorm as the criminal-legal system enters the unchartered territory of trying a former president.
The charges from the Manhattan DA are just one of several legal problems facing the 45th President linked to his business practices and attempt to steal the 2020 election. Since Trump remains the front-runner in the Republican primary, the implications of these prosecutions on the 2024 election are already significant. Liberals are, of course, jubilant – gleeful at anything that even appears to take Trump down a peg. Millions of people across the country who hate Trump’s bigoted, hyper-capitalist politics also took something of a victory lap seeing Trump turn himself in.
The various cases against Trump are indeed “political”, but this is only a revelation for those naive enough to think prosecutors and the criminal justice system have ever been apolitical. Every day, prosecutors make a range of decisions for political reasons, mainly to look “tough on crime.” Trump supporters are now saying what many have known for some time – that the legal system is arbitrary, capricious and often unfair. This is the exact behavior these same people seek from the criminal-legal system when its targets are working class Black, Latino and Indigenous people who are the victims of the “law and order” politics they love. It’s also somewhat rich for Trump supporters to cry about “persecution” when Trump, as President, was an avid advocate and practitioner of political prosecutions against those he deemed enemies, often urging his officials to pursue blatantly illegal actions.
The Manhattan case also reflects the vacuous liberal elite “opposition” to Trump that focuses on the least consequential matters. This is a strategy that reflects the desire of the “Democratic” section of the ruling class to fold a section of Republican Party voters into their electoral coalition without changing their views on any substantive issues. The hoopla over District Attorney Bragg’s indictment has also obscured the much more consequential legal inquiries into Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election.
Ultimately, Trump’s legal trouble in New York and elsewhere is a reflection of the ongoing tussle among the ruling elites over how to right the sinking ship of U.S. capitalism.
Are they out to get him?
While “persecution” is a stretch, clearly Trump’s legal problems are wrapped up in his political struggles. Trump’s enemies in the political elite hate him not so much because of his policies, but because the way he pursues them threatens the social cohesion of the country.
The plutocrat dominated two-party system is manifestly failing to deliver sustained social gains for any subset of society. It is precariously balanced around two increasingly bankrupt “conservative” and “liberal” ideologies which utilize a massive propaganda ecosystem to argue that the American system is fundamentally sound, and that any problems are only the result of the “other side.” Under this framework, instead of seeking fundamental change to society, all that is necessary to do is switch the party in power. But especially since the Bush administration, faith in the underlying strength and legitimacy of the existing political order has been eroding as it fails to address the pressing problems facing different sectors of the population.
Trump is a symptom of this decay. In many particulars, Trump’s program comports well with broad currents among the ruling elite. The economic core of his program includes eviscerating tax obligations for massive corporations and the ultra-wealthy; the crushing of unions and elimination of health, safety and wage regulations for workers; and totally ignoring climate change so that saving the planet does not stand in the way of profits. These were all core elements of the Republican Party program prior to Trump. Republicans have always built a coalition in support of these unpopular policies by linking them to opposition to the civil and human rights of Black people, women, the LGBTQ community and increasingly immigrants of all types.
Trump, however, took this to extremes. He operated with a very openly racist public presentation that jettisoned the decades of work Republicans had done to make their racist policies appear simply “race-neutral.” Even more, Trump rhetorically promoted a pre-WWII style imperialism, harkening back to the more “isolationist” Open Door Policy where American military and economic coercion was used more narrowly to “open” or keep open markets around the world – but with fewer pretensions to shape the world order ideologically. These things taken as a whole were disruptive to the precarious balance of the political system.
By laying many of the starkest contradictions bare and seeking to resolve them in a semi-fascistic manner, Trump opened up real space for the emergence of resistance to the current order. By questioning the imperialist consensus, he further opened up space for internal challenges to the unipolar world order beloved by the U.S. ruling class who created it. So, Trump is in no way a threat to capitalism or the ultra-rich in general, but he is uniquely disruptive to their mode of governance. As a result, Trump, while assembling a pirate-ship style collection of ruling class figures around him, has become a significant target for a wide subset of the ruling elite.
From “Russiagate” to the Manhattan indictment and the Justice Department probe into Trump keeping some documents in his mansion, forces led by the Democratic Party high command have sought to consolidate the elite opposition to Trump and to isolate his wing of the Republican party electorally. These Democratic Party forces are calculating that they can rely on Trump’s anti-worker program to keep their base in the labor unions and nationally oppressed communities onside. And at the same time, the Democrats’ leadership hope to use their total support for imperialist adventures abroad to rope in the “neo-con” wing of hardline militarist Republicans. Adding general revulsion to Trump’s boorishness on top of that, the Democrats have sought to construct a center-right electoral majority that maintains the upperhand in national elections by leaving Trump with only a minority MAGA base.
Because the Democratic Party elite refuses to challenge Trump on the basis of his pro-corporate policies, various legal and media-based attacks have been launched around issues that are of far less consequence. The working class can’t simply stand aside here. The liberals’ strategy empowers the most vicious war mongers, and pulls the overall political space further towards dangerous and damaging policies like expansion of the military and police. It continually elevates the most fascistic elements of the Republican Party into contention in two-horse political races, furthering the spread of far right ideas in society.
All cases not created equal
All the legal attacks against Trump, however, are not created equal. In fact three of the four cases he is facing have important, positive implications for the working class. First and foremost are the Georgia and federal probes into Trump’s attempt to steal the election. While it has become caught up in the partisan back-and-forth, it is unequivocal that Trump’s attempt at imposing a presidential election result is deeply anti-working class. Trump was attempting to impose an agenda consisting of the total evisceration of workers’ rights, unions, a woman’s right to choose, and taxes on the wealthy. In Trump’s vision, this would all be enforced by a massively empowered police state with presidential sanction to shoot and kill, with all major opposition crushed by military force.
On top of that, he tried to achieve this vision through a massive series of lies like the claim that China sent tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots (made of bamboo paper), and Black and Latino working class people voted illegally in staggering numbers. Even more, when his totally fraudulent efforts failed in the courts and the recounts, he assembled a mob to invade Congress to prevent them from certifying the vote.
For Trump not to face any sort of serious sanction on that front sets a dangerous precedent. As the history of Reconstruction following the Civil War teaches us, this will only lead to more drastic rollbacks of democratic rights. Defending these rights preserves our ability to fight off capital’s worst excesses and organize to transform society.
Clearly, Trump only represents a fake opposition to “elites.” Behind the rhetoric is simply an extreme pro-capitalist agenda. It is also clear that the rest of the “mainstream” political system is no better option, and their tactics are essentially just paving the way for a slower drift to the right. What is needed now more than ever is to arrest this inexorable pull towards the politics of total destruction for the people and the planet. We need a real resistance rooted in an understanding of the true causes of the problems facing working and poor people. From there, we can only conclude that capitalism has outlived its usefulness, and that the only answer is a socialist reorganization of society.
https://www.liberationnews.org/trump-in ... rationnews
I generally agree with this analysis, though a quibble here and there. I think Trump's 'isolationism' weighs more heavily given Mr Biden's war on Russia and the impending war on China. The policy hawks could probably bring him around to agreement but it would be a hassle and might not work. Things are getting tight, I suspect Trump, thru his ineptitude at imperialist policy set the timetable back a couple years.
The point about Reconstruction is a good one, crackers like Wade Hampton got away with many murders, the question is whether the bosses of either party have the will to stand up to the racism which they have nurtured over the centuries. But where would US capitalism be if not for racism?
The way the two parties switched their apparent racial politics shows no attachment to either stance but rather an ambivalence based upon utility. The Dems were in power in the early 60s when things came to a head. In order to 'keep the peace' the Voting Rights Act was adopted, moving black voters firmly into the Dem camp, to the dismay of most Southern Dems. At the same time the Republicans were losing their traditional hold on the Midwest and New England. The utterly amoral Richard Nixon had the solution: his so-called Southern Strategy. It sure as hell saved the Republican Party as a political entity, tough shit Mr Lincoln.
Nixon and Reagan made MAGA and it fit Trump like a glove. Oops, they didn't see that coming, couldn't imagine street level democracy mucking up internal party politics. They need the MAGAs but not Trump. The Dems need Trump to run against cause they got nothing to vote for.
Consider how the Dem elite burned Bernie Sanders, the popular choice, in the last two elections...that's how you run a democracy in this country.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Ruling Class Faction Mounts Coup Against Nixon and Trump: Should Progressives Support Such Efforts?
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - April 26, 2023 1
Donald Trump with his legal team in court on April 4 after being indicted on 34 felony counts. [Source: usatoday.com]
History as usual provides a cautionary lesson
On August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace with impeachment proceedings underway against him for the Watergate affair in which five men from his presidential election reelection committee were caught trying to break into and undertake illegal wiretapping in Democratic Party headquarters.
[Source: ebay.com]
Liberals at the time celebrated Nixon’s downfall, believing that the rule of law had been upheld and that Nixon had been held accountable for his abuses of power.[1]
Poorly understood was the fact that Nixon was set up and was the victim of a plot by a cabal within the military and CIA that paved the way for the ascendancy of neoconservatism.
[Source: amazon.com]
As Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin detailed in their book, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), the CIA secretly infiltrated the “plumbers” and staged the break-in in a sloppy way—likely without Nixon’s approval—in order to get caught.[2]
The key culprits were CIA officers E. Howard Hunt and James W. McCord Jr., a top aide to former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who were coached to change their testimony before the Senate Watergate hearings to be made more incriminating to Nixon and his top aides.[3]
Another key participant in the plot was Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff (1973-1974) and Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, who engineered the exposure of the secret White House taping system that recorded all of the President’s conversation in the Oval Office, and subsequently stacked the deck against Nixon’s legal defense.[4]
James McCord [Source: newsmax.com]
White House Counsel John Dean III played a crucial role in deceiving Nixon into joining a conspiracy to obstruct justice to cover up a crime he had not actually committed but that Dean had helped orchestrate.[5]
The final revelation that helped undermine Nixon was made by Alexander Butterfield, the White House deputy assistant in charge of supervising the President’s recording system, whom CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr called “the CIA’s man in the White House.”[6]
John Dean III [Source: wikipedia.org]
Alexander Butterfield: The CIA’s Man in Nixon’s White House [Source: wikipedia.org]
Mark Felt (AKA “deep throat”), who had overseen COINTELPRO operations before becoming assistant director of the FBI in 1972, leaked the story of the break-in to Bob Woodward, who had an intelligence background going back to his days in the U.S. Navy when he was a briefer for Alexander Haig. Woodward worked for The Washington Post, whose owners, Philip and Katherine Graham, routinely used their newspaper to promote CIA disinformation.
On Aug. 30, 1976, Mark Felt appeared on CBS' Mark Felt, the alleged “Deep Throat:” [Source: bostonglobe.com]
Bob Woodward, left, with Carl Bernstein and their book, All the President’s Men. The two broke the Watergate story and may have actually been unwitting players in a sophisticated coup plot. [Source: csweb.brookings.edu]
The connection between Woodward and Haig has led some researchers to suggest that Haig was the real “deep throat,” not Felt, whereas others believe the real “deep throat” was someone else high up in the CIA.[7]
The reason that Nixon was targeted was because a faction in the ruling class felt that he was too divisive and could no longer rule by consensus.
Forging an alliance with the Rockefeller wing of the GOP that was part of the East Coast establishment, Nixon adopted tariffs and price controls opposed by high finance, furthermore, and backchannel diplomacy with both Russia and China as a prelude to his support for arms control agreements (notably the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty-SALT I) and détente policies that deescalated tensions in the Cold War.[8]
Nixon’s relationship with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev and pursuit of détente aroused the anger of the neo-conservatives, much like the 2017 Putin-Trump summit. [Source: timetoast.com]
Nixon additionally opposed granting the intelligence and military bureaucracies more autonomy, using the National Security Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger as a weapon against them after having grown skeptical of their conformism, inefficiencies and errors, and the way they shielded themselves from accountability and control by the executive branch.[9]
The above policies ignited opposition among neoconservatives, including figures such as Paul Nitze, Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Walt W. Rostow, who mobilized in opposition to détente and rallied support behind Ronald Reagan.[10]
Reagan’s base lay among southern and western-rooted military, high-tech, fossil fuel and other extractive industries and Christian evangelicals intent on waging a holy war against the godless communists and hippie movement even more determinantly than Nixon and his supporters.[11]
Reagan’s victory in the 1980s election and subsequent revitalization of the Cold War was made possible by the removal of Nixon from power by secret unconstitutional means.
Ronald Reagan gives his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Detroit, July 17, 1980. [Source: wisconsinhistory.org]
History Repeating Itself in a Different Way
Fifty years after Nixon’s downfall, the dominant faction of the ruling elite has been involved in another effort—less secret and sophisticated this time—to politically destroy a president who resembles Nixon in certain ways and even shares a key adviser in common (Roger Stone).
Political dirty trickster Roger Stone has advised both Nixon and Trump. [Source: newyorker.com]
Donald Trump is a megalomaniac who presents himself as an outsider like Nixon and whipping boy of the Eastern establishment, while railing against a largely invented left (Trump called arch-capitalist Joe Biden a “trojan horse of socialism”) and calling for law and order.
Like Nixon, Trump is also very polarizing in a way that threatens domestic stability.
The part of the ruling class that hates Trump is in favor of aggressive imperialist actions to strengthen the U.S. empire, whereas the wing supporting Trump is less aggressive internationally because their economic base is rooted in domestic manufacturing, which Trump had promised to revitalize in part through revival of Nixonian protectionist policies, and less in finance.
Though escalating the drone war and provoking confrontation with China, Trump met with American adversaries like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un, and expressed scorn for the CIA in a way no president ever has, suggesting that U.S. intelligence officers are “disgraceful, “politically motivated” and “sick people,” who “spread fake news.”
Trump further earned the ire of many in the ruling class by a) vowing to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, b) cutting back on U.S. troop levels in Iraq, Germany, South Korea and Somalia, c) questioning the legitimacy of NATO, and d) blocking the U.S. from joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a centerpiece of Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” policy that promised endless corporate profits.
Additionally, Trump adopted extreme immigration policies that threatened to undermine cheap labor supply; and advocated at times for an “America First” program that harkened back to early 1930s isolationism.[12]
Trump shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim JongUn: not something the neocons were happy to see. [Source: thegrayzoneproject.com]
More recently, Trump offered a stinging rebuke to the Biden administration’s foreign policy, stating in a February 28th speech that “for decades, we’ve had the very same people, such as Victoria Nuland and many others just like her, obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO, not to mention the State Department support for uprisings in Ukraine. These people have been seeking confrontation for a long time, much like in the case in Iraq and other parts of the world and now we’re teetering on the brink of World War III.”
Trump is the first ex-president to attack neocons like Victoria Nuland who have provoked war after war. [Source: rightedition.com]
Trump’s volatility, thinly veiled bigotry and crudeness was not in the manner expected of imperial statesmen.[13] Calling his generals “dopes” and “losers,” Trump admitted that America was not really exceptional; stating that Americans had occupied Syria to steal its oil; and telling a Fox News reporter who asked whether Putin had killed his opponents that: “there are a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?”
This isn’t what presidents are supposed to say.
In 2017, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow after Trump challenged the claim that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Chuck Schumer warned Trump. [Source: townhall.com]
Bernie Sanders was also seen as a threat to the ruling class in the 2016 and 2020 elections that was successfully contained when he was removed through a rigged primary process by the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
[Source: wallstreetonparade.com]
Since Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, he had to be dealt with by other means.
From Russia-gate to the April 4 Indictment
These means have included the artificially manufactured Russia-gate scandal, which was initiated by the “deep state” as a 21st Century successor to Watergate.
Hillary Clinton, a key mastermind, had herself commenced her career as a Watergate lawyer on the House Judiciary committee, where she began to develop her reputation as a liberal Nixon for her use of political dirty tricks.[14]
Hillary Clinton as a young Watergate lawyer with other staff working for the House Judiciary Committee. [Source: democraticunderground.com]
The supposed smoking gun in the Russia-gate proceedings was the Steele dossier, which was exposed as a hoax produced by a British spy, Christopher Steele.
[Source: washingtontimes.com]
An alleged email hack by the Russians that purported to expose their election interference was shown by former intelligence American professionals to have been a leak undertaken somewhere in the U.S. based on the speed of the modem.
When Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a report, it determined there was no evidence to corroborate that Trump had colluded with the Russians to rig the 2016 election.
[Source: cnn.com]
In 2019, the Democrats tried in vain again to impeach Trump by accusing him of withholding $400 million in military aid to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an attempt to pressure Zelenskyy to launch an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s appointment to the board of a natural gas company in Ukraine, Burisma.
Scene from the Trump Ukraine impeachment hearings. [Source: cbsnews.com]
As part of the Russia-gate investigation, a number of Trump’s top aides were prosecuted, including the old Nixonite Roger Stone, who characterized his trial—on charges of allegedly lying to congress about what he knew about the release of Wikileaks documents—as a “Soviet style show trial.”[15]
Roger Stone gives Nixon salute outside his trial for allegedly lying to congress–which he was convicted for and sentenced to three years in prison. [Source: businessinsider.com]
In 2022, the House formed a select committee to investigate the January 6 Capitol riots, headed by Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R-WY), which recommended criminal charges against Trump—now a private citizen—for triggering the insurrection.
Thompson and Cheney presiding over the House Select committee set up to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 hearings. [Source: sputnikglobe.com]
While the latter charges held merit, the committee’s singular focus on Trump’s role in provoking the riot left unanswered questions about FBI informants and possible provocateurs among the rioters and other oddities surrounding the events, including some unexplained deaths and the placing of pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican party headquarters the night before.
The latest salvo in the ruling class plot to remove Trump appears to have taken place on April 4, 2023, when Trump was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records as part of a scheme to cover up two illicit affairs.
Legal experts quickly pointed out that the offense in which Trump is charged is normally categorized as a misdemeanor.
Bragg said in the indictment that Trump made false statements to cover up crimes related to the 2016 election, though he does not lay out any evidence of this—causing Trump’s supporters and many legal experts to question the validity of the case.[16]
The man at the center of the storm—Alvin Bragg. [Source: foxnews.com]
Last year, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed to pay fines of $8,000 and $105,000 respectively, for mislabeling a $175,000 expenditure on opposition research, namely the long-discredited “Steele dossier,” as “legal expenses”—which is very similar to what Trump is accused of doing in a slightly different context.
What Should Progressives Do?
While we do not know for sure that Bragg’s prosecution is over-zealous as he could be withholding some smoking gun, it appears to be a continuation of the illegal six-year campaign—orchestrated covertly by the intelligence community and reinforced overtly by newspapers, TV stations, cable networks and the social media giants they long ago infiltrated and now control—to undermine Trump, whose main effect so far has been largely to bolster Trump’s popularity since he can present himself as a victim.
The question for progressives is whether to support such a campaign when we know Trump to be a dangerous and loathsome figure who aspires to be an American Mussolini.
