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

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

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 10, 2022 2:37 pm

Trump Raid Is Sabotaging The Democrats' Campaign

Over the weekend the Democrats finally passed their rather mediocre $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act, which will not reduce inflation and is mostly about climate related measures and drugs. They hope to profit from it in the November midterm election:

Vulnerable incumbent Democratic senators like Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada are already planning events promoting the landmark legislation they passed over the weekend. Democratic ad makers are busily preparing a barrage of commercials about it across key battlegrounds. And the White House is set to deploy Cabinet members on a nationwide sales pitch.
The sweeping legislation, covering climate change and prescription drug prices, which came together in the Senate after more than a year of painfully public fits and starts, has kicked off a frenetic 91-day sprint to sell the package by November — and win over an electorate that has grown skeptical of Democratic rule.

But on the very same day the the Justice Department and the FBI handed republicans a huge new rallying point that will significantly increase their election turnout:

Hoards of angry Donald Trump supporters descended on his Mar-a-Lago home last night shortly after it emerged that the FBI had searched the ex-president's estate as part of an investigation into whether he took classified records from the White House to the Florida residence.
Trump, disclosing the search in a lengthy statement, claimed that agents had opened up a safe at his home and described their work as an 'unannounced raid' that he called 'prosecutorial misconduct.'

He accused the FBI of a double standard, claiming the bureau 'allowed' Hillary Clinton to 'acid wash' 33,000 emails from her time as Secretary of State.

Those in his camp said the raid was a clear attempt to thwart a potential 2024 Presidential run.

Trump has not formally announced any campaign but speculation that he will run again is rife. It was compounded by his appearance at C-Pac this weekend.

The raid is guaranteed to be covered in multiple news rounds. It will give Trump new momentum for announcing his campaign:

As Trump weighs running for the presidency for a third time, the implications of the FBI’s foray into Mar-a-Lago for his political fortunes are considerable. Will it boost his status as a martyr, prompting the GOP to rally around him? Or is it the first real sign of myriad legal difficulties, ranging from wire fraud to election tampering in Georgia to the January 6 attack, that could fatally entangle him?
Is this a 'bombshell'? Are the walls closing in (vid) on Trump? Is this the long awaited 'tipping point' that marks the 'beginning of the end' for Trump?

Of course not.

All attempts to get Trump over fake Russiagate claims or other issues have failed. Some 'classified' documents probably found in the possession of the person who, as president, had the power to declassify them will not change anything.

The raid and the accusations will only increase Trump's and his followers determination to win:

The short-term upside for Trump, in any case, is clear. He is now once more the center of political attention at a moment when President Joe Biden was scoring a bunch of victories this past week. Trump, a master showman, will milk the FBI search for all the publicity he can squeeze from it.
The raid was probably the best Trump could have hoped for:

Mr. Trump made clear in his statement that he sees potential political value in the search, something some of his advisers echoed, depending on what any investigation produces.
His political team began sending fund-raising solicitations about the search late on Monday evening.

Even those conservatives who do not like Trump will see the raid as an illegitimate attempt by democrats to prevent another Trump run for the presidency. It is something many will opposed on principal independent of who is targeted.

The White House claims to not have been noticed of the raid. Many people will doubt that.

If Attorney General Merrick B. Garland did not inform the White House he should be fired for political sabotage of the Democrats' campaign. Launching highly political action without informing the boss is a no-no for the Justice Department.

If the White House was informed its hatred for Trump must have pushed it into a very stupid mistake. Allowing the raid at this point of time was the worst thing that could happen to the Democrats.

(more...)

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/08/t ... .html#more

Gotta agree with 'b', if Garland didn't inform Biden of his intentions he should be sacked. But I find that unlikely, however they play the 'plausible deniability' card. And I cannot figure what 'gold' the investigators might find as the real juicy stuff has probably been disposed of, perhaps by the 'shredder in chief' himself. And if it is a ploy to 'pile on' while the committee amps up in an attempt to bury the Orange Man it is about stupid as was the Clinton's original 'bug in the ear' that The Donald should run.

It is only the blind arrogance of the two parties that allowed Trump to become president in the first place. Fat and complacent, with the 'common knowledge' that the masses have nowhere else to go(thanks to generations of propaganda and imperialist trickle down spoils) they don't really try to address the wants and needs of the masses, a congress that delivers to the rich only and a parade of presidents of either party who can be said to be 'alternatively gifted' (excepting Obama, who was mostly competent but evil) at best it is little wonder that the 'novelty act' got the prize.