Good people may have different answers to this question, and if Trump truly is a fascist, one can justify an attitude of anything goes.
However, by aligning with the dominant faction of the ruling class that is against Trump, one is aligning with the forces that have tried to exploit liberal anger about Trump’s election to drum up Russophobia and trigger a war in Ukraine with Russia that could easily escalate into a nuclear war.
History shows furthermore that by removing one cancer (Dick Nixon), the ruling elite can produce an even worse malignancy (Ronald Reagan) and empower dark forces that have taken us to the horrible point that we’re at today—and are not the ones capable of taking us out of it.
The latter can best be done through the traditional formula of grassroots organizing and movement building in regions of the country where Trump draws his political support.
1.Noam Chomsky noted that the offenses for which Nixon was prosecuted were largely trivial compared to his crimes in expanding the Indochina Wars, including by illegally bombing Laos and Cambodia, and in his support for the FBI’s Counterintelligence operation (COINTELPRO), which committed myriad unconstitutional acts in targeting the Black Panther Party, Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and other leftist organizations. A similar argument was made in Salon about Donald Trump by Chris Hedges, who invoked Chomsky’s article. Trump’s most egregious crimes included illegal drone strikes, assassination, and the attempted engineering of foreign coups for which he nor any other member of his administration was ever prosecuted for.
2.Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). See also Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA (New York: Random House, 1984). ↑
3.McCord had been instrumental in the coverup of the CIA’s murder of Dr. Frank Olson and served as a deputy to Paul Gaynor, a powerful figure in the CIA who had played an essential role in some of the Agency’s darkest projects, including MK-ULTRA, Project Artichoke and Project Bluebird involving unethical experiments with hypnosis and drugs involving human guinea pigs, and kept files on the sexual proclivities of political officials. Nixon’s “plumbers” who carried out illegal surveillance and other clandestine operations for him, included others with CIA backgrounds, notably Frank Sturgis, who had served alongside Hunt in the Agency’s anti-Castro operations and CIA-trained Cuban exiles Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Barker, and Eugenio Martinez. Many of the “plumbers” were also involved in the Kennedy assassination. See Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (Westworks, 1977).
4.Haig had earlier been part of the anti-détente spy ring at the heart of the Moorer-Radford affair, a surveillance operation run by far right-wing military officers targeting Nixon. He also ordered an Army Criminal Investigation Command (CIC) investigation into Nixon’s mob ties and to his smuggling of gold into Vietnam in a clear effort to bring Nixon down. ↑
5.According to various sources, Dean had ordered the break-in to obtain information on a secret DNC-prostitution ring of which Dean’s girlfriend, Maureen Biner, was involved. One of the burglars, Eugenio Martinez, was arrested with the key to the desk of Maxie Wells, the Secretary of DNC official Spencer Oliver, whose office was used to run the prostitution ring. The CIA had promoted disinformation claiming that the purpose of the break-in was to unearth covert funding by Fidel Castro to Democratic Party politicians. ↑
6.Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2022), 191. Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski was a board member of a CIA front company, the M.D. Anderson Foundation. Jesse Ventura, with Dick Russell American Conspiracies (New York: Skyhorse, 2010), 90. ↑
7.Colodny and Gettlin in Silent Coup suggest that information that Woodward attributes to “Deep Throat” simply could not have been known by Felt at that place and time, so he was either someone else or a composite of informants. ↑
8.Good, American Exception, ch. 9. ↑
9.In 1973, Nixon appointed as CIA Director James Schlesinger, who fired more than 1,000 agents. Kissinger later noted that a key reason for Nixon’s animus towards the CIA was because he had “brought to the presidency a belief that the CIA was a refuge of Ivy League intellectuals opposed to him.” Whitney Webb, One Nation under Blackmail, Vol. 1: The sordid union between intelligence and Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2022), 177. Aaron Good points out that Nixon’s War on Drugs angered the CIA because it threatened to undermine many of its operations and expose its covert “assets” that were drug traffickers. Nixon may have also had knowledge about CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination that they were leery about being exposed. Good, American Exception, ch. 10. ↑
10.See Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983). ↑
11.Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (New York: Random House, 1975). Former SDS President Carl Oglesby described the ruling class divide as being between “yankees” who were part of the Eastern establishment and helped form the CIA, and “cowboys” who rallied behind Reagan and promoted an extremely anticommunist and hawkish foreign policy. Michael Klare differentiated between “Prussians,” or military hawks tied to military industry, and “traders,” Wall Street high finance who embraced neoliberal and neoconservative policies. Michael T. Klare, “The Prussians V. The Traders,” New Internationalist, March 4, 1984, https://newint.org/features/1984/03/05/prussians/ ↑
12.Christian Parenti details how Trump’s foreign policy team worked actively to thwart him, writing that “Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic advisor, went so far as to twice steal from the president’s desk important documents awaiting the president’s signature. One would have withdrawn the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. The other would have unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).” Parenti writes also that Mark Esper, who spent a year and a half as Trump’s second Secretary of Defense, “made an art of blocking implementation of Trump’s empire-wrecking directives. When Trump demanded that one third of the American military personnel in Germany come home, Esper drew up a plan to instead ‘redeploy’ 11,500 troops with more than half of these remaining in the European theater. Indeed, Esper even managed to spin the redeployment as advancing America’s traditional agenda of threatening Russia.” At the end of his piece, Parenti writes: “Look abroad. Trump threatened the entire system of U.S. global hegemony. He threatened it for different reasons and in different ways than might grassroots, socialist, anti-imperialists, but he threatened U.S. empire nonetheless.” Christian Parenti, “Trump Against Empire: Is That Why They Hate Him?” The Grayzone Project, February 15, 2023. ↑
13.Trump called Third World countries “shitholes,” giving off a bad image for a country purporting to be on a crusade to spread democracy and goodwill around the world. ↑
14.See Barbara Olsen, Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001), 4, 5. ↑
15.Judge Amy Berman Jackson displayed her bias in Stone’s sentencing hearing when she stated that “Stone was not prosecuted for standing up to the president, he was prosecuted for covering up for the president.” The Mueller inquiry, however, never revealed that Trump colluded with Russia and Wikileaks or was involved in any significant malfeasance for him to require Stone to cover it up. ↑
16.Significantly, the payments to Stormy Daniels were made six years ago and facts have been publicly known for five, but Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr. declined to pursue an indictment against Trump and Merrick Garland’s Justice Department also declined. According to Paul Rosenzweig, a former federal prosecutor, Bragg’s filing is a “very plain vanilla indictment,” which “doesn’t even say what the ‘other crime’ is that converts misdemeanors to be converted into felonies.” UCLA School of Law professor Richard Hasen, who previously called for Trump to be charged in a separate inquiry over the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riots, said political and legal considerations should have prevented Bragg from moving forward. “The legal papers are quite skimpy–if this was in federal [or national] court I would expect more of the theory of the case to be in there,” Hasen said. “If this case is weak … some in the public might surmise that they are all weak,” he added, referring to investigations in Georgia and elsewhere over Trump’s alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election. ↑
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... h-efforts/
A lot here I've been saying for a while, and it is why Trump will not be prez again, by hook or by crook.
PS - Good luck on that last paragraph...I live in the heart of MAGA country and breaking the fear and loathing the majority white population has for the mere whisper of 'socialism' is gonna be a very hard row to hoe. But necessary.
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - April 26, 2023 1
Donald Trump with his legal team in court on April 4 after being indicted on 34 felony counts. [Source: usatoday.com]
History as usual provides a cautionary lesson
On August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace with impeachment proceedings underway against him for the Watergate affair in which five men from his presidential election reelection committee were caught trying to break into and undertake illegal wiretapping in Democratic Party headquarters.
[Source: ebay.com]
Liberals at the time celebrated Nixon’s downfall, believing that the rule of law had been upheld and that Nixon had been held accountable for his abuses of power.[1]
Poorly understood was the fact that Nixon was set up and was the victim of a plot by a cabal within the military and CIA that paved the way for the ascendancy of neoconservatism.
[Source: amazon.com]
As Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin detailed in their book, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), the CIA secretly infiltrated the “plumbers” and staged the break-in in a sloppy way—likely without Nixon’s approval—in order to get caught.[2]
The key culprits were CIA officers E. Howard Hunt and James W. McCord Jr., a top aide to former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who were coached to change their testimony before the Senate Watergate hearings to be made more incriminating to Nixon and his top aides.[3]
Another key participant in the plot was Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff (1973-1974) and Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, who engineered the exposure of the secret White House taping system that recorded all of the President’s conversation in the Oval Office, and subsequently stacked the deck against Nixon’s legal defense.[4]
James McCord [Source: newsmax.com]
White House Counsel John Dean III played a crucial role in deceiving Nixon into joining a conspiracy to obstruct justice to cover up a crime he had not actually committed but that Dean had helped orchestrate.[5]
The final revelation that helped undermine Nixon was made by Alexander Butterfield, the White House deputy assistant in charge of supervising the President’s recording system, whom CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr called “the CIA’s man in the White House.”[6]
John Dean III [Source: wikipedia.org]
Alexander Butterfield: The CIA’s Man in Nixon’s White House [Source: wikipedia.org]
Mark Felt (AKA “deep throat”), who had overseen COINTELPRO operations before becoming assistant director of the FBI in 1972, leaked the story of the break-in to Bob Woodward, who had an intelligence background going back to his days in the U.S. Navy when he was a briefer for Alexander Haig. Woodward worked for The Washington Post, whose owners, Philip and Katherine Graham, routinely used their newspaper to promote CIA disinformation.
On Aug. 30, 1976, Mark Felt appeared on CBS' Mark Felt, the alleged “Deep Throat:” [Source: bostonglobe.com]
Bob Woodward, left, with Carl Bernstein and their book, All the President’s Men. The two broke the Watergate story and may have actually been unwitting players in a sophisticated coup plot. [Source: csweb.brookings.edu]
The connection between Woodward and Haig has led some researchers to suggest that Haig was the real “deep throat,” not Felt, whereas others believe the real “deep throat” was someone else high up in the CIA.[7]
The reason that Nixon was targeted was because a faction in the ruling class felt that he was too divisive and could no longer rule by consensus.
Forging an alliance with the Rockefeller wing of the GOP that was part of the East Coast establishment, Nixon adopted tariffs and price controls opposed by high finance, furthermore, and backchannel diplomacy with both Russia and China as a prelude to his support for arms control agreements (notably the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty-SALT I) and détente policies that deescalated tensions in the Cold War.[8]
Nixon’s relationship with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev and pursuit of détente aroused the anger of the neo-conservatives, much like the 2017 Putin-Trump summit. [Source: timetoast.com]
Nixon additionally opposed granting the intelligence and military bureaucracies more autonomy, using the National Security Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger as a weapon against them after having grown skeptical of their conformism, inefficiencies and errors, and the way they shielded themselves from accountability and control by the executive branch.[9]
The above policies ignited opposition among neoconservatives, including figures such as Paul Nitze, Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Walt W. Rostow, who mobilized in opposition to détente and rallied support behind Ronald Reagan.[10]
Reagan’s base lay among southern and western-rooted military, high-tech, fossil fuel and other extractive industries and Christian evangelicals intent on waging a holy war against the godless communists and hippie movement even more determinantly than Nixon and his supporters.[11]
Reagan’s victory in the 1980s election and subsequent revitalization of the Cold War was made possible by the removal of Nixon from power by secret unconstitutional means.
Ronald Reagan gives his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Detroit, July 17, 1980. [Source: wisconsinhistory.org]
History Repeating Itself in a Different Way
Fifty years after Nixon’s downfall, the dominant faction of the ruling elite has been involved in another effort—less secret and sophisticated this time—to politically destroy a president who resembles Nixon in certain ways and even shares a key adviser in common (Roger Stone).
Political dirty trickster Roger Stone has advised both Nixon and Trump. [Source: newyorker.com]
Donald Trump is a megalomaniac who presents himself as an outsider like Nixon and whipping boy of the Eastern establishment, while railing against a largely invented left (Trump called arch-capitalist Joe Biden a “trojan horse of socialism”) and calling for law and order.
Like Nixon, Trump is also very polarizing in a way that threatens domestic stability.
The part of the ruling class that hates Trump is in favor of aggressive imperialist actions to strengthen the U.S. empire, whereas the wing supporting Trump is less aggressive internationally because their economic base is rooted in domestic manufacturing, which Trump had promised to revitalize in part through revival of Nixonian protectionist policies, and less in finance.
Though escalating the drone war and provoking confrontation with China, Trump met with American adversaries like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un, and expressed scorn for the CIA in a way no president ever has, suggesting that U.S. intelligence officers are “disgraceful, “politically motivated” and “sick people,” who “spread fake news.”
Trump further earned the ire of many in the ruling class by a) vowing to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, b) cutting back on U.S. troop levels in Iraq, Germany, South Korea and Somalia, c) questioning the legitimacy of NATO, and d) blocking the U.S. from joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a centerpiece of Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” policy that promised endless corporate profits.
Additionally, Trump adopted extreme immigration policies that threatened to undermine cheap labor supply; and advocated at times for an “America First” program that harkened back to early 1930s isolationism.[12]
Trump shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim JongUn: not something the neocons were happy to see. [Source: thegrayzoneproject.com]
More recently, Trump offered a stinging rebuke to the Biden administration’s foreign policy, stating in a February 28th speech that “for decades, we’ve had the very same people, such as Victoria Nuland and many others just like her, obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO, not to mention the State Department support for uprisings in Ukraine. These people have been seeking confrontation for a long time, much like in the case in Iraq and other parts of the world and now we’re teetering on the brink of World War III.”
Trump is the first ex-president to attack neocons like Victoria Nuland who have provoked war after war. [Source: rightedition.com]
Trump’s volatility, thinly veiled bigotry and crudeness was not in the manner expected of imperial statesmen.[13] Calling his generals “dopes” and “losers,” Trump admitted that America was not really exceptional; stating that Americans had occupied Syria to steal its oil; and telling a Fox News reporter who asked whether Putin had killed his opponents that: “there are a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?”
This isn’t what presidents are supposed to say.
In 2017, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow after Trump challenged the claim that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Chuck Schumer warned Trump. [Source: townhall.com]
Bernie Sanders was also seen as a threat to the ruling class in the 2016 and 2020 elections that was successfully contained when he was removed through a rigged primary process by the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
[Source: wallstreetonparade.com]
Since Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, he had to be dealt with by other means.
From Russia-gate to the April 4 Indictment
These means have included the artificially manufactured Russia-gate scandal, which was initiated by the “deep state” as a 21st Century successor to Watergate.
Hillary Clinton, a key mastermind, had herself commenced her career as a Watergate lawyer on the House Judiciary committee, where she began to develop her reputation as a liberal Nixon for her use of political dirty tricks.[14]
Hillary Clinton as a young Watergate lawyer with other staff working for the House Judiciary Committee. [Source: democraticunderground.com]
The supposed smoking gun in the Russia-gate proceedings was the Steele dossier, which was exposed as a hoax produced by a British spy, Christopher Steele.
[Source: washingtontimes.com]
An alleged email hack by the Russians that purported to expose their election interference was shown by former intelligence American professionals to have been a leak undertaken somewhere in the U.S. based on the speed of the modem.
When Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a report, it determined there was no evidence to corroborate that Trump had colluded with the Russians to rig the 2016 election.
[Source: cnn.com]
In 2019, the Democrats tried in vain again to impeach Trump by accusing him of withholding $400 million in military aid to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an attempt to pressure Zelenskyy to launch an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s appointment to the board of a natural gas company in Ukraine, Burisma.
Scene from the Trump Ukraine impeachment hearings. [Source: cbsnews.com]
As part of the Russia-gate investigation, a number of Trump’s top aides were prosecuted, including the old Nixonite Roger Stone, who characterized his trial—on charges of allegedly lying to congress about what he knew about the release of Wikileaks documents—as a “Soviet style show trial.”[15]
Roger Stone gives Nixon salute outside his trial for allegedly lying to congress–which he was convicted for and sentenced to three years in prison. [Source: businessinsider.com]
In 2022, the House formed a select committee to investigate the January 6 Capitol riots, headed by Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R-WY), which recommended criminal charges against Trump—now a private citizen—for triggering the insurrection.
Thompson and Cheney presiding over the House Select committee set up to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 hearings. [Source: sputnikglobe.com]
While the latter charges held merit, the committee’s singular focus on Trump’s role in provoking the riot left unanswered questions about FBI informants and possible provocateurs among the rioters and other oddities surrounding the events, including some unexplained deaths and the placing of pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican party headquarters the night before.
The latest salvo in the ruling class plot to remove Trump appears to have taken place on April 4, 2023, when Trump was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records as part of a scheme to cover up two illicit affairs.
Legal experts quickly pointed out that the offense in which Trump is charged is normally categorized as a misdemeanor.
Bragg said in the indictment that Trump made false statements to cover up crimes related to the 2016 election, though he does not lay out any evidence of this—causing Trump’s supporters and many legal experts to question the validity of the case.[16]
The man at the center of the storm—Alvin Bragg. [Source: foxnews.com]
Last year, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed to pay fines of $8,000 and $105,000 respectively, for mislabeling a $175,000 expenditure on opposition research, namely the long-discredited “Steele dossier,” as “legal expenses”—which is very similar to what Trump is accused of doing in a slightly different context.
What Should Progressives Do?
While we do not know for sure that Bragg’s prosecution is over-zealous as he could be withholding some smoking gun, it appears to be a continuation of the illegal six-year campaign—orchestrated covertly by the intelligence community and reinforced overtly by newspapers, TV stations, cable networks and the social media giants they long ago infiltrated and now control—to undermine Trump, whose main effect so far has been largely to bolster Trump’s popularity since he can present himself as a victim.
The question for progressives is whether to support such a campaign when we know Trump to be a dangerous and loathsome figure who aspires to be an American Mussolini.
Good people may have different answers to this question, and if Trump truly is a fascist, one can justify an attitude of anything goes.
However, by aligning with the dominant faction of the ruling class that is against Trump, one is aligning with the forces that have tried to exploit liberal anger about Trump’s election to drum up Russophobia and trigger a war in Ukraine with Russia that could easily escalate into a nuclear war.
History shows furthermore that by removing one cancer (Dick Nixon), the ruling elite can produce an even worse malignancy (Ronald Reagan) and empower dark forces that have taken us to the horrible point that we’re at today—and are not the ones capable of taking us out of it.
The latter can best be done through the traditional formula of grassroots organizing and movement building in regions of the country where Trump draws his political support.
1.Noam Chomsky noted that the offenses for which Nixon was prosecuted were largely trivial compared to his crimes in expanding the Indochina Wars, including by illegally bombing Laos and Cambodia, and in his support for the FBI’s Counterintelligence operation (COINTELPRO), which committed myriad unconstitutional acts in targeting the Black Panther Party, Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and other leftist organizations. A similar argument was made in Salon about Donald Trump by Chris Hedges, who invoked Chomsky’s article. Trump’s most egregious crimes included illegal drone strikes, assassination, and the attempted engineering of foreign coups for which he nor any other member of his administration was ever prosecuted for.
2.Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). See also Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA (New York: Random House, 1984). ↑
3.McCord had been instrumental in the coverup of the CIA’s murder of Dr. Frank Olson and served as a deputy to Paul Gaynor, a powerful figure in the CIA who had played an essential role in some of the Agency’s darkest projects, including MK-ULTRA, Project Artichoke and Project Bluebird involving unethical experiments with hypnosis and drugs involving human guinea pigs, and kept files on the sexual proclivities of political officials. Nixon’s “plumbers” who carried out illegal surveillance and other clandestine operations for him, included others with CIA backgrounds, notably Frank Sturgis, who had served alongside Hunt in the Agency’s anti-Castro operations and CIA-trained Cuban exiles Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Barker, and Eugenio Martinez. Many of the “plumbers” were also involved in the Kennedy assassination. See Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (Westworks, 1977).
4.Haig had earlier been part of the anti-détente spy ring at the heart of the Moorer-Radford affair, a surveillance operation run by far right-wing military officers targeting Nixon. He also ordered an Army Criminal Investigation Command (CIC) investigation into Nixon’s mob ties and to his smuggling of gold into Vietnam in a clear effort to bring Nixon down. ↑
5.According to various sources, Dean had ordered the break-in to obtain information on a secret DNC-prostitution ring of which Dean’s girlfriend, Maureen Biner, was involved. One of the burglars, Eugenio Martinez, was arrested with the key to the desk of Maxie Wells, the Secretary of DNC official Spencer Oliver, whose office was used to run the prostitution ring. The CIA had promoted disinformation claiming that the purpose of the break-in was to unearth covert funding by Fidel Castro to Democratic Party politicians. ↑
6.Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2022), 191. Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski was a board member of a CIA front company, the M.D. Anderson Foundation. Jesse Ventura, with Dick Russell American Conspiracies (New York: Skyhorse, 2010), 90. ↑
7.Colodny and Gettlin in Silent Coup suggest that information that Woodward attributes to “Deep Throat” simply could not have been known by Felt at that place and time, so he was either someone else or a composite of informants. ↑
8.Good, American Exception, ch. 9. ↑
9.In 1973, Nixon appointed as CIA Director James Schlesinger, who fired more than 1,000 agents. Kissinger later noted that a key reason for Nixon’s animus towards the CIA was because he had “brought to the presidency a belief that the CIA was a refuge of Ivy League intellectuals opposed to him.” Whitney Webb, One Nation under Blackmail, Vol. 1: The sordid union between intelligence and Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2022), 177. Aaron Good points out that Nixon’s War on Drugs angered the CIA because it threatened to undermine many of its operations and expose its covert “assets” that were drug traffickers. Nixon may have also had knowledge about CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination that they were leery about being exposed. Good, American Exception, ch. 10. ↑
10.See Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983). ↑
11.Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (New York: Random House, 1975). Former SDS President Carl Oglesby described the ruling class divide as being between “yankees” who were part of the Eastern establishment and helped form the CIA, and “cowboys” who rallied behind Reagan and promoted an extremely anticommunist and hawkish foreign policy. Michael Klare differentiated between “Prussians,” or military hawks tied to military industry, and “traders,” Wall Street high finance who embraced neoliberal and neoconservative policies. Michael T. Klare, “The Prussians V. The Traders,” New Internationalist, March 4, 1984, https://newint.org/features/1984/03/05/prussians/ ↑
12.Christian Parenti details how Trump’s foreign policy team worked actively to thwart him, writing that “Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic advisor, went so far as to twice steal from the president’s desk important documents awaiting the president’s signature. One would have withdrawn the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. The other would have unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).” Parenti writes also that Mark Esper, who spent a year and a half as Trump’s second Secretary of Defense, “made an art of blocking implementation of Trump’s empire-wrecking directives. When Trump demanded that one third of the American military personnel in Germany come home, Esper drew up a plan to instead ‘redeploy’ 11,500 troops with more than half of these remaining in the European theater. Indeed, Esper even managed to spin the redeployment as advancing America’s traditional agenda of threatening Russia.” At the end of his piece, Parenti writes: “Look abroad. Trump threatened the entire system of U.S. global hegemony. He threatened it for different reasons and in different ways than might grassroots, socialist, anti-imperialists, but he threatened U.S. empire nonetheless.” Christian Parenti, “Trump Against Empire: Is That Why They Hate Him?” The Grayzone Project, February 15, 2023. ↑
13.Trump called Third World countries “shitholes,” giving off a bad image for a country purporting to be on a crusade to spread democracy and goodwill around the world. ↑
14.See Barbara Olsen, Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001), 4, 5. ↑
15.Judge Amy Berman Jackson displayed her bias in Stone’s sentencing hearing when she stated that “Stone was not prosecuted for standing up to the president, he was prosecuted for covering up for the president.” The Mueller inquiry, however, never revealed that Trump colluded with Russia and Wikileaks or was involved in any significant malfeasance for him to require Stone to cover it up. ↑
16.Significantly, the payments to Stormy Daniels were made six years ago and facts have been publicly known for five, but Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr. declined to pursue an indictment against Trump and Merrick Garland’s Justice Department also declined. According to Paul Rosenzweig, a former federal prosecutor, Bragg’s filing is a “very plain vanilla indictment,” which “doesn’t even say what the ‘other crime’ is that converts misdemeanors to be converted into felonies.” UCLA School of Law professor Richard Hasen, who previously called for Trump to be charged in a separate inquiry over the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riots, said political and legal considerations should have prevented Bragg from moving forward. “The legal papers are quite skimpy–if this was in federal [or national] court I would expect more of the theory of the case to be in there,” Hasen said. “If this case is weak … some in the public might surmise that they are all weak,” he added, referring to investigations in Georgia and elsewhere over Trump’s alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election. ↑
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... h-efforts/
A lot here I've been saying for a while, and it is why Trump will not be prez again, by hook or by crook.
PS - Good luck on that last paragraph...I live in the heart of MAGA country and breaking the fear and loathing the majority white population has for the mere whisper of 'socialism' is gonna be a very hard row to hoe. But necessary.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Trump Is Bad Because He’s Similar To Other US Presidents, Not Because He’s Different
We’re already seeing a ton of ridiculous drama queenery about Trump’s second presidential run, claiming he’s grown even more extremist and fascistic than when he was president in what amounts to a repeat of the “Trump is a second Hitler” narrative that dominated US political discourse in his first run.
A Washington Post article titled “The deepening radicalization of Donald J. Trump” asserts that “Trump is sketching out the contours of a second term potentially more dangerous and chaotic than his first,” citing a New York University professor who says, “When authoritarian leaders lose office, they come back, like, 10 times worse — they never get less extreme, they always get more extreme.”
But when you look at the authors’ evidence that Trump is becoming more dangerous and evil, there’s nothing about assassinating foreign leaders, starvation sanctions, cold war brinkmanship, mass bombing campaigns or Trump’s Yemen veto, or any of the other horrors he unleashed upon the world as commander in chief from 2017 through 2020. Instead, the article talks about his attitudes toward the January 6 Capitol Building riot and his “grab them by the pussy” remarks about women.
Trump ramped up cold war aggressions against Russia, helped set the US on track for war with China, killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, vetoed attempts to save Yemen from U.S.-backed genocide, assassinated Iran’s top military commander, worked to foment civil war in Iran using starvation sanctions and CIA ops with the stated goal of effecting regime change, occupied Syrian oil fields with the goal of preventing Syria’s reconstruction, launched repeated airstrikes against the Syrian government, greatly increased the number of troops in the Middle East and elsewhere, greatly increased the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians, and reduced military accountability for those airstrikes. He also imprisoned Julian Assange by escalating the empire’s war on journalism for exposing US war crimes.
All of which are in perfect alignment with the actions of both Trump’s predecessors and Trump’s successor.
https://twitter.com/MaxBoot/status/1661329451177635842
Donald Trump spent four years proving to everyone that he wasn’t bad because he was similar to Hitler, he was bad because he was similar to Obama. He wasn’t terrible because of the ways he differed from other presidents, but because of the ways he was the same.
The tiny smattering of violence that occurred in the US because of Trump was microscopic compared to the death and destruction he inflicted upon the world outside the nation’s borders. But the mainstream worldview can’t acknowledge those actions, because the mainstream worldview is designed to support and facilitate those actions.
Yes, Trump is evil. Yes, you should be alarmed that monsters like him exist. But not because he is a unique aberration and deviation from the US government’s status quo; rather, you should be alarmed because he perfectly exemplifies and bolsters the US government’s status quo.
The bad things about Trump specifically are dwarfed by the bad things about the US empire generally — not by a percentage, but by many orders of magnitude. The empire’s malfeasance is exponentially more significant than whatever face happens to be sitting at its front desk.
That’s what people should be freaked out about. Not that the front desk of the imperial office might be occupied by an obnoxious oaf for four years, but by the empire itself. That’s where all the real horrors are. They’re just invisible to the mainstream worldview. By design.
The US presidency can only be held by imperialist monsters. That’s the only kind of person who ever makes it through the security checkpoints on becoming president of the world’s most powerful and destructive government which serves as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by human blood.
Sometimes when I tell Australians who’ve been indoctrinated by our nation’s insanely propagandistic imperial media what I do for a living, they tell me “Ooh, it would be terrible if Trump wins the election!” I tell them “Yeah, it will be! Also it will be terrible if anyone else does!”
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/06/02 ... different/
I might question some of the sins Ms Johnstone lays at Trumps door like increasing troops in the ME and killing record numbers of civilians. He's bad enough, no need to exaggerate. Also, Trump did not "makes it through the security checkpoints on becoming president ", he snuck in thru an accident of democracy(however dismaying) and the gatekeepers being full of hubris letting down their guard. They didn't let their guard down for Al Gore, they saw that possibility and were prepared. Junior was supposed to be prez and so was Hil. They won't make that mistake again and today we see a bit of that effort in Miami.
What does make Trump like the rest is class.
******
Former US President Donald Trump Confesses to Planned Theft of Venezuela’s Oil, Venezuelan Officials React
JUNE 12, 2023
Former President Donald Trump in front of the stars of a US flag during a political rally in Columbus, Georgia, on June 10. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.
Responding to former United States President Donald Trump’s recent confession regarding the theft of Venezuela’s oil during his term, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil reiterated that Trump’s ambitions to seize resources and assets belonging to the Venezuelan people had been endorsed by his lackeys inside Venezuela.
Trump’s confession emerged during a speech given this Saturday, June 10, in North Carolina, where the former president postured to the audience: “How about we’re buying oil from Venezuela? When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would’ve taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil; it would’ve been right next door. But now we’re buying oil from Venezuela, we’re making a dictator very rich. Can you believe this? Nobody can believe it.”
In the address, Trump emphasized that because his mission was not achieved, the US government has been forced to buy oil from Venezuela, without mentioning the illegal sanctions continued by the Biden administration and the reconciliation with Venezuela as a timid response to the derailed sanction strategy against Russia after the escalation of conflicts between Russia and the NATO-Ukraine bloc.
Goal: Seize natural resources
Given Trump’s statements, Foreign Minister Gil emphasized through his social media accounts that Trump’s intention has always been to seize Venezuelan oil.
He recalled all the damage that the US has done to the people of Venezuela: “With the support of its lackeys here, it has pursued a single objective: to steal our resources! They could not and will not be able to do it,” he wrote.
Trump confiesa que su intención era apoderarse del petróleo venezolano. Todo el daño que los EEUU ha hecho a nuestro pueblo, con el apoyo de sus lacayos acá ha tenido un único objetivo: ¡robarnos nuestros recursos! No pudieron ni podrán. ¡Siempre venceremos! https://t.co/mQEihOi2ll
— Yvan Gil (@yvangil) June 11, 2023
Foreign Minister Gil reiterated in another social media post that “Trump revealed that the US strategy, with the collaboration of lackey groups from inside Venezuela, was to seize Venezuelan oil.”
Removing the mask
Trump’s new confession has caused a stir and has ended up exposing the intentions of 60 satellite countries and all those who supported a “government” led by a puppet, said Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations (UN).
“Trump has removed the mask of 60 satellite countries, international propaganda, and all the politicians and intellectuals who supported a puppet to govern Venezuela. The sole purpose has been to loot oil from the Venezuelan people. What a shame!” Moncada wrote on his Twitter account.
Trump le quita la máscara a 60 países satélites, a la propaganda internacional y a todos los políticos e intelectuales que apoyaron a un títere para gobernar Venezuela. El único fin ha sido saquear el petróleo del pueblo venezolano. Que vergüenza! Aquí la confesión del criminal: pic.twitter.com/0bxob6ZUJX
— Samuel Moncada (@SMoncada_VEN) June 11, 2023
Biden continues harsh sanctions against Venezuela
Venezuela’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for North America, Carlos Ron, stressed that Trump’s recent confession has served as all the evidence needed regarding the hostility of US foreign policy toward Venezuela. He also denounced “the Biden administration’s [continuation of] its policy of illegal sanctions” against the Venezuelan people.
“What additional evidence do we need? Here is Trump confessing that his goal, all along, was to seize oil from Venezuela. The Biden administration keeps in force its policy of illegal sanctions. Venezuela has triumphed and will continue to triumph!” Ron wrote on his social media.
What further evidence do we need?
Here’s Trump confessing that his aim, all along, was to take over Venezuela’s oil.
The Biden Administracion keeps his illegal sanctions policy still in place.
Venezuela has and will continue to prevail! https://t.co/kLO3INnm57
— Carlos Ron (@CarlosJRonVE) June 11, 2023
Trump: Sanctions and illegal measures against Venezuela
With the triumph of Donald Trump in 2016, aggression against Venezuela increased with with more than 900 illegal sanctions that affected and continue to affect the majority of the Venezuelan population.
Among the attacks were sanctions against the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) as well as the seizure of its subsidiary in the US, CITGO Petroleum Corporation.
Donald Trump ‘s announcement is the first he has made after new accusations against him for a federal crime regarding the handling of top secret White House documents. The former president of the United States faces 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, a legal attack launched by the leadership of the Democratic Party that resembles the lawfare processes in Latin America against leftist leaders.
Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda also reacts
The Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, expressed his solidarity with the people of Venezuela following Trump’s confession. The Caribbean leader stated that his nation was always on the right side of history by courageously defending the international principles of non-intervention and interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela.
“Many of us were accused of being defenders of socialism and dictatorship, when the powerful failed to cash on their vicious agenda to plunder Venezuela. The people of this hemisphere should thank us for standing firm against the most powerful, and should see CARICOM as the conscience of this hemisphere,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
https://orinocotribune.com/former-us-pr ... als-react/
*****
Trump’s arraignment on federal charges is a grave moment for the nation
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 5:47 AM EDT, Tue June 13, 2023
It’s the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump.
For the first time in history, the nation is seeking to put on criminal trial a person who was elected to lead it as president.
Trump is due in court in Miami on Tuesday to answer a 37-count indictment that alleges he willfully retained classified documents after he left office and refused to return them.
His appearance will be an earthshaking, and even tragic, moment in the history of a republic that has endured for more than two centuries after being founded on the principle that no leader has absolute power or should be above laws that apply to other citizens.
Tuesday will be a grave day that could rip even deeper divides in an already estranged country, especially given that Trump supporters have already once resorted to violence in a bid to overturn the will of the people after the ex-president refused to accept his loss in a democratic election.
(and so on....)
https://us.cnn.com/2023/06/13/politics/ ... index.html
The first thing to understand is that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. There are all sorts of reasons that people dissatisfied with the status quo have hung their hopes on this charlatan, some bogus and some quite real. To believe that all would be well, or at least a lot better if the Orange Man disappeared is to believe in fairy tales or be a member of the ruling class consensus.(They'll have their way this time.)
Americans are totally ensconced in American Exceptionalism, including all of the bogus left(Democrats) and so-called leftists who tail them. And what they really take exception to is appearances. He wouldn't be no more objectionable than any other Republican(or Dem) but that he is totally obnoxious and shamelessly sexist and racist. Yes, he has stirred up the Right, but they were there all along and if not him then the next loathsome lodestone.
People overseas don't see it that way, our concerns are not theirs. They just don't want to be bombed, starved or otherwise exploited due to US policy. And best I can tell Trump did less bombing, certainly didn't cause a war in Ukraine. He might have if he had gotten reelected as the imperial lobby in it's various forms wore down or distracted(oil!) his paleo-conservative outlook. And so we see Russian and other commentators speaking favorably of him compared to the warmongering Democrats. Some even foolishly believe that Republicans might be less bellicose. Have they not paid attention to Lindsay Graham? And if the US prez is a easily flattered ignoramus so much the better for them...
We’re already seeing a ton of ridiculous drama queenery about Trump’s second presidential run, claiming he’s grown even more extremist and fascistic than when he was president in what amounts to a repeat of the “Trump is a second Hitler” narrative that dominated US political discourse in his first run.
A Washington Post article titled “The deepening radicalization of Donald J. Trump” asserts that “Trump is sketching out the contours of a second term potentially more dangerous and chaotic than his first,” citing a New York University professor who says, “When authoritarian leaders lose office, they come back, like, 10 times worse — they never get less extreme, they always get more extreme.”
But when you look at the authors’ evidence that Trump is becoming more dangerous and evil, there’s nothing about assassinating foreign leaders, starvation sanctions, cold war brinkmanship, mass bombing campaigns or Trump’s Yemen veto, or any of the other horrors he unleashed upon the world as commander in chief from 2017 through 2020. Instead, the article talks about his attitudes toward the January 6 Capitol Building riot and his “grab them by the pussy” remarks about women.
Trump ramped up cold war aggressions against Russia, helped set the US on track for war with China, killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, vetoed attempts to save Yemen from U.S.-backed genocide, assassinated Iran’s top military commander, worked to foment civil war in Iran using starvation sanctions and CIA ops with the stated goal of effecting regime change, occupied Syrian oil fields with the goal of preventing Syria’s reconstruction, launched repeated airstrikes against the Syrian government, greatly increased the number of troops in the Middle East and elsewhere, greatly increased the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians, and reduced military accountability for those airstrikes. He also imprisoned Julian Assange by escalating the empire’s war on journalism for exposing US war crimes.
All of which are in perfect alignment with the actions of both Trump’s predecessors and Trump’s successor.
https://twitter.com/MaxBoot/status/1661329451177635842
Donald Trump spent four years proving to everyone that he wasn’t bad because he was similar to Hitler, he was bad because he was similar to Obama. He wasn’t terrible because of the ways he differed from other presidents, but because of the ways he was the same.
The tiny smattering of violence that occurred in the US because of Trump was microscopic compared to the death and destruction he inflicted upon the world outside the nation’s borders. But the mainstream worldview can’t acknowledge those actions, because the mainstream worldview is designed to support and facilitate those actions.