Incompetent or 'crazy like a fox.? The worst political party in history or the most devious?
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 19, 2022 3:59 pm

Trump Derangement Syndrome Returns
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 17 Aug 2022

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Why would Black people laud the FBI or criticize protection against self-incrimination? The FBI search of Donald Trump's home has reawakened Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Progressives love the FBI? Leftists embrace the Espionage Act? Of course, one man is responsible for this madness, and he is none other than Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. The fallout from the FBI search conducted at Trump’s home shows the rank confusion spread by people who call themselves liberal but who are as dangerous as anyone on the right. From the moment that Trump announced the raid they were in full fascist mode, even as they claimed to be fighting fascism.

Trump did what he usually does, play fast and loose with the truth. Of all former presidents only he would ignore subpoenas and claim to have declassified documents when he hadn’t done so. He can’t get out of his own way and thus makes himself a target. But Democrats should know that the search is seen as nothing more than a personal attack against him. Millions of people who love Trump will love him all the more and conclude that the raid was meant to keep him from running for president again. Liberal dead-enders will be happy, but everyone else will say that something rotten was conducted at Mar a Lago.

Attorney General Merrick Garland says that the documents were subpoenaed but the former president didn’t respond. The FBI search warrant states that the search encompassed three different issues: gathering, transmitting or losing defense information, which is part of the Espionage Act; concealment, removal, or mutilation concerning the handling of records and reports; and the destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy, which is part of a section dealing with obstruction of justice. The warrant also states a search for information on Roger Stone and on the President of France.

Aside from the item descriptions, no one knows what Trump had or what the FBI found. Leaks from the Justice Department indicate something about nuclear weapons, but no one knows what that means. The lack of information hasn’t stopped the speculation which Trump always causes. There is conjecture that he was selling information to Russia or to Saudi Arabia or was plotting some other treason. There are even claims that documents were buried with his recently deceased ex-wife. It is fascinating that there can be so much guesswork about issues no one can know.

The years long Russiagate investigation is responsible for ordinarily sensible people losing their minds. Hardly anyone recalls that the charge of collusion was actually disproven, that Robert Mueller only indicted for process crimes, such as those which occur when people let down their guard and talk to the FBI. Most Americans who know the name Paul Manafort think he was a Russian spy but don’t know that he went to jail for tax and bank fraud. Propaganda works very well when it is repeated over and over again.

Worse than the silly Trump inspired derangement is the way that those who call themselves left or progressive have chosen to defend federal law enforcement and bad legislation like the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is a relic from the earliest days of the cold war, and Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Palmer Raids which targeted the left for persecution and prosecution. Barack Obama used it more than all previous presidents combined in order to prosecute journalists who published what the state didn’t want us to know. As for the FBI, its Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, created dissension in the liberation movement, targeted individuals for prosecution, spied on Martin Luther King and told him to commit suicide, and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark among others. The FBI continues to use informants to entrap Black people in phony terror cases.

It is truly shameful to see Black people exalt the FBI and act as if punishing Trump is the organizing principle of all political activity. The Trump organization is also under investigation by the New York Attorney and the former president refused to answer questions put to him in a deposition. The right to remain silent is one of the most important in American law and should be used a lot more often. But copaganda television shows and Trump hatred have caused their own form of insanity, and his exercise of a fundamental right was widely lampooned. No one should ever be condemned for utilizing their fifth amendment right, not even Donald Trump.

Of course, this spectacle is also used to deflect from Biden administration failures. His approval rating is still low, for the simple reason that he didn’t do what he claimed he would for American voters. He continues to pour public money into the losing effort in Ukraine and needlessly provokes Russia and China. But who is paying attention if there is speculation that Trump put files in Ivana’s casket?

It is time to nip this foolishness in the bud before it goes any further. Trump should not live rent free in our collective consciousness any longer. He cannot be allowed to distract from the current president’s actions or become a rallying point for politics which will inevitably be useless. No one has to follow Trump’s shenanigans any longer or allow the corporate media or the democratic party to make him their focus. Doing so only makes it harder to do the already hard work of recreating Black politics.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/trump ... me-returns

But look at it this way: Trump Derangement Syndrome is all the Dems got. Keep him barking, keep the sheep in the corral. Of course that didn't work out so well in 2016 due to massive ruling class hubris: precautions were not taken against the unlikely possibility that the chosen candidate, Clinton, would be so repulsive to voters. Such as we saw in 2000 against Gore . No more surprises, be assured, Trump set the Imperial project back four years*, they won't let it happen again.