Yes, Trump is evil. Yes, you should be alarmed that monsters like him exist. But not because he is a unique aberration and deviation from the US government’s status quo; rather, you should be alarmed because he perfectly exemplifies and bolsters the US government’s status quo.
The bad things about Trump specifically are dwarfed by the bad things about the US empire generally — not by a percentage, but by many orders of magnitude. The empire’s malfeasance is exponentially more significant than whatever face happens to be sitting at its front desk.
That’s what people should be freaked out about. Not that the front desk of the imperial office might be occupied by an obnoxious oaf for four years, but by the empire itself. That’s where all the real horrors are. They’re just invisible to the mainstream worldview. By design.
The US presidency can only be held by imperialist monsters. That’s the only kind of person who ever makes it through the security checkpoints on becoming president of the world’s most powerful and destructive government which serves as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by human blood.
Sometimes when I tell Australians who’ve been indoctrinated by our nation’s insanely propagandistic imperial media what I do for a living, they tell me “Ooh, it would be terrible if Trump wins the election!” I tell them “Yeah, it will be! Also it will be terrible if anyone else does!”
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/06/02 ... different/
I might question some of the sins Ms Johnstone lays at Trumps door like increasing troops in the ME and killing record numbers of civilians. He's bad enough, no need to exaggerate. Also, Trump did not "makes it through the security checkpoints on becoming president ", he snuck in thru an accident of democracy(however dismaying) and the gatekeepers being full of hubris letting down their guard. They didn't let their guard down for Al Gore, they saw that possibility and were prepared. Junior was supposed to be prez and so was Hil. They won't make that mistake again and today we see a bit of that effort in Miami.
What does make Trump like the rest is class.
******
Former US President Donald Trump Confesses to Planned Theft of Venezuela’s Oil, Venezuelan Officials React
JUNE 12, 2023
Former President Donald Trump in front of the stars of a US flag during a political rally in Columbus, Georgia, on June 10. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.
Responding to former United States President Donald Trump’s recent confession regarding the theft of Venezuela’s oil during his term, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil reiterated that Trump’s ambitions to seize resources and assets belonging to the Venezuelan people had been endorsed by his lackeys inside Venezuela.
Trump’s confession emerged during a speech given this Saturday, June 10, in North Carolina, where the former president postured to the audience: “How about we’re buying oil from Venezuela? When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would’ve taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil; it would’ve been right next door. But now we’re buying oil from Venezuela, we’re making a dictator very rich. Can you believe this? Nobody can believe it.”
In the address, Trump emphasized that because his mission was not achieved, the US government has been forced to buy oil from Venezuela, without mentioning the illegal sanctions continued by the Biden administration and the reconciliation with Venezuela as a timid response to the derailed sanction strategy against Russia after the escalation of conflicts between Russia and the NATO-Ukraine bloc.
Goal: Seize natural resources
Given Trump’s statements, Foreign Minister Gil emphasized through his social media accounts that Trump’s intention has always been to seize Venezuelan oil.
He recalled all the damage that the US has done to the people of Venezuela: “With the support of its lackeys here, it has pursued a single objective: to steal our resources! They could not and will not be able to do it,” he wrote.
Trump confiesa que su intención era apoderarse del petróleo venezolano. Todo el daño que los EEUU ha hecho a nuestro pueblo, con el apoyo de sus lacayos acá ha tenido un único objetivo: ¡robarnos nuestros recursos! No pudieron ni podrán. ¡Siempre venceremos! https://t.co/mQEihOi2ll
— Yvan Gil (@yvangil) June 11, 2023
Foreign Minister Gil reiterated in another social media post that “Trump revealed that the US strategy, with the collaboration of lackey groups from inside Venezuela, was to seize Venezuelan oil.”
Removing the mask
Trump’s new confession has caused a stir and has ended up exposing the intentions of 60 satellite countries and all those who supported a “government” led by a puppet, said Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations (UN).
“Trump has removed the mask of 60 satellite countries, international propaganda, and all the politicians and intellectuals who supported a puppet to govern Venezuela. The sole purpose has been to loot oil from the Venezuelan people. What a shame!” Moncada wrote on his Twitter account.
Trump le quita la máscara a 60 países satélites, a la propaganda internacional y a todos los políticos e intelectuales que apoyaron a un títere para gobernar Venezuela. El único fin ha sido saquear el petróleo del pueblo venezolano. Que vergüenza! Aquí la confesión del criminal: pic.twitter.com/0bxob6ZUJX
— Samuel Moncada (@SMoncada_VEN) June 11, 2023
Biden continues harsh sanctions against Venezuela
Venezuela’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for North America, Carlos Ron, stressed that Trump’s recent confession has served as all the evidence needed regarding the hostility of US foreign policy toward Venezuela. He also denounced “the Biden administration’s [continuation of] its policy of illegal sanctions” against the Venezuelan people.
“What additional evidence do we need? Here is Trump confessing that his goal, all along, was to seize oil from Venezuela. The Biden administration keeps in force its policy of illegal sanctions. Venezuela has triumphed and will continue to triumph!” Ron wrote on his social media.
What further evidence do we need?
Here’s Trump confessing that his aim, all along, was to take over Venezuela’s oil.
The Biden Administracion keeps his illegal sanctions policy still in place.
Venezuela has and will continue to prevail! https://t.co/kLO3INnm57
— Carlos Ron (@CarlosJRonVE) June 11, 2023
Trump: Sanctions and illegal measures against Venezuela
With the triumph of Donald Trump in 2016, aggression against Venezuela increased with with more than 900 illegal sanctions that affected and continue to affect the majority of the Venezuelan population.
Among the attacks were sanctions against the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) as well as the seizure of its subsidiary in the US, CITGO Petroleum Corporation.
Donald Trump ‘s announcement is the first he has made after new accusations against him for a federal crime regarding the handling of top secret White House documents. The former president of the United States faces 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, a legal attack launched by the leadership of the Democratic Party that resembles the lawfare processes in Latin America against leftist leaders.
Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda also reacts
The Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, expressed his solidarity with the people of Venezuela following Trump’s confession. The Caribbean leader stated that his nation was always on the right side of history by courageously defending the international principles of non-intervention and interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela.
“Many of us were accused of being defenders of socialism and dictatorship, when the powerful failed to cash on their vicious agenda to plunder Venezuela. The people of this hemisphere should thank us for standing firm against the most powerful, and should see CARICOM as the conscience of this hemisphere,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
https://orinocotribune.com/former-us-pr ... als-react/
*****
Trump’s arraignment on federal charges is a grave moment for the nation
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 5:47 AM EDT, Tue June 13, 2023
It’s the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump.
For the first time in history, the nation is seeking to put on criminal trial a person who was elected to lead it as president.
Trump is due in court in Miami on Tuesday to answer a 37-count indictment that alleges he willfully retained classified documents after he left office and refused to return them.
His appearance will be an earthshaking, and even tragic, moment in the history of a republic that has endured for more than two centuries after being founded on the principle that no leader has absolute power or should be above laws that apply to other citizens.
Tuesday will be a grave day that could rip even deeper divides in an already estranged country, especially given that Trump supporters have already once resorted to violence in a bid to overturn the will of the people after the ex-president refused to accept his loss in a democratic election.
(and so on....)
https://us.cnn.com/2023/06/13/politics/ ... index.html
The first thing to understand is that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. There are all sorts of reasons that people dissatisfied with the status quo have hung their hopes on this charlatan, some bogus and some quite real. To believe that all would be well, or at least a lot better if the Orange Man disappeared is to believe in fairy tales or be a member of the ruling class consensus.(They'll have their way this time.)
Americans are totally ensconced in American Exceptionalism, including all of the bogus left(Democrats) and so-called leftists who tail them. And what they really take exception to is appearances. He wouldn't be no more objectionable than any other Republican(or Dem) but that he is totally obnoxious and shamelessly sexist and racist. Yes, he has stirred up the Right, but they were there all along and if not him then the next loathsome lodestone.
People overseas don't see it that way, our concerns are not theirs. They just don't want to be bombed, starved or otherwise exploited due to US policy. And best I can tell Trump did less bombing, certainly didn't cause a war in Ukraine. He might have if he had gotten reelected as the imperial lobby in it's various forms wore down or distracted(oil!) his paleo-conservative outlook. And so we see Russian and other commentators speaking favorably of him compared to the warmongering Democrats. Some even foolishly believe that Republicans might be less bellicose. Have they not paid attention to Lindsay Graham? And if the US prez is a easily flattered ignoramus so much the better for them...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Trump charged with failing to return secret war plans
June 14, 21:50
Trump charged with failing to return secret war plans
Trump's 38-count federal criminal indictment marks a new and unprecedented stage in the crisis of the US political system. At a critical juncture in the escalation of the US/NATO war against Russia, with only seven months to go before the Republican primary, an explosive conflict between the two main factions of the ruling class erupted to the surface.
For the first time in US history, the Justice Department is charging a former president with violating federal law. Even in 1974, at the height of Watergate, Gerald Ford sacrificed his political reputation and eventually his presidency by pardoning Nixon to prevent a trial that the ruling class feared would undermine the political system and weaken the position of US imperialism in the world.
Unlike other ongoing cases against Trump based on his sexual indecency, this accusation will have far more significant consequences.
The prosecution alleges that Trump usurped basic government powers by not returning top-secret military documents related to US military plans, hoping to use them for personal gain. The prosecution details how Trump and his associates stole top-secret military documents he received when he was president and hid them in his mansion in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. The accusers cite audio recordings and text messages in which Trump and his workers practically admit that they know about the illegality of their actions.
Details of this kind in the accusation show that part of the state apparatus has decided that the time has come to remove Trump from politics once and for all.
Trump is charged with 38 counts of criminal acts, including 31 violations of the Anti-Espionage Act, each of which carries a maximum sentence of ten years, for "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information." The remaining counts allege that Trump and his lackey, Valtine Nauta, conspired, lied, and refused to provide information during a federal investigation into possession of confidential documents. For each count of conspiracy, the maximum sentence is 20 years.
There is no "democratic" side to this case. The imperialist politico Trump is neither a victim nor an opponent of the war machine, and the Democratic Party is only confronting Trump from the most right-wing position possible: war against Russia.
The charge does not concern Trump's violation of democratic rights or his attempt to violate the constitution during the failed January 6, 2021 coup. The Anti-Espionage Act of 1917 is the most powerful weapon of US imperialism in protecting its secrets, including against Manning and Assange.
In a brief statement to the media, Special Counsel Jack Smith emphasized the reactionary nature of the accusation: "The men and women of intelligence and the military have dedicated their lives to defending our country and its people," he said. “Our laws that protect national defense and its information are vital to protecting the security of the United States, and they must be enforced. Violation of these laws means risk to our country.”
In line with the Democratic Party's long-term strategy against Trump, the accusation is based solely on defending the privileges of the military spy apparatus and portraying Trump as a hindrance to achieving the goals of US imperialist policy, when in fact he is no less a cynical imperialist than his Democratic opponents, and the difference between them only tactical.
But this vicious split between the factions of the ruling class brings to light information that was previously hidden from the masses.
For example, the prosecution lists the topics of the documents that Trump did not return and kept in boxes that the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago mansion during the raid on August 8, 2022: “The classified documents included information about the defense and weapons of both the United States and other
countries ; US nuclear programs; the possible vulnerability of the US and its allies to military attack; plans for possible revenge in response to an attack by another country. Unauthorized release of these classified documents endangers US national security."
These details leave no doubt that the US government has gone far in planning for a world war, including strategic nuclear weapons. Behind the backs of the populace, in rooms not open to the public, and with little or no question from the bourgeois media, the military and spies are running simulations of nuclear war and counting the possible casualties of the planned various wars of US imperialism in a desperate struggle for world domination. Such information is "top secret" because the main condition for the success of these military plans is to keep them secret from the population. Since Trump decided that such documents were worth holding, they were important to his own intrigues.
Among the top secret documents that Trump is accused of failing to return are documents containing: “other country and US military capabilities,” “other country’s nuclear capabilities,” “other country’s military attacks,” “US military contingency planning,” “estimated regional military capabilities of another country and the US”, “military options of another country and potential consequences for US interests”, and “US nuclear weapons”.
The prosecution refers to the high-level discussion of attacks on various countries listed as "country A", "country B", etc. The July 2021 audio recording contains a conversation at Trump's home in Bedminster, NJ, about a dispute between Trump and top generals, including Chiefs of Staff Chairman Milley, who accused Trump of going to war against Iran to stay in power. after losing the 2020 election. In this tape, Trump claims he has top secret US "plans to attack" Iran ("Country A"). The indictment quotes:
“Well, when Milly-a, let me tell you as an example. He said I want to attack country A. Isn't that amazing? I have a whole bunch of papers, this one just turned up. Look. This is him (Millie). They showed me this - it's off the record, but - they showed me this. It was he. It was the Department of Defense, and he... Look. You attack and…”
The prosecution describes the document with the war plans against “Country B”, explaining: “In August or September 2021, when he was no longer president, Trump met in his office at the Bedminster Club with a representative of the committee in his support for the election. During this meeting, Trump remarked that the military operation against country B was not going well. Trump showed him a secret map of country B and told him that he shouldn't have shown that map to a committee representative to support the election."
How many more such war plans have been drawn up behind the backs of the population? What other information is hidden from the eyes of the working class under the heading "top secret"? It is worth noting that Trump is charged under the same article as Jack Teixeira, a National Guard intelligence officer who was arrested for publishing documents about the preparation and conduct of the US war in Ukraine.
Trump responded by branding the Biden government, saying "this is war" and "our country is going to hell." He addressed supporters in the military, saying that when he was president "we had a strong army, not God knows what" and called on the millions who voted for him to defend him.
Two and a half years after attempting to violate the constitution, Trump remains the leading GOP candidate, and Republicans have almost unanimously condemned Trump's indictment. Regardless of the development of this case, the indictment will cause a significant increase in the internal political crisis and the further movement of the Republican Party towards openly fascist.
For its part, the Democratic Party is trying to stabilize the power of the bourgeoisie by trying to concoct a bipartisan agreement with the Republican Party based on the common interests of the ruling class, including drastic cuts in spending on social programs, as in the decision on the national debt ceiling. At the same time, they are trying to secure the most important thing for the Biden government - the US/NATO war against Russia.
The indictment of Trump is both an indicator and an accelerator of the political crisis of the class power machine in the United States. Moreover, given the role of the United States in world capitalism, this will have consequences for the whole world.
(c) Eric London
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/0 ... z-j10.html - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8422623.html
Google Translator
************
Trump Indictments Subvert the Legal and Political System
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 14 Jun 2023
Court sketch depicts former President Donald Trump and his attorney appearing via video from Florida at a court hearing before Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan on May 23, 2023. (Credit: Jane Rosenberg)
The recent indictments of former president Donald Trump are political acts intended to keep him from becoming president again. But the impact of dubious legal precedent should be of greater concern than helping the democrats achieve electoral victories that rarely benefit the people.
“Do they consider as part of a potential plea offer, something that would proscribe him… proscribe him from running for office again? I don’t know.”
"I would imagine if anything like that happened that it would have to come from the defense side of the negotiation. That the Trump team would say, ‘Oh, by the way, and with this, we will also, you know, drop out of the race for president.'"
Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell
Donald Trump once again presents conundrums for those on the left. Like every other U.S. president his administration subverted justice at home and abroad. Unlike other presidents he didn’t have the wisdom to obey the niceties that absolve them of their many acts of terrible criminality. Invasions, proxy wars and crime bills are all forgotten by people eager to think well of political leadership.
Trump’s appeal to the basest instincts of white nationalism made him persona non grata to people who ought to be more discerning in their analysis. Despite the assertion that Trump is somehow uniquely unfit to serve, his policies were all in line with those of his predecessors and conformed with the wishes of the U.S. oligarchic class and the military industrial complex. The crimes he committed on behalf of the U.S. are never called into question and like those of other presidents will never be punished.
He is being punished by democrats who fear that he can become president again and they are doubling down on their efforts to prevent him from running. In addition to being indicted just two months ago for falsifying business records he now faces a 37-count indictment which includes charges of obstruction of justice and 31-counts of violating the Espionage Act . What these two indictments have in common is that the charges can be addressed with lesser charges or no charges but the pathway of deference usually paid to powerful people is suddenly nowhere to be found.
It is ironic that Trump used the very problematic Espionage Act while he was president. It was a means of indicting Julian Assange and others, but now the former president is hoisted on his own petard. The Espionage Act is a relic of Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare policies and doesn’t require that the person charged actually engage in espionage. Being in possession of government documents can be sufficient for prosecution and that is why Trump is once again in legal jeopardy.
But it is a mistake to allow schadenfreude to cloud one’s judgment. The precedents set by these indictments of Trump pose dangers for everyone. This effort to prevent Trump from becoming president again will harm the legal system and jeopardize everyone’s rights.
One stunning example of how the law has been undermined is the subversion of the doctrine of attorney and client privilege. There is a carve out called a crime-fraud exception. It allows prosecutors to use what is ordinarily privileged information if they convince a judge that an attorney used legal advice to commit an ongoing crime. It is an understatement to say that this rule is a slippery slope, a precedent which should be of concern to everyone who wants to ensure justice for all.
This most recent indictment is a travesty on top of a travesty. The charge of falsifying business records can be treated as a misdemeanor and stemmed from Trump’s effort to hide an affair by paying people to be silent about his private life. In fact, the Manhattan District Attorney was initially reluctant to charge him with a felony at all. But it isn’t hard to imagine that the drive to keep Trump from running ultimately resulted in that 34-count indictment.
Joe Biden is running too, and the incumbent president’s approval rating stands at a meager 40% . Propaganda gaslighting about “the most progressive president since FDR” and “cutting child poverty in half” are a distant memory as the end of the covid emergency and a debt ceiling deal with republicans deprived millions of people of their medicaid and SNAP benefits . Biden has no real constituency among the public who have seen that he provided little aside from not being Donald Trump. The democratic wing of the duopoly will surely raise $1 billion for his campaign as they did in 2020 but they can’t force enthusiasm or make anyone go to the polls in the numbers that they need to ensure victory.
If Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party lived up to their manufactured hype they wouldn’t have to worry about Donald Trump running again. But hype is all they have. There are still billions of dollars allocated to wage a proxy war in Ukraine and the vilification of republicans as “extreme MAGA” ends at the door of the smoke filled room where treacherous deals are made. Biden has good reason to be worried and that is why the legal system has been used to get Donald Trump. They may succeed in sabotaging his election campaign but absent some change in policy, another republican like Florida governor Ron DeSantis could be the next president of the United States. That outcome would be just deserts for the political class which has nothing to offer the people, and the people always lose no matter who is in the white house.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/trump ... cal-system
Well, the Dems are getting a lot of help in this effort from the permanent imperialist interests, who don't want Trump mucking up their schemes again. This effort couldn't succeed without them and I expect will not.
***********
EXERCISING SOVEREIGNTY: HOW VENEZUELA SHOULD RESPOND TO TRUMP'S CONFESSION
June 14, 2023 , 1:30 p.m.
What Trump expressed should give rise to building a political and institutional milestone that is equivalent to the seriousness of his statements (Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
"When I left, Venezuela was about to collapse. We would have taken over it, we would have kept all that oil": this statement by former US President Donald Trump in the middle of a campaign rally has caused a political earthquake in Venezuela, and its consequences can be profound as well as decisive for the political and electoral cycle of the year 2024.
First, the semantic framing of the statement leaves little room for doubt. Trump confessed that his administration pursued the collapse of Venezuela and that the objective behind that strategy was to seize its oil, its main natural and strategic resource.
The Republican's sequence of words demolished more than half a century of conventions, treaties and legal conventions of international law that restrict the use of force in interstate relations. A declaration of principles that revealed how the origins and subsequent expansion of the American empire lie in crime and looting, and not in an ecumenical search for freedom, progress and human rights.
Expressly, Trump spoke of "taking over Venezuela", where oil, although crucial due to its economic and political implications, was only one component of a plan designed to completely suppress the sovereignty of the Bolivarian Republic, with all the defining elements that they include territorial integrity, legal status as an independent nation, and constitutional order.
Observing Trump's statement only from the point of view of the appropriation of oil as an end in itself diminishes its seriousness, and does not take into account that the US offensive against the country, the "maximum pressure" orchestrated by the tycoon president and his team, was betting on an absolute reconquest of the Venezuelan nation. Colonialism of the 21st century.
Another important aspect is the mention of the collapse, so expensive when it comes to explaining the economic and social trajectory of Venezuela in recent years and the center of narrative dispute to point out those responsible for a harsh reality that, in all areas of life in society , has faced the country.
At this point, Trump's declaration was also lapidary: the precipitation of a deep and unprecedented economic and social crisis was the product of a voluntary decision, planned from Washington, to lead Venezuela to collapse, through instruments of economic warfare that focused on the kidnapping of the Republic's large assets abroad, driving down oil revenues and cutting off the country's main commercial and financial activities.
As a summary, Trump with his confession closed the debate around the "failed model" of Chavismo, by indicating, effusively, that his search for collapse caused the calamities of recent years, whose trails still extend into the immediate present of the Venezuelan nation. Without the battery of "sanctions", Venezuela would not have touched ground and the errors of Chavismo in the economic field clearly would not have generated an equivalent chaos.
The intention of taking the Venezuelan economy into the red has had a human side with significant impacts. The estimate that the offensive of illegal "sanctions" of the United States, framed in the "maximum pressure" of Trump, had caused around 40 thousand deaths made by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in 2019, due to A destructive mix of unavailability of medicines and basic goods, falling oil production, and general damage to critical infrastructure, could even be conservative given the way the effects of US economic warfare were amplified after 2019.
In short, Trump confessed that the destructive "sanctions" issued during his administration were a kind of economic bombing campaign aimed at taking as many Venezuelan lives as possible before his temporary stay in the Oval Office ended. A straight-talking bully who, in the judgment of POLITICO 's Jack Shafer , he hasn't outgrown his adolescent behavior of "partying in stolen cars, bullying weaklings, and generally acting like a juvenile delinquent."
The phased extermination policy against the Venezuelan civilian population designed in the West Wing of the White House found in the leading bloc of the Venezuelan opposition a local management committed to the values of the company and its objectives. Willing to give everything to go until the end of the recolonization. Here the image of Juan Guaidó and Voluntad Popular, converted by the Trump administration into the fictitious head of government of Venezuela, seems to occupy the entire map of visible accomplices.
However, although the collaborationism of Guaidó and Voluntad Popular stood out above the rest, no political actor or partisan formation of the anti-Chavista ecosystem distanced itself from the "maximum pressure" at its peak. From the ultra barra brava of María Corina Machado to the supposed centrism of Primero Justicia and Acción Democrática, support for Trump's strategy was transversal to the entire national political spectrum, with few and minuscule exceptions.
The subsequent differences that existed with Guaidó, used by some leaders after Trump's declaration to reduce their burden of responsibility, were caused by the monopoly management of the income from looting the Republic. No Venezuelan outburst in the opposition block made an appearance when the country, in the midst of extreme harassment and siege, needed it to break with the fabricated consensus that the United States was destroying the country for our good.
It is for these reasons that Trump's statements have been a watershed, because at the same time that he certifies that the collapse was the product of a war design, he also exposes a collaborationist opposition with the necolonial interests of a foreign power, which it had been made easy to grab the vast oil reserves once the overthrow of President Nicolás Maduro crystallized.
This situation puts the country, and particularly the Venezuelan government, in a different scenario. The complicities exposed around the economic and political aggressions against Venezuela in recent years have been revealed, and the institutions that preserve the country's sovereignty must be protected using the appropriate legal mechanisms within the toolbox of the national legal system.
What Trump expressed should give rise to building a political and institutional milestone that is equivalent to the seriousness of his statements. Those who today, in the context of primaries, aspire to the Presidency of the Republic and who have proven links with the "maximum pressure", cannot be candidates for the main position in the country for reasons of common sense: their proven role in collaboration with a powerful foreign exchange is reason enough to consider that, in an eventual change of government, the opposition would complete the job of handing over the country that was left half done because Trump lost his re-election. Consequently, the State, in defense of its integrity and sovereign status, cannot expose itself to an electoral turn threatening its own material existence.
Confirm what is indicated by the current Criminal Code, from its article 128 to 133, what Trump revealed indicates that we are in the presence of crimes of treason in its strict legal sense.
Venezuela must not allow the humiliation and attacks to which it has been subjected to go unpunished.
https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/ejer ... n-de-trump
Google Translator
Trump's naked fixation on stealing other people's oil is just another aspect of his vulgarity. That Sheech was targeting the Florida gusano vote.
June 14, 21:50
Trump charged with failing to return secret war plans
Trump's 38-count federal criminal indictment marks a new and unprecedented stage in the crisis of the US political system. At a critical juncture in the escalation of the US/NATO war against Russia, with only seven months to go before the Republican primary, an explosive conflict between the two main factions of the ruling class erupted to the surface.
For the first time in US history, the Justice Department is charging a former president with violating federal law. Even in 1974, at the height of Watergate, Gerald Ford sacrificed his political reputation and eventually his presidency by pardoning Nixon to prevent a trial that the ruling class feared would undermine the political system and weaken the position of US imperialism in the world.
Unlike other ongoing cases against Trump based on his sexual indecency, this accusation will have far more significant consequences.
The prosecution alleges that Trump usurped basic government powers by not returning top-secret military documents related to US military plans, hoping to use them for personal gain. The prosecution details how Trump and his associates stole top-secret military documents he received when he was president and hid them in his mansion in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. The accusers cite audio recordings and text messages in which Trump and his workers practically admit that they know about the illegality of their actions.
Details of this kind in the accusation show that part of the state apparatus has decided that the time has come to remove Trump from politics once and for all.
Trump is charged with 38 counts of criminal acts, including 31 violations of the Anti-Espionage Act, each of which carries a maximum sentence of ten years, for "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information." The remaining counts allege that Trump and his lackey, Valtine Nauta, conspired, lied, and refused to provide information during a federal investigation into possession of confidential documents. For each count of conspiracy, the maximum sentence is 20 years.
There is no "democratic" side to this case. The imperialist politico Trump is neither a victim nor an opponent of the war machine, and the Democratic Party is only confronting Trump from the most right-wing position possible: war against Russia.
The charge does not concern Trump's violation of democratic rights or his attempt to violate the constitution during the failed January 6, 2021 coup. The Anti-Espionage Act of 1917 is the most powerful weapon of US imperialism in protecting its secrets, including against Manning and Assange.
In a brief statement to the media, Special Counsel Jack Smith emphasized the reactionary nature of the accusation: "The men and women of intelligence and the military have dedicated their lives to defending our country and its people," he said. “Our laws that protect national defense and its information are vital to protecting the security of the United States, and they must be enforced. Violation of these laws means risk to our country.”
In line with the Democratic Party's long-term strategy against Trump, the accusation is based solely on defending the privileges of the military spy apparatus and portraying Trump as a hindrance to achieving the goals of US imperialist policy, when in fact he is no less a cynical imperialist than his Democratic opponents, and the difference between them only tactical.
But this vicious split between the factions of the ruling class brings to light information that was previously hidden from the masses.
For example, the prosecution lists the topics of the documents that Trump did not return and kept in boxes that the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago mansion during the raid on August 8, 2022: “The classified documents included information about the defense and weapons of both the United States and other
countries ; US nuclear programs; the possible vulnerability of the US and its allies to military attack; plans for possible revenge in response to an attack by another country. Unauthorized release of these classified documents endangers US national security."
These details leave no doubt that the US government has gone far in planning for a world war, including strategic nuclear weapons. Behind the backs of the populace, in rooms not open to the public, and with little or no question from the bourgeois media, the military and spies are running simulations of nuclear war and counting the possible casualties of the planned various wars of US imperialism in a desperate struggle for world domination. Such information is "top secret" because the main condition for the success of these military plans is to keep them secret from the population. Since Trump decided that such documents were worth holding, they were important to his own intrigues.
Among the top secret documents that Trump is accused of failing to return are documents containing: “other country and US military capabilities,” “other country’s nuclear capabilities,” “other country’s military attacks,” “US military contingency planning,” “estimated regional military capabilities of another country and the US”, “military options of another country and potential consequences for US interests”, and “US nuclear weapons”.
The prosecution refers to the high-level discussion of attacks on various countries listed as "country A", "country B", etc. The July 2021 audio recording contains a conversation at Trump's home in Bedminster, NJ, about a dispute between Trump and top generals, including Chiefs of Staff Chairman Milley, who accused Trump of going to war against Iran to stay in power. after losing the 2020 election. In this tape, Trump claims he has top secret US "plans to attack" Iran ("Country A"). The indictment quotes:
“Well, when Milly-a, let me tell you as an example. He said I want to attack country A. Isn't that amazing? I have a whole bunch of papers, this one just turned up. Look. This is him (Millie). They showed me this - it's off the record, but - they showed me this. It was he. It was the Department of Defense, and he... Look. You attack and…”
The prosecution describes the document with the war plans against “Country B”, explaining: “In August or September 2021, when he was no longer president, Trump met in his office at the Bedminster Club with a representative of the committee in his support for the election. During this meeting, Trump remarked that the military operation against country B was not going well. Trump showed him a secret map of country B and told him that he shouldn't have shown that map to a committee representative to support the election."
How many more such war plans have been drawn up behind the backs of the population? What other information is hidden from the eyes of the working class under the heading "top secret"? It is worth noting that Trump is charged under the same article as Jack Teixeira, a National Guard intelligence officer who was arrested for publishing documents about the preparation and conduct of the US war in Ukraine.
Trump responded by branding the Biden government, saying "this is war" and "our country is going to hell." He addressed supporters in the military, saying that when he was president "we had a strong army, not God knows what" and called on the millions who voted for him to defend him.
Two and a half years after attempting to violate the constitution, Trump remains the leading GOP candidate, and Republicans have almost unanimously condemned Trump's indictment. Regardless of the development of this case, the indictment will cause a significant increase in the internal political crisis and the further movement of the Republican Party towards openly fascist.
For its part, the Democratic Party is trying to stabilize the power of the bourgeoisie by trying to concoct a bipartisan agreement with the Republican Party based on the common interests of the ruling class, including drastic cuts in spending on social programs, as in the decision on the national debt ceiling. At the same time, they are trying to secure the most important thing for the Biden government - the US/NATO war against Russia.
The indictment of Trump is both an indicator and an accelerator of the political crisis of the class power machine in the United States. Moreover, given the role of the United States in world capitalism, this will have consequences for the whole world.
(c) Eric London
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/0 ... z-j10.html - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8422623.html
Google Translator
************
Trump Indictments Subvert the Legal and Political System
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 14 Jun 2023
Court sketch depicts former President Donald Trump and his attorney appearing via video from Florida at a court hearing before Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan on May 23, 2023. (Credit: Jane Rosenberg)
The recent indictments of former president Donald Trump are political acts intended to keep him from becoming president again. But the impact of dubious legal precedent should be of greater concern than helping the democrats achieve electoral victories that rarely benefit the people.
“Do they consider as part of a potential plea offer, something that would proscribe him… proscribe him from running for office again? I don’t know.”
"I would imagine if anything like that happened that it would have to come from the defense side of the negotiation. That the Trump team would say, ‘Oh, by the way, and with this, we will also, you know, drop out of the race for president.'"
Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell
Donald Trump once again presents conundrums for those on the left. Like every other U.S. president his administration subverted justice at home and abroad. Unlike other presidents he didn’t have the wisdom to obey the niceties that absolve them of their many acts of terrible criminality. Invasions, proxy wars and crime bills are all forgotten by people eager to think well of political leadership.
Trump’s appeal to the basest instincts of white nationalism made him persona non grata to people who ought to be more discerning in their analysis. Despite the assertion that Trump is somehow uniquely unfit to serve, his policies were all in line with those of his predecessors and conformed with the wishes of the U.S. oligarchic class and the military industrial complex. The crimes he committed on behalf of the U.S. are never called into question and like those of other presidents will never be punished.
He is being punished by democrats who fear that he can become president again and they are doubling down on their efforts to prevent him from running. In addition to being indicted just two months ago for falsifying business records he now faces a 37-count indictment which includes charges of obstruction of justice and 31-counts of violating the Espionage Act . What these two indictments have in common is that the charges can be addressed with lesser charges or no charges but the pathway of deference usually paid to powerful people is suddenly nowhere to be found.
It is ironic that Trump used the very problematic Espionage Act while he was president. It was a means of indicting Julian Assange and others, but now the former president is hoisted on his own petard. The Espionage Act is a relic of Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare policies and doesn’t require that the person charged actually engage in espionage. Being in possession of government documents can be sufficient for prosecution and that is why Trump is once again in legal jeopardy.
But it is a mistake to allow schadenfreude to cloud one’s judgment. The precedents set by these indictments of Trump pose dangers for everyone. This effort to prevent Trump from becoming president again will harm the legal system and jeopardize everyone’s rights.
One stunning example of how the law has been undermined is the subversion of the doctrine of attorney and client privilege. There is a carve out called a crime-fraud exception. It allows prosecutors to use what is ordinarily privileged information if they convince a judge that an attorney used legal advice to commit an ongoing crime. It is an understatement to say that this rule is a slippery slope, a precedent which should be of concern to everyone who wants to ensure justice for all.
This most recent indictment is a travesty on top of a travesty. The charge of falsifying business records can be treated as a misdemeanor and stemmed from Trump’s effort to hide an affair by paying people to be silent about his private life. In fact, the Manhattan District Attorney was initially reluctant to charge him with a felony at all. But it isn’t hard to imagine that the drive to keep Trump from running ultimately resulted in that 34-count indictment.
Joe Biden is running too, and the incumbent president’s approval rating stands at a meager 40% . Propaganda gaslighting about “the most progressive president since FDR” and “cutting child poverty in half” are a distant memory as the end of the covid emergency and a debt ceiling deal with republicans deprived millions of people of their medicaid and SNAP benefits . Biden has no real constituency among the public who have seen that he provided little aside from not being Donald Trump. The democratic wing of the duopoly will surely raise $1 billion for his campaign as they did in 2020 but they can’t force enthusiasm or make anyone go to the polls in the numbers that they need to ensure victory.
If Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party lived up to their manufactured hype they wouldn’t have to worry about Donald Trump running again. But hype is all they have. There are still billions of dollars allocated to wage a proxy war in Ukraine and the vilification of republicans as “extreme MAGA” ends at the door of the smoke filled room where treacherous deals are made. Biden has good reason to be worried and that is why the legal system has been used to get Donald Trump. They may succeed in sabotaging his election campaign but absent some change in policy, another republican like Florida governor Ron DeSantis could be the next president of the United States. That outcome would be just deserts for the political class which has nothing to offer the people, and the people always lose no matter who is in the white house.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/trump ... cal-system
Well, the Dems are getting a lot of help in this effort from the permanent imperialist interests, who don't want Trump mucking up their schemes again. This effort couldn't succeed without them and I expect will not.
***********
EXERCISING SOVEREIGNTY: HOW VENEZUELA SHOULD RESPOND TO TRUMP'S CONFESSION
June 14, 2023 , 1:30 p.m.
What Trump expressed should give rise to building a political and institutional milestone that is equivalent to the seriousness of his statements (Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
"When I left, Venezuela was about to collapse. We would have taken over it, we would have kept all that oil": this statement by former US President Donald Trump in the middle of a campaign rally has caused a political earthquake in Venezuela, and its consequences can be profound as well as decisive for the political and electoral cycle of the year 2024.
First, the semantic framing of the statement leaves little room for doubt. Trump confessed that his administration pursued the collapse of Venezuela and that the objective behind that strategy was to seize its oil, its main natural and strategic resource.
The Republican's sequence of words demolished more than half a century of conventions, treaties and legal conventions of international law that restrict the use of force in interstate relations. A declaration of principles that revealed how the origins and subsequent expansion of the American empire lie in crime and looting, and not in an ecumenical search for freedom, progress and human rights.
Expressly, Trump spoke of "taking over Venezuela", where oil, although crucial due to its economic and political implications, was only one component of a plan designed to completely suppress the sovereignty of the Bolivarian Republic, with all the defining elements that they include territorial integrity, legal status as an independent nation, and constitutional order.
Observing Trump's statement only from the point of view of the appropriation of oil as an end in itself diminishes its seriousness, and does not take into account that the US offensive against the country, the "maximum pressure" orchestrated by the tycoon president and his team, was betting on an absolute reconquest of the Venezuelan nation. Colonialism of the 21st century.
Another important aspect is the mention of the collapse, so expensive when it comes to explaining the economic and social trajectory of Venezuela in recent years and the center of narrative dispute to point out those responsible for a harsh reality that, in all areas of life in society , has faced the country.
At this point, Trump's declaration was also lapidary: the precipitation of a deep and unprecedented economic and social crisis was the product of a voluntary decision, planned from Washington, to lead Venezuela to collapse, through instruments of economic warfare that focused on the kidnapping of the Republic's large assets abroad, driving down oil revenues and cutting off the country's main commercial and financial activities.
As a summary, Trump with his confession closed the debate around the "failed model" of Chavismo, by indicating, effusively, that his search for collapse caused the calamities of recent years, whose trails still extend into the immediate present of the Venezuelan nation. Without the battery of "sanctions", Venezuela would not have touched ground and the errors of Chavismo in the economic field clearly would not have generated an equivalent chaos.
The intention of taking the Venezuelan economy into the red has had a human side with significant impacts. The estimate that the offensive of illegal "sanctions" of the United States, framed in the "maximum pressure" of Trump, had caused around 40 thousand deaths made by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in 2019, due to A destructive mix of unavailability of medicines and basic goods, falling oil production, and general damage to critical infrastructure, could even be conservative given the way the effects of US economic warfare were amplified after 2019.