*Fucked up with China and North Korea, set back the timetable on aggression against Russia, needlessly and gratuitously pissed off the entire Global South.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 01, 2022 2:29 pm

In FBI vs. Trump, the People Lose
AUGUST 31, 2022

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A man carrying Trump posters and wearing a hat with US flag colors stands in front of a policeman. Photo: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images.

By Aaron Maté – Aug 21, 2022

Investigating Trump for an Espionage Act violation, the FBI opens a new chapter in a six-year, intra-elite feud.

For my money, the early beneficiary of the FBI’s espionage investigation of Donald Trump is Donald Trump.

According to the Washington Post, “Trump has told advisers that in the nearly two years since leaving office, no issue had better galvanized Republican voters around him.” A Politico poll of Republican voters in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago raid gave Trump a 10-point boost over his closest possible primary rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump’s ensuing fundraising campaign has done even better, quickly topping $1 million on at least two days, a jump of at least 700%.

Over the long run, it is difficult to form a conclusive judgment on Trump’s potential culpability in the absence of any confirmed detail about both the contents of the documents that Trump allegedly mishandled, and the evidence to support the Justice Department’s suspicions. But if the last six years of routine Trump standoffs with the national security state are any guide, the walls are nowhere closer to closing in.

Whatever your views on Trump, it is undeniable that the permanent military-intelligence bureaucracy in Washington does not see him as one of their own, and has gone to extraordinary lengths to target him when it sees fit. It is also undeniable that the national security state’s spats with Trump have distracted the public from vital issues that impact working people’s lives and the future of the planet. This includes, I have long argued, Trump’s most harmful policies as president, which were routinely overshadowed and even exacerbated by his standoffs with the “deep state.”

Accordingly, it is reasonable to expect that this latest “scandal” over the potential mishandling of classified documents will continue the trend that has defined the Trump era: an intra-elite, symbiotic feud that simultaneous boosts Trump among his base, and the national security state among his foes.

Pundits and politicians are resoundingly confident that the FBI must have the goods on Trump to have taken the unprecedented step of searching the former president’s home. This argument can only be made by ignoring that the FBI and other intelligence agencies took far more unprecedented and consequential actions against Trump when he was president, on grounds that were not only baseless, but fraudulent.

The FBI investigated Trump as a suspected Russian conspirator and asset—and not just once, but twice: first as a presidential candidate, and then months after he took office. To undertake this, they relied on the Hillary Clinton-funded Steele dossier’s conspiracy theories as source material; repeatedly lied to a FISA court; and, despite the full knowledge that they had come up empty, prolonged their investigation with media leaks and court filings that falsely suggested that a collusion “smoking gun” was within reach.

Russiagate apologists like to argue that the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier was an aberration that does not taint the whole enterprise. In fact, there are ample grounds to believe that Steele’s fabrications played an even greater role than the FBI has acknowledged—including, as I have detailed, possibly triggering the Russia investigation to begin with. But even taking the FBI’s official predicate at face value, the probe was baseless from start to finish.

https://orinocotribune.com/in-fbi-vs-tr ... ople-lose/

Only thing I'm sure of is that Trump will not be re-elected. By hook or by crook.....no hubris this time.

Which does not make me feel warm and fuzzy after two treacherous years of Biden, inciting the war in Ukraine, bungling Covid-19, and finessing his party left into impotence, not seriously addressing climate change while supporting fossil fuel.

Biden and Trump are both anti-humans.

Folks overseas don't know or care much about the Donald's hideous behavior, race baiting, thievery, etc. What they do know is that there were no major military conflicts initiated during his time, and a little the opposite. But Americans don't care about the deaths our country causes overseas, out of sight, out of mind.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 16, 2022 6:26 pm

He's back....

Trump launches 2024 White House bid
Xinhua | Updated: 2022-11-16 09:57

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Donald Trump arrives with his wife Melania Trump to announce that he will once again run for US president in the 2024 US presidential election during an event at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, US Nov 15, 2022. [Photo/Agencies]

WASHINGTON - Former US President Donald Trump announced Tuesday night that he will run for the White House again.

"I am tonight announcing my candidacy for President of the United States," the Republican said from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Trump, 76, also filed his paperwork establishing his candidacy to run for the US presidency in 2024 with the Federal Elections Commission on Tuesday.