In short, Trump confessed that the destructive "sanctions" issued during his administration were a kind of economic bombing campaign aimed at taking as many Venezuelan lives as possible before his temporary stay in the Oval Office ended. A straight-talking bully who, in the judgment of POLITICO 's Jack Shafer , he hasn't outgrown his adolescent behavior of "partying in stolen cars, bullying weaklings, and generally acting like a juvenile delinquent."
The phased extermination policy against the Venezuelan civilian population designed in the West Wing of the White House found in the leading bloc of the Venezuelan opposition a local management committed to the values of the company and its objectives. Willing to give everything to go until the end of the recolonization. Here the image of Juan Guaidó and Voluntad Popular, converted by the Trump administration into the fictitious head of government of Venezuela, seems to occupy the entire map of visible accomplices.
However, although the collaborationism of Guaidó and Voluntad Popular stood out above the rest, no political actor or partisan formation of the anti-Chavista ecosystem distanced itself from the "maximum pressure" at its peak. From the ultra barra brava of María Corina Machado to the supposed centrism of Primero Justicia and Acción Democrática, support for Trump's strategy was transversal to the entire national political spectrum, with few and minuscule exceptions.
The subsequent differences that existed with Guaidó, used by some leaders after Trump's declaration to reduce their burden of responsibility, were caused by the monopoly management of the income from looting the Republic. No Venezuelan outburst in the opposition block made an appearance when the country, in the midst of extreme harassment and siege, needed it to break with the fabricated consensus that the United States was destroying the country for our good.
It is for these reasons that Trump's statements have been a watershed, because at the same time that he certifies that the collapse was the product of a war design, he also exposes a collaborationist opposition with the necolonial interests of a foreign power, which it had been made easy to grab the vast oil reserves once the overthrow of President Nicolás Maduro crystallized.
This situation puts the country, and particularly the Venezuelan government, in a different scenario. The complicities exposed around the economic and political aggressions against Venezuela in recent years have been revealed, and the institutions that preserve the country's sovereignty must be protected using the appropriate legal mechanisms within the toolbox of the national legal system.
What Trump expressed should give rise to building a political and institutional milestone that is equivalent to the seriousness of his statements. Those who today, in the context of primaries, aspire to the Presidency of the Republic and who have proven links with the "maximum pressure", cannot be candidates for the main position in the country for reasons of common sense: their proven role in collaboration with a powerful foreign exchange is reason enough to consider that, in an eventual change of government, the opposition would complete the job of handing over the country that was left half done because Trump lost his re-election. Consequently, the State, in defense of its integrity and sovereign status, cannot expose itself to an electoral turn threatening its own material existence.
Confirm what is indicated by the current Criminal Code, from its article 128 to 133, what Trump revealed indicates that we are in the presence of crimes of treason in its strict legal sense.
Venezuela must not allow the humiliation and attacks to which it has been subjected to go unpunished.
https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/ejer ... n-de-trump
Google Translator
Trump's naked fixation on stealing other people's oil is just another aspect of his vulgarity. That Sheech was targeting the Florida gusano vote.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Trump’s worst crimes are overlooked in latest arrest and arraignment
The former US president committed many crimes before and during his time in office. But he is being arraigned for crossing the US national security apparatus
June 14, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch
There’s no question that Trump is, even in the barest technical sense, a criminal. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
Former US president Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned yesterday, June 13, in Miami on 37 criminal counts which have the potential to land him decades in prison.
There’s no question that Trump is, even in the barest technical sense, a criminal. Trump oversaw a historic transfer of wealth from working people to the ultra-rich through his 2017 tax cuts, which arguably constitutes a massive theft of public funds that negatively impacts all government social spending that could have benefited the poor. Trump incited a right-wing insurrection. Trump’s record with sexual harassment and assault of women is notorious, and has already landed him in trouble with the courts. Trump illegally assassinated an Iranian general in a reckless provocation of war. Trump is an unabashed, unashamed imperialist, recently bragging that when he left office, “Venezuela was ready to collapse, we would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door.” Trump’s administration aided and promoted a destabilization campaign against Venezuela which included Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as president, massive state asset seizure, and even a failed invasion.
But the reason Trump is the first former president to be federally charged is not due to any of his many most outrageous crimes. Instead, Trump stands accused of insufficiently stewarding the top secrets of the US empire.
In an indictment filed June 8, Trump is accused of hiding and lying about classified documents, thus putting “national security” at risk. There are in fact many stunning elements to the case, as is typical with former president Trump. Trump had stashed away top-secret files in a tackily-bejeweled bathroom in his Mar-a-Lago estate. One box of documents had spilled, exposing national secrets to the eyes of unsuspecting employees at the estate. Trump openly boasted about classified battle plans to a writer, bragging that the information was “highly confidential.”
But Trump’s most egregious crimes remain untouched. And the case against him further exposes US empire, including that the country has made plans to potentially attack Iran, an outrage almost entirely overlooked by corporate media. Some of the classified documents contained the Pentagon’s secret plans for an attack on Iran, which Trump referenced during a recorded interview with a writer. And for 31 of the 37 counts, Trump is being charged under the Espionage Act, the same tactic that the US government is using to persecute Julian Assange.
As expected, Trump is defiant. He has pled not guilty, and he has taken to social media to denounce the “witch hunt” against him. A line from his post-indictment speech, when he hoarsely announces that he “did everything right and they indicted me,” has gone viral for its amusing delivery.
Trump’s supporters have organized protests against the trial proceedings throughout the country.
Nevertheless, the rich and powerful Trump is receiving special treatment in the courts. He will go before a judge who he nominated while in office, and who ruled in favor of Trump when he sued the FBI for raiding Mar-a-Lago. This ruling was later overturned by an appeals court. He was not required to have his mugshot taken. He was not given travel restrictions typical of those accused of serious crimes, and prosecutors did not even demand cash bail.
The US has never jailed a former president. It is unclear if Trump will make history in this regard. But even if he is imprisoned, will it be for the right reasons?
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/06/14/ ... raignment/
To accuse Trump of his most serious crimes would be to indict capitalism. Only one way that's gonna happen...
The former US president committed many crimes before and during his time in office. But he is being arraigned for crossing the US national security apparatus
June 14, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch
There’s no question that Trump is, even in the barest technical sense, a criminal. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
Former US president Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned yesterday, June 13, in Miami on 37 criminal counts which have the potential to land him decades in prison.
There’s no question that Trump is, even in the barest technical sense, a criminal. Trump oversaw a historic transfer of wealth from working people to the ultra-rich through his 2017 tax cuts, which arguably constitutes a massive theft of public funds that negatively impacts all government social spending that could have benefited the poor. Trump incited a right-wing insurrection. Trump’s record with sexual harassment and assault of women is notorious, and has already landed him in trouble with the courts. Trump illegally assassinated an Iranian general in a reckless provocation of war. Trump is an unabashed, unashamed imperialist, recently bragging that when he left office, “Venezuela was ready to collapse, we would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door.” Trump’s administration aided and promoted a destabilization campaign against Venezuela which included Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as president, massive state asset seizure, and even a failed invasion.
But the reason Trump is the first former president to be federally charged is not due to any of his many most outrageous crimes. Instead, Trump stands accused of insufficiently stewarding the top secrets of the US empire.
In an indictment filed June 8, Trump is accused of hiding and lying about classified documents, thus putting “national security” at risk. There are in fact many stunning elements to the case, as is typical with former president Trump. Trump had stashed away top-secret files in a tackily-bejeweled bathroom in his Mar-a-Lago estate. One box of documents had spilled, exposing national secrets to the eyes of unsuspecting employees at the estate. Trump openly boasted about classified battle plans to a writer, bragging that the information was “highly confidential.”
But Trump’s most egregious crimes remain untouched. And the case against him further exposes US empire, including that the country has made plans to potentially attack Iran, an outrage almost entirely overlooked by corporate media. Some of the classified documents contained the Pentagon’s secret plans for an attack on Iran, which Trump referenced during a recorded interview with a writer. And for 31 of the 37 counts, Trump is being charged under the Espionage Act, the same tactic that the US government is using to persecute Julian Assange.
As expected, Trump is defiant. He has pled not guilty, and he has taken to social media to denounce the “witch hunt” against him. A line from his post-indictment speech, when he hoarsely announces that he “did everything right and they indicted me,” has gone viral for its amusing delivery.
Trump’s supporters have organized protests against the trial proceedings throughout the country.
Nevertheless, the rich and powerful Trump is receiving special treatment in the courts. He will go before a judge who he nominated while in office, and who ruled in favor of Trump when he sued the FBI for raiding Mar-a-Lago. This ruling was later overturned by an appeals court. He was not required to have his mugshot taken. He was not given travel restrictions typical of those accused of serious crimes, and prosecutors did not even demand cash bail.
The US has never jailed a former president. It is unclear if Trump will make history in this regard. But even if he is imprisoned, will it be for the right reasons?
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/06/14/ ... raignment/
To accuse Trump of his most serious crimes would be to indict capitalism. Only one way that's gonna happen...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Liberal and Left Silence on National Security Police State When Used Against Trump and His Supporters
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 21, 2023
Stan Smith
Members of the D.C. National Guard deployed outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on January 6. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)
The National Security police state now regards the Democratic Party a more useful tool to criminalize opposition to US wars and maintain their control over the US government. We see this in the attack on the Uhuru Movement as being in the pay of Russia, in the imprisonment and torture of Julian Assange, in the jailing of numerous whistleblowers, in the censoring of hundreds of anti-war websites, claiming they spread Russian “disinformation.” Unfortunately, not a few who consider themselves on the left or liberals acquiesce to these attacks. Many actually repeat them.
Many more self-described leftists and liberals are supportive and participate in national security state/Democratic Party attacks on Trump and his supporters. In doing so, first, they are oblivious to the fact that these repressive police state operations will be used against them in the future. We saw that when we okayed the blocking access to Alex Jones’ website because of his abusive and cruel attacks on the Sandy Hook families and killings as a hoax. Once we tolerated that, the national security state used the same measures against hundreds of our own anti-war websites.
Second, in supporting police state operations against Trump, leftists are caving into the Democratic Party and the national security state, some at a faster rate than others. Traditionally, liberals and leftists have always considered, either consciously or not, the Democrats as the “lesser evil.” They paint Republicans, particularly with the rise of Trump, as a fascist threat that must be stopped. In reality, the ruling class has no need for fascism in the present political climate of a quiescent and disorganized working class.
The Man with the Horned Hat and “Obstruction of an Official Proceeding”
We saw liberal and left supporters of civil liberties silent after the imprisonment of Jacob Chansley, the January 6 man with the horned hat. He was sentenced to 3 ½ years for “obstruction of an official proceeding,” even though the prosecutors admitted he was non-violent, that the videos of him in the Capitol showed he was respectful of the police, and was actually guided around by some of them.
Jimmy Dore reported that police agencies had infiltrated the groups involved in January 6 long before it occurred, so they knew well enough what to expect. Dore also reported over 100 undercover police (FBI, Department of Justice and Homeland Security police, DC Metro Police, Secret Service, etc.) were part of the January 6 crowd both outside and inside the Capitol.
For those of us who see the need for fundamental social change in this country, as most in the US now do, obstructing an official proceeding will sooner or later be obligatory – if many of us have not done so already.
Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes and Seditious Conspiracy
Liberal and left supporters of civil liberties were also silent after Stewart Rhodes, head of the police infiltrated Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years for “seditious conspiracy.” Key Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins, was tried but not found guilty of “seditious conspiracy.” She is, incidentally, a transwoman – so much for the view that these right-wingers are “transphobic.”
Seditious conspiracy is codified as:
“If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”
To “conspire” to use “force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” In contrast, Martin Luther King proclaimed, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
“Seditious conspiracy” was used to imprison Puerto Rican nationalists opposed to the US occupation of their country. In 1936, Pedro Albizu Campos and other leaders of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party were found guilty of the “crime.” Later, 17 members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party were charged after four of them carried out the 1954 shooting inside the Capitol, wounding five Congresspeople. Oscar Lopez Rivera, who declared, “By international law, a colonized people has the right to fight against colonialism by any means necessary, including the use of force,” was imprisoned for seditious conspiracy and other charges.
On January 6, thousands of people went to the Capitol to protest, and hundreds went inside, some by violently attacking the police, some by breaking in, some let in by the police. The Oath Keepers were not some driving force behind the riot. It is silly to think a few hundred people, without guns, could seize control of the Capitol from armed police forces, let alone overturn an election.
Stewart Rhodes, leader of the rightwing Oath Keepers, didn’t engage in violence against the government, didn’t carry a weapon, didn’t go inside the Capitol, didn’t vandalize government property, and wasn’t commanding those outside or inside the Capitol. His crime was apparently talking about revolution in private chats and lamenting after the event that “we should have brought rifles.” How is that so different from the Black Panthers? The Oath Keepers didn’t bring guns to the Capitol, and they didn’t take part in an “insurrection” – everyone left the Capitol after just a few hours when asked to. Rhodes was basically convicted for mouthing off to his associates – a common occurrence among leftist revolutionaries. The government prosecution failed to prove they had a coordinated plan to seize the Capitol, let alone overthrow the government.
In spite of this, the sentencing judge declared Rhodes conspired with others “to take up arms and foment revolution.” That is exactly the reason many leftists support some version of the Second Amendment. Rhodes had his sentence jacked up to 18 years with a “terrorism enhancement” charge, in part because the Oath Keepers had weapons elsewhere.
The judge could assert, “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country and to the republic and to the very fabric of this democracy.” Rhodes’ lawyer legitimately stated his case was about the “weaponization of speech by the Department of Justice.” Exactly the same was true of Eugene Debs and later Socialist Workers Party leaders for their “seditious conspiracy” convictions for opposing US involvement in World War I and World War II.
Sedition and conspiracy prosecutions, like those the Biden administration pursue, turn advocacy of ideas into a crime. This conviction of Rhodes, if not thrown out, you can expect to be used against a working class left wing in the coming years.
Donald Trump and the Espionage Act
Last summer President Joseph branded so-called MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascists” who “threaten the very foundations of our Republic.” Liberals and leftists use the same label to describe Trump supporters, who they claim are white supremacists and reactionaries.
In January 2017, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer bluntly admitted who really controls Washington when he said President Trump was “being really dumb” by challenging the US police state apparatus.“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” he foretold.
The latest national security state operation is the Biden administration attempting to jail and exclude his chief rival in the upcoming presidential election, Trump, by charging him with treason. That is unprecedented in US history. There would be outrage and cries of a fascist government takeover if in 2020, sitting President Trump had charged his chief presidential rival, Joe Biden, with treason and aimed to imprison him for having classified and secret government documents in his garage and elsewhere. Trump could just as easily have done that, just as he could have charged Hillary and Obama with treason for the same reason.
Previously the Espionage Act had been used against Eugene Debs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Daniel Ellsberg, and Julian Assange. Obama used the Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined in order to shut down public knowledge of criminal US military policies abroad and at home. The Obama administration charged Jeffrey Sterling with espionage, a former CIA officer who publicized details of covert CIA spying on Iran; Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency official who attempted to blow the whistle on NSA spying; Chelsea Manning, who provided information about US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan; John Kiriakou, who leaked information about the illegal torture of detainees; Edward Snowden, who showed the NSA was engaged in massive illegal surveillance against the world population; and Daniel Hale, who leaked documents about the Pentagon’s drone assassination program.
The national security state and its puppet Biden are using this same Espionage Act to try to lock up Biden’s main opponent in the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump is an anathema to them in part because he is against their proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, just as he was against their war on Iraq. Tucker Carlson made this point in a show now seen by 101 million.
Tulsi Gabbard highlighted that this prosecution of President Biden’s rival is like “authoritarian regimes around the world [that] wield the power of the state to silence or eliminate opposition.” She called out the blatant double standard when it came to the same by Clinton, Biden, when CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to Congress, when 51 senior intelligence officials deliberately lied and labeled Hunter Biden’s laptop Russian disinformation, when FBI officials spread the Russia-Trump collusion hoax.
Carlson’s and Gabbard’s positions are ones that leftists and defenders of civil liberties should be taking. However, because of widespread anti-Trumpism in the liberal-left milieu, they don’t because they worry of losing their “left” credentials by standing up and condemning Democratic Party backed police state operations against rightwing groups, against Trump, against the attempt to deny people’s right to vote for Trump. We also saw this fear of standing for people’s rights and against the Democrat and police state operations with their support for the Russiagate hoax, with their condemnation of the Ottawa protestors, with unjustified sentences of those January 6 protestors who were non-violent. We even see it with the hesitation of many liberals and the left to defend Julian Assange and the Uhuru Movement, as they are considered “pro-Russian.”
Given liberals and leftists paint the Republicans as a fascistic party, it follows they see – whether they admit it or not – the Democrats as the lesser evil. No matter that all Democrats in Congress vote to arm Ukraine fascists in the war on Russia, and only Republicans, a minority, oppose it. It is irrelevant to the Democrats how much you criticize them and what names you call them if in November you ok voting for them to stop the Republicans from winning. That makes you an election time supporter of the Democratic Party. That makes people like Bernie Sanders, even Cornel West and left groups, sheep dogs for the Democratic Party because in the end they say the Republicans are so dangerous we can’t let them win.
This amounts to caving into the Democratic Party, the national security state, and inevitably to the ideology they push. One counterproductive result is that Trump becomes seen by much of the public as one real opposition to the national security state. He said after his indictment, the “deep state“…they want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom…They are not coming after me, they are coming after you, and I just happen to be standing in their way….” He is standing in their way, he is seen as a threat to their controlling power, though he differs from his enemies only in the manner of maintaining US imperial world rule. But in the end, Trump is right: what the national security state does to him, they will later do to us.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/06/ ... upporters/
*********
Donald Trump Continues to Twist What It Means to Be “Conservative” Into Total Incoherence
The leader of the Republican primary is running to the left of his competitors. Sometimes. Sort of.
BY BEN MATHIS-LILLEY
JUNE 21, 20231:31 PM
Get it? He’s on the left. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images and Sean Rayford/Getty Images.
Earlier this month, former Vice President Mike Pence announced that he is seeking the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. In response, the race’s front-runner, Donald Trump, released a document titled “Conservatives Need To Know These Facts About Pence.” These were the facts:
• Pence supports sending military aid to Ukraine.
• Pence supported the invasion of Iraq.
• Pence says the U.S. should consider raising the Social Security retirement age.
• Pence also wants to cut spending on Medicare.
Telling voters that another candidate doesn’t represent their values is a standard move in primaries. (Doing so by means of a vaguely unsettling teaser headline is a standard move for releasing written content in 2023.) But Pence’s positions would have been recognized as the correct ones for a conservative Republican to hold at almost any other moment in the last half-decade of American politics. The profligate expense of resources on the projection of military power but not on social welfare programs is the essence of Reaganism! Trump’s press release, if you bracket the ideologically muddled issue of Ukraine, is really an attack on Pence that’s being launched, in pundit terms, from Pence’s left.
There are in fact many recent examples of Trump criticizing rival Republicans for holding positions that are too far to the right—even if he is not phrasing the accusation that way. He’s criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on entitlements as well, telling a May rally audience in New Hampshire that he, “unlike Ron DeSanctus,” will “always protect Social Security and Medicare for our great seniors.” (DeSantis voted for cuts to the programs when he was in Congress. “DeSanctus” is, we think, a shortening of “DeSanctimonious.”) He’s also declined to endorse a national 15-week abortion ban and, in January, said on his Truth Social site that some Republicans performed poorly in the 2022 midterms because they supported bans that do not include exceptions in cases of rape or life-threatening medical complications.
While support for Ukraine is imprecise as a left-right litmus test—both Republican isolationists and leftist anti-imperialists are against it—Trump framed his criticism of it in left-friendly terms during a May CNN town hall, telling a Republican-heavy audience, to cheers, that he is motivated by humanitarian concern that too many soldiers on both sides are dying. He also likes to bring up his administration’s Operation Warp Speed program to develop COVID vaccines, bragging recently in Iowa that it was “something nobody else would have done.” That is probably not true, but it still makes him the only candidate in the Republican race celebrating a big-government public-health initiative.
Then there was Trump’s early-June comment about DeSantis’ frequent claims that his campaign is a counterattack on left-wing “wokeness”:
This is actually the argument liberal New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie made about DeSantis in May: That he’s obsessed, to his own electoral detriment, with the relatively niche concerns (like “wokeness” and critical race theory) of partisan conservatives who use social media. Of course, it is rich to the point of fraudulence for Trump to accuse someone else of having that problem; he used the term “woke” himself in a social media post just four days before making the comment above. But it’s what he’s going with!
<snip>
With his signature ability to see some things very clearly, Trump also recognized that the invasion of Iraq was now widely thought of as a blunder and that very few voters actually want to cut Social Security. Saying those things out loud gave his campaign an outsider, truth-telling feel that helped him in both the primary and the general election with the kind of independent voters who are always looking for someone who is going to “shake things up in Washington.”
At the same time, Trump knew—and still knows—that the Republican base thinks of itself as being conservative. Additionally, he is a narcissist who conflates conservatism itself with his own interests. So he labels positions that are simply unpopular, or which challenge his own record, as anti-conservative. His supporters call DeSantis, who is arguably even more obsessed with “owning” liberals than Trump, a RINO—i.e., a Republican In Name Only, a label that was initially applied to party leaders who were perceived as too friendly toward Democrats.
He will also use any available ammunition to disparage someone he doesn’t like, such as saying last week that his former chief of staff, John Kelly, who has criticized his handling of classified documents, was “born with a very small brain.”
With all this in mind, here are some informed guesses as to how he ended up at each of the left-ish positions described above.
• Iraq: Not wanting to admit that he’d also been wrong about the wisdom of invading; needing to take the opposite of Barack Obama’s position, which at the time was that the U.S. should keep troops in Iraq; looking for a way to humiliate 2016 primary opponent Jeb Bush, whose brother launched the war.
• Ukraine: Sharing, with Vladimir Putin, a longtime interest in enabling international money laundering; disliking Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for not helping him smear Joe Biden; having a genuine, total lack of interest in promoting democracy or human rights abroad.
• Entitlements: Realizing that his disproportionately older supporters love receiving direct deposits from the Social Security Administration.
• Abortion: Being a performative ladies’ man who won’t say whether any of his past sexual partners ended a subsequent pregnancy; finding the personalities and goals of legitimate rural evangelicals like Mike Pence to be off-putting and mystifying; being pretty good at trusting issue polls when they don’t concern something like “Should I keep talking about the 2020 election and ‘Russia hoax’ indefinitely.”
• The COVID vaccine: Wanting to take credit for something.
• Wokeness: Looking for a reason to belittle Ron DeSantis.
The domestic items on that list in particular—entitlements, abortion, COVID, and wokeness—speak to the trap that other 2024 candidates find themselves in. They know that if they are going to earn the base’s trust, they are going to have to prove that they are as crazy a bastard as Trump is. It’s the proverbial first-day-in-the-prison-yard phenomenon; they need to go extreme on something, like DeSantis has with critical race theory and grooming. But that exposes them to Trump arguing that they’re going to lose a general election because they seem like wingnuts. And Trump has established brand ownership of the issues—particularly southern-border immigration and “tough” street-level policing—on which a hardline position actually has appeal to independents (and even some Democrats). Crazy like a fox, that Donald Trump!
Of course, you may be noticing a continent-sized cloud of irony hovering over this discussion, which is that Trump himself is the most high-profile wingnut (and loser) in U.S. politics. His crude manner, corrupt behavior, and never-ending blah, blah, blah about being the subject of deep state persecution are the gold-standard ways to alienate middle-of-the-road voters in 2023, probably more so than making symbolic votes for entitlement reform during the Obama administration.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... erent.html
Not too bad an analysis, for a liberal. That last paragraph a feel-good doggie treat for his liberal(Slate) audience, that crap about Putin and international money laundering another bonbon for those dipsticks. For truth be told, the 'Deep State'(for lack of a more concise term), is out to get him. And it will, inso far as he will not be re-elected prez by hook or crook(details later...) Trump will not be allowed to interfere in foreign policy again. His domestic doings the ruling class could care less about as 'divide and conquer' is their eternal strategy in the class war.
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 21, 2023
Stan Smith
Members of the D.C. National Guard deployed outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on January 6. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)
The National Security police state now regards the Democratic Party a more useful tool to criminalize opposition to US wars and maintain their control over the US government. We see this in the attack on the Uhuru Movement as being in the pay of Russia, in the imprisonment and torture of Julian Assange, in the jailing of numerous whistleblowers, in the censoring of hundreds of anti-war websites, claiming they spread Russian “disinformation.” Unfortunately, not a few who consider themselves on the left or liberals acquiesce to these attacks. Many actually repeat them.
Many more self-described leftists and liberals are supportive and participate in national security state/Democratic Party attacks on Trump and his supporters. In doing so, first, they are oblivious to the fact that these repressive police state operations will be used against them in the future. We saw that when we okayed the blocking access to Alex Jones’ website because of his abusive and cruel attacks on the Sandy Hook families and killings as a hoax. Once we tolerated that, the national security state used the same measures against hundreds of our own anti-war websites.
Second, in supporting police state operations against Trump, leftists are caving into the Democratic Party and the national security state, some at a faster rate than others. Traditionally, liberals and leftists have always considered, either consciously or not, the Democrats as the “lesser evil.” They paint Republicans, particularly with the rise of Trump, as a fascist threat that must be stopped. In reality, the ruling class has no need for fascism in the present political climate of a quiescent and disorganized working class.
The Man with the Horned Hat and “Obstruction of an Official Proceeding”
We saw liberal and left supporters of civil liberties silent after the imprisonment of Jacob Chansley, the January 6 man with the horned hat. He was sentenced to 3 ½ years for “obstruction of an official proceeding,” even though the prosecutors admitted he was non-violent, that the videos of him in the Capitol showed he was respectful of the police, and was actually guided around by some of them.
Jimmy Dore reported that police agencies had infiltrated the groups involved in January 6 long before it occurred, so they knew well enough what to expect. Dore also reported over 100 undercover police (FBI, Department of Justice and Homeland Security police, DC Metro Police, Secret Service, etc.) were part of the January 6 crowd both outside and inside the Capitol.
For those of us who see the need for fundamental social change in this country, as most in the US now do, obstructing an official proceeding will sooner or later be obligatory – if many of us have not done so already.
Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes and Seditious Conspiracy
Liberal and left supporters of civil liberties were also silent after Stewart Rhodes, head of the police infiltrated Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years for “seditious conspiracy.” Key Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins, was tried but not found guilty of “seditious conspiracy.” She is, incidentally, a transwoman – so much for the view that these right-wingers are “transphobic.”
Seditious conspiracy is codified as:
“If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”
To “conspire” to use “force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” In contrast, Martin Luther King proclaimed, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
“Seditious conspiracy” was used to imprison Puerto Rican nationalists opposed to the US occupation of their country. In 1936, Pedro Albizu Campos and other leaders of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party were found guilty of the “crime.” Later, 17 members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party were charged after four of them carried out the 1954 shooting inside the Capitol, wounding five Congresspeople. Oscar Lopez Rivera, who declared, “By international law, a colonized people has the right to fight against colonialism by any means necessary, including the use of force,” was imprisoned for seditious conspiracy and other charges.
On January 6, thousands of people went to the Capitol to protest, and hundreds went inside, some by violently attacking the police, some by breaking in, some let in by the police. The Oath Keepers were not some driving force behind the riot. It is silly to think a few hundred people, without guns, could seize control of the Capitol from armed police forces, let alone overturn an election.
Stewart Rhodes, leader of the rightwing Oath Keepers, didn’t engage in violence against the government, didn’t carry a weapon, didn’t go inside the Capitol, didn’t vandalize government property, and wasn’t commanding those outside or inside the Capitol. His crime was apparently talking about revolution in private chats and lamenting after the event that “we should have brought rifles.” How is that so different from the Black Panthers? The Oath Keepers didn’t bring guns to the Capitol, and they didn’t take part in an “insurrection” – everyone left the Capitol after just a few hours when asked to. Rhodes was basically convicted for mouthing off to his associates – a common occurrence among leftist revolutionaries. The government prosecution failed to prove they had a coordinated plan to seize the Capitol, let alone overthrow the government.
In spite of this, the sentencing judge declared Rhodes conspired with others “to take up arms and foment revolution.” That is exactly the reason many leftists support some version of the Second Amendment. Rhodes had his sentence jacked up to 18 years with a “terrorism enhancement” charge, in part because the Oath Keepers had weapons elsewhere.
The judge could assert, “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country and to the republic and to the very fabric of this democracy.” Rhodes’ lawyer legitimately stated his case was about the “weaponization of speech by the Department of Justice.” Exactly the same was true of Eugene Debs and later Socialist Workers Party leaders for their “seditious conspiracy” convictions for opposing US involvement in World War I and World War II.
Sedition and conspiracy prosecutions, like those the Biden administration pursue, turn advocacy of ideas into a crime. This conviction of Rhodes, if not thrown out, you can expect to be used against a working class left wing in the coming years.
Donald Trump and the Espionage Act
Last summer President Joseph branded so-called MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascists” who “threaten the very foundations of our Republic.” Liberals and leftists use the same label to describe Trump supporters, who they claim are white supremacists and reactionaries.
In January 2017, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer bluntly admitted who really controls Washington when he said President Trump was “being really dumb” by challenging the US police state apparatus.“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” he foretold.
The latest national security state operation is the Biden administration attempting to jail and exclude his chief rival in the upcoming presidential election, Trump, by charging him with treason. That is unprecedented in US history. There would be outrage and cries of a fascist government takeover if in 2020, sitting President Trump had charged his chief presidential rival, Joe Biden, with treason and aimed to imprison him for having classified and secret government documents in his garage and elsewhere. Trump could just as easily have done that, just as he could have charged Hillary and Obama with treason for the same reason.
Previously the Espionage Act had been used against Eugene Debs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Daniel Ellsberg, and Julian Assange. Obama used the Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined in order to shut down public knowledge of criminal US military policies abroad and at home. The Obama administration charged Jeffrey Sterling with espionage, a former CIA officer who publicized details of covert CIA spying on Iran; Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency official who attempted to blow the whistle on NSA spying; Chelsea Manning, who provided information about US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan; John Kiriakou, who leaked information about the illegal torture of detainees; Edward Snowden, who showed the NSA was engaged in massive illegal surveillance against the world population; and Daniel Hale, who leaked documents about the Pentagon’s drone assassination program.
The national security state and its puppet Biden are using this same Espionage Act to try to lock up Biden’s main opponent in the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump is an anathema to them in part because he is against their proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, just as he was against their war on Iraq. Tucker Carlson made this point in a show now seen by 101 million.
Tulsi Gabbard highlighted that this prosecution of President Biden’s rival is like “authoritarian regimes around the world [that] wield the power of the state to silence or eliminate opposition.” She called out the blatant double standard when it came to the same by Clinton, Biden, when CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to Congress, when 51 senior intelligence officials deliberately lied and labeled Hunter Biden’s laptop Russian disinformation, when FBI officials spread the Russia-Trump collusion hoax.
Carlson’s and Gabbard’s positions are ones that leftists and defenders of civil liberties should be taking. However, because of widespread anti-Trumpism in the liberal-left milieu, they don’t because they worry of losing their “left” credentials by standing up and condemning Democratic Party backed police state operations against rightwing groups, against Trump, against the attempt to deny people’s right to vote for Trump. We also saw this fear of standing for people’s rights and against the Democrat and police state operations with their support for the Russiagate hoax, with their condemnation of the Ottawa protestors, with unjustified sentences of those January 6 protestors who were non-violent. We even see it with the hesitation of many liberals and the left to defend Julian Assange and the Uhuru Movement, as they are considered “pro-Russian.”
Given liberals and leftists paint the Republicans as a fascistic party, it follows they see – whether they admit it or not – the Democrats as the lesser evil. No matter that all Democrats in Congress vote to arm Ukraine fascists in the war on Russia, and only Republicans, a minority, oppose it. It is irrelevant to the Democrats how much you criticize them and what names you call them if in November you ok voting for them to stop the Republicans from winning. That makes you an election time supporter of the Democratic Party. That makes people like Bernie Sanders, even Cornel West and left groups, sheep dogs for the Democratic Party because in the end they say the Republicans are so dangerous we can’t let them win.
This amounts to caving into the Democratic Party, the national security state, and inevitably to the ideology they push. One counterproductive result is that Trump becomes seen by much of the public as one real opposition to the national security state. He said after his indictment, the “deep state“…they want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom…They are not coming after me, they are coming after you, and I just happen to be standing in their way….” He is standing in their way, he is seen as a threat to their controlling power, though he differs from his enemies only in the manner of maintaining US imperial world rule. But in the end, Trump is right: what the national security state does to him, they will later do to us.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/06/ ... upporters/
*********
Donald Trump Continues to Twist What It Means to Be “Conservative” Into Total Incoherence
The leader of the Republican primary is running to the left of his competitors. Sometimes. Sort of.
BY BEN MATHIS-LILLEY
JUNE 21, 20231:31 PM
Get it? He’s on the left. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images and Sean Rayford/Getty Images.
Earlier this month, former Vice President Mike Pence announced that he is seeking the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. In response, the race’s front-runner, Donald Trump, released a document titled “Conservatives Need To Know These Facts About Pence.” These were the facts:
• Pence supports sending military aid to Ukraine.
• Pence supported the invasion of Iraq.
• Pence says the U.S. should consider raising the Social Security retirement age.
• Pence also wants to cut spending on Medicare.
Telling voters that another candidate doesn’t represent their values is a standard move in primaries. (Doing so by means of a vaguely unsettling teaser headline is a standard move for releasing written content in 2023.) But Pence’s positions would have been recognized as the correct ones for a conservative Republican to hold at almost any other moment in the last half-decade of American politics. The profligate expense of resources on the projection of military power but not on social welfare programs is the essence of Reaganism! Trump’s press release, if you bracket the ideologically muddled issue of Ukraine, is really an attack on Pence that’s being launched, in pundit terms, from Pence’s left.
There are in fact many recent examples of Trump criticizing rival Republicans for holding positions that are too far to the right—even if he is not phrasing the accusation that way. He’s criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on entitlements as well, telling a May rally audience in New Hampshire that he, “unlike Ron DeSanctus,” will “always protect Social Security and Medicare for our great seniors.” (DeSantis voted for cuts to the programs when he was in Congress. “DeSanctus” is, we think, a shortening of “DeSanctimonious.”) He’s also declined to endorse a national 15-week abortion ban and, in January, said on his Truth Social site that some Republicans performed poorly in the 2022 midterms because they supported bans that do not include exceptions in cases of rape or life-threatening medical complications.
While support for Ukraine is imprecise as a left-right litmus test—both Republican isolationists and leftist anti-imperialists are against it—Trump framed his criticism of it in left-friendly terms during a May CNN town hall, telling a Republican-heavy audience, to cheers, that he is motivated by humanitarian concern that too many soldiers on both sides are dying. He also likes to bring up his administration’s Operation Warp Speed program to develop COVID vaccines, bragging recently in Iowa that it was “something nobody else would have done.” That is probably not true, but it still makes him the only candidate in the Republican race celebrating a big-government public-health initiative.
Then there was Trump’s early-June comment about DeSantis’ frequent claims that his campaign is a counterattack on left-wing “wokeness”:
This is actually the argument liberal New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie made about DeSantis in May: That he’s obsessed, to his own electoral detriment, with the relatively niche concerns (like “wokeness” and critical race theory) of partisan conservatives who use social media. Of course, it is rich to the point of fraudulence for Trump to accuse someone else of having that problem; he used the term “woke” himself in a social media post just four days before making the comment above. But it’s what he’s going with!
<snip>
With his signature ability to see some things very clearly, Trump also recognized that the invasion of Iraq was now widely thought of as a blunder and that very few voters actually want to cut Social Security. Saying those things out loud gave his campaign an outsider, truth-telling feel that helped him in both the primary and the general election with the kind of independent voters who are always looking for someone who is going to “shake things up in Washington.”
At the same time, Trump knew—and still knows—that the Republican base thinks of itself as being conservative. Additionally, he is a narcissist who conflates conservatism itself with his own interests. So he labels positions that are simply unpopular, or which challenge his own record, as anti-conservative. His supporters call DeSantis, who is arguably even more obsessed with “owning” liberals than Trump, a RINO—i.e., a Republican In Name Only, a label that was initially applied to party leaders who were perceived as too friendly toward Democrats.
He will also use any available ammunition to disparage someone he doesn’t like, such as saying last week that his former chief of staff, John Kelly, who has criticized his handling of classified documents, was “born with a very small brain.”
With all this in mind, here are some informed guesses as to how he ended up at each of the left-ish positions described above.
• Iraq: Not wanting to admit that he’d also been wrong about the wisdom of invading; needing to take the opposite of Barack Obama’s position, which at the time was that the U.S. should keep troops in Iraq; looking for a way to humiliate 2016 primary opponent Jeb Bush, whose brother launched the war.
• Ukraine: Sharing, with Vladimir Putin, a longtime interest in enabling international money laundering; disliking Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for not helping him smear Joe Biden; having a genuine, total lack of interest in promoting democracy or human rights abroad.
• Entitlements: Realizing that his disproportionately older supporters love receiving direct deposits from the Social Security Administration.
• Abortion: Being a performative ladies’ man who won’t say whether any of his past sexual partners ended a subsequent pregnancy; finding the personalities and goals of legitimate rural evangelicals like Mike Pence to be off-putting and mystifying; being pretty good at trusting issue polls when they don’t concern something like “Should I keep talking about the 2020 election and ‘Russia hoax’ indefinitely.”
• The COVID vaccine: Wanting to take credit for something.