The announcement came a week after the 2022 US midterm elections, in which all 435 seats of the House of Representatives and 35 spots in the 100-member Senate were among those up for grabs.

Democrats have been projected to retain control of the Senate in the next US Congress while neither party has won enough seats to be the House majority as of Tuesday night.

Trump on Tuesday night touted Republicans' midterm performance despite analysis that they had underperformed.

Trump served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.

He lost to his Democrat challenger Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election but has refused to acknowledge defeat and continued to promote unsubstantiated claims that the race was rigged.

Biden said last week that he still intends to seek re-election and that he would likely make an official decision "early next year."

The 2024 US presidential election is scheduled for Nov 5 of that year.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... 2a005.html

Yep, it's champagne and cocaine time at the DNC, now they got a chance at retaining the White House in 2024. Cause they got nothing to show for these 1st two years and the next 2 look even less propitious. If ya ain't got nothing to run on ya need something to run against. Viola!

***********

What It Would Look Like to Put Trump on Trial (Literally) While He Runs for President
BY JEREMY STAHL
NOV 15, 20229:34 PM

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The former president announces a thing. USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. Isn’t this wildly early, you might ask? Yes, yes, it is—it’s the earliest presidential candidacy declaration for a non-incumbent major candidate in modern history.

The rushed nature of Trump’s announcement—coming also before we even know the final outcome of last week’s midterms—has raised speculation that Trump is only announcing his bid as a way to avoid prosecution. Indeed, there’s been reporting for months that Trump would try to use a candidacy to deter an indictment by the Department of Justice in the Mar-a-Lago case and other cases, hoping that Attorney General Merrick Garland would find such a prosecution too politically toxic and essentially give Trump a get out of jail free card.

But the situation presents a bit of a conundrum. As I’ve argued before, there are a lot—like a lot, lot, lot—of legal issues, criminal and civil, that potentially stand in the way of Trump even making it to that first primary, which is more than 14 months away. It’s unclear how they are all going to shake out, but they should make this a far different primary campaign than the one Trump ran in 2015 and 2016, when he shocked the Republican establishment, split the field, and ultimately took the prize.

The thorniest among those legal issues stems from the August FBI search on his home at Mar-a-Lago—also the site of Tuesday’s announcement—which uncovered more than 100 classified documents Trump had taken from the White House and which his lawyers had claimed had been returned in response to a grand jury subpoena. Experts in classified document cases have been saying for months that there’s already more than enough public evidence available to indict Trump, particularly given the apparent obstruction of justice involved in the case.

“If Trump were anyone else, he would have already faced a likely indictment,” Bradley Moss, a leading private attorney in classified documents cases, told NBC News last week. Trump likely hasn’t been indicted yet only because of a DOJ policy against taking prosecutorial steps that might be seen as interfering in an election—it prohibits any interference in the 60 days leading up to any election, in this case, the midterms. That midterm election, however, just ended. Which begs the question: What would it look like to prosecute Donald Trump now that the midterms are over and his is again a candidate for president?

Moss and I spoke back in August shortly after the Mar-a-Lago search and on Tuesday prior to Trump’s announcement. What he described a possible Trump prosecution and trial looking like was surprisingly straightforward—despite Trump’s attempt to insist we are already in a general election season via the announcement.

(more...)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... nyway.html

From the Dept of Wishful Thinking....Mebbe it is and mebbe it ain't but I suspect the over-riding reason behind this early announcement is that Trump misses and wants the headlines, all the better to get out ahead of Desantis. Even if you are a baby raised in a wicker basket in a dark closet you know that Trump is the world master of running out the legal clock. That plus the above mentioned complexities leads one to expect that Trump will never be convicted unless it is posthumous. A plurality of the rich might hate him but class has it's privileges....and one must not set such precedence.....

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... nyway.html

********

PSL Statement – Workers shouldn’t be fooled: Trump is a tool of the ultra-rich
Party for Socialism and LiberationNovember 15, 2022 236 5 minutes read
Download PDF flyer https://flyer-generator.herokuapp.com/? ... sts/110082

Photo credit — Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

Donald Trump announced tonight that he is launching his third campaign for the presidency. In a rambling speech filled with outrageous falsehoods and demagogic promises, Trump presented himself as someone who had brought about incredible prosperity during his time in office, but is hounded by a corrupt elite. He promised a police state crackdown involving the death penalty for drug dealers, called to make early voting illegal, ridiculed efforts to save the environment, grossly misrepresented his catastrophic handling of the pandemic and much more.

A central feature of Trump’s false appeal is the notion that he is “pro-worker” and stands up for the rights of working people against the establishment. This is especially targeted to people who work or used to work in the manufacturing sector, an area of the economy that has been devastated by corporate greed and shrunken down to a shadow of its former self.

But a look at Trump’s real record while in office makes it clear that the opposite is true. Trump is nothing more than a tool for the millionaires and billionaires to grow even more disgustingly rich while workers’ rights are trampled on. Trump is an ultra-rich real estate mogul himself, and uses his power to enrich himself and the class of wealthy parasites he belongs to.

Implementing the billionaires’ wishlist

Perhaps the clearest example of this is the 2017 tax “reform” law, something Trump constantly touts as one of his proudest accomplishments. Totaling $2 trillion, this overhaul was effectively a massive transfer of wealth from workers to the rich. Outrageously, many billionaires and multinational corporations pay a lower effective tax rate than many working class families. Trump’s tax law slashed the corporate tax rate from 36 percent to 21 percent. Likewise, the income tax rate paid by those in the highest bracket was reduced from 39.6 percent to 37 percent. And Trump wanted to make sure that inequality would persist from generation to generation – he exempted people with up to $12 million from paying any taxes at all on the inheritance they leave to their children.

Regulations meant to protect the health, safety and other basic rights of workers – won thanks to the courage and persistent struggle of the labor movement and other people’s movements – were shredded by Trump. Less than two weeks after taking office, Trump issued an executive order referred to as “two for one” – a mandate that no new regulation can be introduced unless two existing regulations are eliminated. This wave of deregulation made it easier, for instance, for companies to dump coal ash into water supplies or spew mercury into the air. And Trump systematically deprived OSHA of the resources it needed to keep workers safe on the job, reducing the number of inspectors at the agency’s disposal to the lowest level ever in its 50-year history.

The National Labor Relations Board, supposed to be an institution to uphold workers’ rights, turned into yet another tool of corporate America under Trump. Trump’s NLRB made it easier for bosses to rig union certification elections by arbitrarily adding unrelated employees to a potential bargaining unit. It also gave bosses more leeway to make unilateral changes to workplace conditions and undermined workers’ right to exercise their free speech rights at their place of employment. Trump appointed Peter Robb to be the General Counsel of the NLRB – the board’s top lawyer. Robb is a long-standing opponent of labor and even worked with Ronald Reagan to crush the landmark PATCO strike in 1981, a defeat that set off decades of decline for unions.

The Trump administration pushed a rule that left over 8 million workers ineligible for overtime pay. He also promised to veto a bill that raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour, something that would have raised standards across the board and improved the bargaining power of all workers.

Trump demagogically cites the tariffs he imposed as evidence of his commitment to the industrial working class, especially his trade war with China. But in reality, the number of manufacturing jobs in the country at the end of Trump’s term was 154,000 fewer than when he took office. There were modest gains registered in the first year and a half of Trump’s presidency, but by 2019 this stalled and then collapsed in 2020 as Trump stood by and refused to take the decisive action necessary to save people’s jobs as the pandemic broke out.

Democrats cannot lead people’s resistance to Trump

Considering this mountain of evidence, it is remarkable that Trump has managed to cultivate an image for himself as a fighter for working people. This notion could have been easily debunked by the Democrats, but they have never wanted the anti-Trump movement to become a pro-worker movement. They are beholden to the same class of Wall Street bankers and corporate executives that Trump serves.

Instead, throughout the Trump administration and beyond, the Democrats sought to organize opposition to him on the basis of nearly anything except class. The temperament of Trump – that he was a rash and self-interested decision maker who embarrassed the U.S. ruling class on the world stage – was their true objection. While Democrats would also correctly point out that Trump is a racist who subscribes to every form of bigotry imaginable, they obscured the roots of this oppression by presenting it as a matter of personal prejudice isolated from the broader social order dominated by a tiny elite.

After Trump’s upset election victory in 2016, spontaneous mass protests broke out like the dramatic airport demonstrations that challenged the Muslim Ban. This independent anti-Trump movement was viewed as a major threat by the Democratic Party establishment, which had just crushed the first Bernie Sanders campaign that drew on much of the same grassroots energy. Also desperate for an explanation to excuse Hillary Clinton’s humiliating shock defeat to Trump, the Democratic Party along with their allies in the intelligence agencies created the “Russiagate” hysteria. Falsely claiming that Russian interference swung the election to Trump, they sought to rally people against his administration on the basis that he is insufficiently committed to the new Cold War policies that have now brought the world to the brink of all-out conflict between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. A movement organized according to the priorities of the Pentagon cannot have a progressive character.