• Wokeness: Looking for a reason to belittle Ron DeSantis.
The domestic items on that list in particular—entitlements, abortion, COVID, and wokeness—speak to the trap that other 2024 candidates find themselves in. They know that if they are going to earn the base’s trust, they are going to have to prove that they are as crazy a bastard as Trump is. It’s the proverbial first-day-in-the-prison-yard phenomenon; they need to go extreme on something, like DeSantis has with critical race theory and grooming. But that exposes them to Trump arguing that they’re going to lose a general election because they seem like wingnuts. And Trump has established brand ownership of the issues—particularly southern-border immigration and “tough” street-level policing—on which a hardline position actually has appeal to independents (and even some Democrats). Crazy like a fox, that Donald Trump!
Of course, you may be noticing a continent-sized cloud of irony hovering over this discussion, which is that Trump himself is the most high-profile wingnut (and loser) in U.S. politics. His crude manner, corrupt behavior, and never-ending blah, blah, blah about being the subject of deep state persecution are the gold-standard ways to alienate middle-of-the-road voters in 2023, probably more so than making symbolic votes for entitlement reform during the Obama administration.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... erent.html
Not too bad an analysis, for a liberal. That last paragraph a feel-good doggie treat for his liberal(Slate) audience, that crap about Putin and international money laundering another bonbon for those dipsticks. For truth be told, the 'Deep State'(for lack of a more concise term), is out to get him. And it will, inso far as he will not be re-elected prez by hook or crook(details later...) Trump will not be allowed to interfere in foreign policy again. His domestic doings the ruling class could care less about as 'divide and conquer' is their eternal strategy in the class war.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
PSL Editorial – Trump indictment sets stage for historic political battle
Liberation StaffAugust 3, 2023
The charges announced Tuesday by special prosecutor Jack Smith constitute the most serious legal crisis yet for Donald Trump. The indictment covers a wide range of actions Trump took between the election in November 2020 and the certification of the results by Congress on January 6, 2021. These centered around a plan to assemble parallel slates of pro-Trump electors from states Joe Biden won, disqualify those states’ legal electors, and then convene an Electoral College with a pro-Trump majority that would install him into the presidency for a second term.
Trump justified this scheme on the basis of a false narrative about massive voter fraud, arguing that the election itself was illegitimate. By questioning the legitimacy of the election, Trump violated one of the cardinal rules of elite politics. The “peaceful transfer of power” is a cherished practice within the ruling class because it is a pillar of stability for their system. The rich and powerful are divided into many factions with their own particular interests that compete with each other for power. Without an orderly process for one presidential administration to end and another to begin, the struggle between these factions could take on highly disruptive and violent dimensions that could threaten the very survival of their system of political and economic domination.
There are countless ways that elections in a capitalist society are illegitimate. Ultra-rich donors dominate the process and determine who has the resources to run a viable campaign and who does not. There are steep legal hurdles for any party other than the Democrats or Republicans to even be listed on the ballot. Executives at corporate media outlets determine which candidates get airtime and how the main issues are framed. A worker has never been president, but nearly every president in the past 100 years has been a millionaire. To call this system of rule by the rich “democratic” is laughable.
But Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was a fraud is of course not based on any of this. He hoped to overturn the result by invalidating the ballots cast by hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino voters in critical swing states, falsely claiming that they had illegally voted.
There is no doubt that this campaign was criminal. Trump sought to prolong his rule for another four years by concocting a completely fabricated narrative that would serve as the basis for both bureaucratic maneuvering by politicians and naked mob violence. Trump’s accusations of voter fraud were laser-focused on majority Black and Latino areas and had a clear racist character. For instance, he publicized a video of two Black poll workers in Atlanta (who later were bombarded with death threats) and falsely claimed it showed them rigging the count, and proclaimed that in general “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and therefore the reported vote totals were not to be trusted.
Facing dismal approval ratings, Joe Biden is hoping to gain electoral advantage by posturing as the only person who can protect people’s basic rights from Trump. But one look at his record in office shows what an outrageous notion that is. Biden has accelerated the destruction of the planet by greenlighting massive fossil fuel extraction, trampled on the right to strike by blocking rail workers from walking off the job, and cut a deal to raise the debt ceiling by kicking people off of food stamps. Beyond the United States, his administration has imperiled the whole world (and wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars) pursuing its new Cold War agenda against Russia and China that could lead to catastrophic global conflict. He has maintained Trump’s cruel blockades of Cuba and Venezuela that lead to needless suffering and death.
The road ahead
This is the third criminal case that Trump is facing. One case involves hiding a hush money payment made during the 2016 campaign and is being handled by prosecutors in Manhattan. Another, brought by special prosecutor Smith’s team, deals with classified documents that Trump retained and hid after he left office. These two initial prosecutions led to increased support for Trump within the Republican Party and helped cement his front-runner status in the primary. Trump was able to push a narrative that these cases – one involving a personal scandal that has already been well-known for years, and another that attempts to paint his retention of documents (apparently for the purpose of bragging to friends) as an act of espionage – are examples of the weaponization of the judiciary to political ends.
Opposition to Trump comes from many different sectors of society. Tens of millions of working class people are rightfully outraged about the war-mongering, pro-corporate policies that Trump pursued and the disgusting bigotry he promotes. But there are also large sections of the ruling class that despise Trump for the damage he has done to the stability of their system. The job of the president in a capitalist government is to manage the common affairs of the entire ruling class, and to keep a lid on tensions in society that could be disruptive to the functioning of capitalism. But Trump was and is purely concerned about himself, regardless of the damage his actions may do to the interests of other members of the elite or how he might inflame social conflict.
In the Manhattan case and the documents case, it was easier for Trump to present the prosecution as an expression of this elite opposition, and the underlying issues involved are of relatively little concern to most people in the country. This most recent case has a different character than the other two. It is about a sweeping plan to overturn the will of the voters using lies, intimidation and violence – effectively a plot by Trump to impose an unelected regime led by himself.
But even still, it is far from certain how the politics of this case will play out. The fact that more than two and a half years have passed between the commission of these crimes and the indictment works to Trump’s advantage as he seeks to paint this as yet another example of Biden’s weaponization of the Department of Justice. It was just as obvious the day Trump left office as it is today that he is guilty of these crimes, which were committed in plain sight. But now the indictment is being rolled out in the midst of a presidential campaign, and in fact at the moment when Trump is being recognized across the spectrum as the clear favorite to be the Republican nominee.
In the weeks following the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump was truly isolated. Not only did powerful institutions like the military and the leadership of the Republican Party reproach him for his actions that day, his own base was confused and demoralized. This crucial window of opportunity was squandered in favor of a meaningless impeachment and a drawn-out series of Congressional hearings. During this time, Trump was able to rewrite the history of January 6 in the minds of millions of his supporters and consolidate the false election fraud narrative as the majority position among Republican voters.
To have a top contender for the presidency campaign while facing multiple criminal trials – including one that involves subverting the constitutional order – is unprecedented in U.S. history. The 2024 election is already shaping up to be a historic political battle that could go in any number of unpredictable directions. The prospect of a second Trump presidency is deeply alarming to a huge number of people. But as was made clear again and again when he was in the White House, it is a mistake to sit idly by and hope that a police agency or prosecutor is going to save us from Trump or the far-right, anti-worker agenda he represents. The task remains to build a fighting, grassroots movement united around an alternative vision – not the pro-Wall Street politics of the Democratic Party, but a new world where equality and peace prevail in a society where a life with dignity is guaranteed.
https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-edit ... rationnews
Calling Trump's post election antics a "sweeping plan" is hyperbole which supports the Dem's 'Anybody but Trump' strategy<sic>. The despicable war criminal John Bolton had it right went he said if Jan 6 was a coup attempt then it was the most pathetic, amateurish that he'd ever seen. He oughta know...What it was is disjointed, spasmodic wishful thinking on the part of the prez with various underlings and a handful of amateur wanna-be 'Minute Men' doing things in a totally uncoordinated manner. Make no mistake, Trump wanted it to happen. But he refused to commit, always looking to save his own ass if things went south. No doubt many close to him saw this, it has been his standard behavior throughout life.That resulted a lack of commitment from them, which would have been absolutely necessary to carry a coup off. So, he most certainly incited a riot but proving sedition is gonna be a tough row to hoe.
No matter, the point is to damage him to the degree that he cannot win the general election. Ain't nothing short of a meteor strike on Trump Tower gonna keep him from winning the Republican primary. Being 'kinda Trump, 'Trump 2.0, or a Real Conservative is not going to cut it. The Republicans have made this base by fighting culture wars as a substitute for politics and now they gotta live with it.
The Dems know they got a stinker in Biden but they're stuck with him too, barring mortality. All they got is 'Not Trump!', which was also the case n 2016 but the minders were asleep at the wheel that time, drunk on hubris. Not this time, the damage he did to the dreams and schemes of the imperialists gang through sheer arrogance of ignorance, not understanding how things really work, will not be repeated. They are kicking out the jams, they will own the mushy middle, by hook or crook.
We shouldn't be surprised that many overseas observers are pulling for Trump. He didn't kill as many innocents as the average President, not thru any goodness on his part but mostly to avoid responsibility. But 'know them by their acts', as they say, that's what affects them. They don't give a damn about our domestic scene and proly figure we deserve him.
Liberation StaffAugust 3, 2023
The charges announced Tuesday by special prosecutor Jack Smith constitute the most serious legal crisis yet for Donald Trump. The indictment covers a wide range of actions Trump took between the election in November 2020 and the certification of the results by Congress on January 6, 2021. These centered around a plan to assemble parallel slates of pro-Trump electors from states Joe Biden won, disqualify those states’ legal electors, and then convene an Electoral College with a pro-Trump majority that would install him into the presidency for a second term.
Trump justified this scheme on the basis of a false narrative about massive voter fraud, arguing that the election itself was illegitimate. By questioning the legitimacy of the election, Trump violated one of the cardinal rules of elite politics. The “peaceful transfer of power” is a cherished practice within the ruling class because it is a pillar of stability for their system. The rich and powerful are divided into many factions with their own particular interests that compete with each other for power. Without an orderly process for one presidential administration to end and another to begin, the struggle between these factions could take on highly disruptive and violent dimensions that could threaten the very survival of their system of political and economic domination.
There are countless ways that elections in a capitalist society are illegitimate. Ultra-rich donors dominate the process and determine who has the resources to run a viable campaign and who does not. There are steep legal hurdles for any party other than the Democrats or Republicans to even be listed on the ballot. Executives at corporate media outlets determine which candidates get airtime and how the main issues are framed. A worker has never been president, but nearly every president in the past 100 years has been a millionaire. To call this system of rule by the rich “democratic” is laughable.
But Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was a fraud is of course not based on any of this. He hoped to overturn the result by invalidating the ballots cast by hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino voters in critical swing states, falsely claiming that they had illegally voted.
There is no doubt that this campaign was criminal. Trump sought to prolong his rule for another four years by concocting a completely fabricated narrative that would serve as the basis for both bureaucratic maneuvering by politicians and naked mob violence. Trump’s accusations of voter fraud were laser-focused on majority Black and Latino areas and had a clear racist character. For instance, he publicized a video of two Black poll workers in Atlanta (who later were bombarded with death threats) and falsely claimed it showed them rigging the count, and proclaimed that in general “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and therefore the reported vote totals were not to be trusted.
Facing dismal approval ratings, Joe Biden is hoping to gain electoral advantage by posturing as the only person who can protect people’s basic rights from Trump. But one look at his record in office shows what an outrageous notion that is. Biden has accelerated the destruction of the planet by greenlighting massive fossil fuel extraction, trampled on the right to strike by blocking rail workers from walking off the job, and cut a deal to raise the debt ceiling by kicking people off of food stamps. Beyond the United States, his administration has imperiled the whole world (and wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars) pursuing its new Cold War agenda against Russia and China that could lead to catastrophic global conflict. He has maintained Trump’s cruel blockades of Cuba and Venezuela that lead to needless suffering and death.
The road ahead
This is the third criminal case that Trump is facing. One case involves hiding a hush money payment made during the 2016 campaign and is being handled by prosecutors in Manhattan. Another, brought by special prosecutor Smith’s team, deals with classified documents that Trump retained and hid after he left office. These two initial prosecutions led to increased support for Trump within the Republican Party and helped cement his front-runner status in the primary. Trump was able to push a narrative that these cases – one involving a personal scandal that has already been well-known for years, and another that attempts to paint his retention of documents (apparently for the purpose of bragging to friends) as an act of espionage – are examples of the weaponization of the judiciary to political ends.
Opposition to Trump comes from many different sectors of society. Tens of millions of working class people are rightfully outraged about the war-mongering, pro-corporate policies that Trump pursued and the disgusting bigotry he promotes. But there are also large sections of the ruling class that despise Trump for the damage he has done to the stability of their system. The job of the president in a capitalist government is to manage the common affairs of the entire ruling class, and to keep a lid on tensions in society that could be disruptive to the functioning of capitalism. But Trump was and is purely concerned about himself, regardless of the damage his actions may do to the interests of other members of the elite or how he might inflame social conflict.
In the Manhattan case and the documents case, it was easier for Trump to present the prosecution as an expression of this elite opposition, and the underlying issues involved are of relatively little concern to most people in the country. This most recent case has a different character than the other two. It is about a sweeping plan to overturn the will of the voters using lies, intimidation and violence – effectively a plot by Trump to impose an unelected regime led by himself.
But even still, it is far from certain how the politics of this case will play out. The fact that more than two and a half years have passed between the commission of these crimes and the indictment works to Trump’s advantage as he seeks to paint this as yet another example of Biden’s weaponization of the Department of Justice. It was just as obvious the day Trump left office as it is today that he is guilty of these crimes, which were committed in plain sight. But now the indictment is being rolled out in the midst of a presidential campaign, and in fact at the moment when Trump is being recognized across the spectrum as the clear favorite to be the Republican nominee.
In the weeks following the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump was truly isolated. Not only did powerful institutions like the military and the leadership of the Republican Party reproach him for his actions that day, his own base was confused and demoralized. This crucial window of opportunity was squandered in favor of a meaningless impeachment and a drawn-out series of Congressional hearings. During this time, Trump was able to rewrite the history of January 6 in the minds of millions of his supporters and consolidate the false election fraud narrative as the majority position among Republican voters.
To have a top contender for the presidency campaign while facing multiple criminal trials – including one that involves subverting the constitutional order – is unprecedented in U.S. history. The 2024 election is already shaping up to be a historic political battle that could go in any number of unpredictable directions. The prospect of a second Trump presidency is deeply alarming to a huge number of people. But as was made clear again and again when he was in the White House, it is a mistake to sit idly by and hope that a police agency or prosecutor is going to save us from Trump or the far-right, anti-worker agenda he represents. The task remains to build a fighting, grassroots movement united around an alternative vision – not the pro-Wall Street politics of the Democratic Party, but a new world where equality and peace prevail in a society where a life with dignity is guaranteed.
https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-edit ... rationnews
Calling Trump's post election antics a "sweeping plan" is hyperbole which supports the Dem's 'Anybody but Trump' strategy<sic>. The despicable war criminal John Bolton had it right went he said if Jan 6 was a coup attempt then it was the most pathetic, amateurish that he'd ever seen. He oughta know...What it was is disjointed, spasmodic wishful thinking on the part of the prez with various underlings and a handful of amateur wanna-be 'Minute Men' doing things in a totally uncoordinated manner. Make no mistake, Trump wanted it to happen. But he refused to commit, always looking to save his own ass if things went south. No doubt many close to him saw this, it has been his standard behavior throughout life.That resulted a lack of commitment from them, which would have been absolutely necessary to carry a coup off. So, he most certainly incited a riot but proving sedition is gonna be a tough row to hoe.
No matter, the point is to damage him to the degree that he cannot win the general election. Ain't nothing short of a meteor strike on Trump Tower gonna keep him from winning the Republican primary. Being 'kinda Trump, 'Trump 2.0, or a Real Conservative is not going to cut it. The Republicans have made this base by fighting culture wars as a substitute for politics and now they gotta live with it.
The Dems know they got a stinker in Biden but they're stuck with him too, barring mortality. All they got is 'Not Trump!', which was also the case n 2016 but the minders were asleep at the wheel that time, drunk on hubris. Not this time, the damage he did to the dreams and schemes of the imperialists gang through sheer arrogance of ignorance, not understanding how things really work, will not be repeated. They are kicking out the jams, they will own the mushy middle, by hook or crook.
We shouldn't be surprised that many overseas observers are pulling for Trump. He didn't kill as many innocents as the average President, not thru any goodness on his part but mostly to avoid responsibility. But 'know them by their acts', as they say, that's what affects them. They don't give a damn about our domestic scene and proly figure we deserve him.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Certainly ain't no endorsement on my part, but this is an observation made by many outside of the 'Golden Billion', not just these here Russians. Say what you will, it is factually correct...
Doe this mean we should vote for Trump? Of course not, we shouldn't vote for any Democrat or Republican. In the meantime the Orange Man looks to be making a bid for those libertarians that Mr Shea is so enamored of. I think I know which way that one is going to fall...
Google TranslatorElements of political persecution
August 5, 23:38
Because these persecution is who needs persecution. Nothing here...
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8547420.html
Doe this mean we should vote for Trump? Of course not, we shouldn't vote for any Democrat or Republican. In the meantime the Orange Man looks to be making a bid for those libertarians that Mr Shea is so enamored of. I think I know which way that one is going to fall...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Democrats Don’t Care About Trump’s Real Crimes: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Caitlin Johnstone
August 7, 2023
Ask an anti-imperialist what’s the worst thing Trump did and they’ll talk about real things like Yemen, Venezuela, Soleimani, Assange, the JCPOA, and the new cold war. Ask a Democrat what’s the worst thing Trump did and they’ll talk about pretend nonsense like Russian collusion and insurrection.
The US government is doing literally hundreds of things right now as you read this that are more harmful and concerning than a pretend “insurrection” that never at any time had a higher than zero percent chance of succeeding, but that’s the issue liberals have been shrieking about for the last two and a half years.
It’s so stupid how today’s right wingers pretend they’re different from the stuffy warmongering conservatives of previous decades. Trump supporters revealed how phony their faction’s antiwar lip service is when their guy assassinated Soleimani; Trump took the US to the brink of war with Iran and everything I said in opposition to this was met with tons of comments from MAGAs cheerleading the assassination and saying the Iranian people need to be free. All of a sudden Politics Twitter was full of 2003 Bush Republicans spouting the exact kinds of rhetoric they were spouting 20 years ago. These people haven’t changed at all.
Trump supporters are Bush supporters cosplaying as Ron Paul supporters.
If you place opposing US murderousness and militarism at a high level of importance, then you can’t really dispute that Bush was quantifiably worse than Trump. And because this administration actively sabotaged peace between Ukraine and Russia, Biden is arguably worse than Bush.
(More...not relevant to thread.)
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/08 ... ve-matrix/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."