As Trump carries out his presidential campaign, he will posture as the underdog taking on a corrupt establishment that wants to take him down. This is beyond dishonest. Trump is a battering ram the ultra-rich want to use to demolish working people’s rights.

To the extent that sectors of the ruling class do stand against Trump – and coalesce around an alternative far right figure like Ron DeSantis – it is an expression of their disdain for his practice of putting his own narrow interests ahead of the collective interests of the capitalist class. He is not a competent manager of their system. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal summed up this position on Nov. 9, “Mr. Trump had policy successes as President, including tax cuts and deregulation, but he has led Republicans into one political fiasco after another.”

The course of Trump’s new presidential campaign is completely unpredictable, as are the contours of the extremely volatile 2024 race overall. But one thing is a certainty: Trump is a sworn enemy of the working class.

https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-stat ... rationnews

I must disagree with this piece, I do not think that Trump is a tool of his class. Any benefits which came to the rich through the Trump regime were always and only because they benefited him. Like that great whooping tax cut, sure the entire class benefited from that but Trump was trying to bribe his peers to get them off his ass. And how long did that last? The MSM, the ruling class's mouthpiece, stayed all over him like a cheap suit except when he killed some foreigners...And his China sanctions probably cost many of his peers more quarterly than that one off windfall.

But his greatest sin was totally botching foreign policy, from the imperial pov. And it is this aspect of his regime which leads many non-Americans to see him at least somewhat favorably: There were no major wars launched by Trump, only a few spasmodic missile attacks and several attempts at reducing US overseas military presence which were scotched by intense Pentagon lobbying. As compared to Biden promoting WWIII..

Trump is always Trump First, the caricature and avatar of his class. The only people who believe he is for the 'little guy' is much of the 'lower middle class', very small business, mid-range managers and such. The very same strata constantly subject to being declassed by the grinding of monopoly. And coincidentally the spawning ground of nascent fascism. They think the people who work for them are no good worthless bums...These are the 'base' of the Republican Party who because they adhere to ruling class ideas must necessarily blame those 'below' for all their woes.

Gotta remember that around 50% of eligible voters in this country don't, and the vast majority of those are the real working class. They are waiting for the leadership which they know will never come from the Democratic Party. And only a Democratic Party so utterly useless to them might make cheap demagoguery seem an alternative.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Sun Jan 01, 2023 5:51 pm

<snip>

But we have long known the basic story. Trump is a bad businessman who seems to lose money on everything from casinos to golf clubs, with steaks and vodka and even a so-called university in between. So the main reason he often pays so little, if any, in taxes, is that he often reports a loss. He also lost other people’s money and got big tax breaks for that.

President Joe Biden deliverers a Christmas address in the East Room of the White House on December 22, 2022 in Washington, DC.
Opinion: The 10 political questions that could determine the future of US politics
Trump has benefitted from the huge head start given to him by his father Fred Trump, which continued to pay dividends with large capital gains from the sale of inherited property in 2018 (leading to Trump paying some taxes that year – just under $1 million). And like his father, Trump emerges as an aggressive and rather crude tax avoider, using standard tactics like putting the kids on the payroll, writing off personal expenses, overvaluing in-kind charitable contributions and so on. Friday’s release has already shown, for example, that Trump did not donate his presidential salary to charities in 2020, as he had promised – he made no charitable gifts at all in 2020, when he paid no taxes.

Trump’s taxes often push the lines of propriety, and his company’s sometimes cross them, as we now know from the Manhattan DA’s criminal conviction of Trump Organization.

Nothing new there.

But sometimes nothing is the story, like the dog that does not bark. So here are some nothings we can resolve to do something about in 2023.

Nothing is what Trump paid in federal income taxes in 2020, and in many other years. Given his massive and mysterious income tax refund of nearly $73 million in 2010, Trump may not have paid net positive income taxes in his life. And he is not alone. Many billionaires pay no income tax, and many do so perfectly legally.

The final report released by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, is photographed Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022.
Opinion: The January 6 report is a 'mirror test' for the American people
Nothing is also what the IRS did in regards to Trump’s tax returns during his first two years in office until the Democrats took power and forced them to do something starting in 2019.

(more...)

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/30/opinions ... index.html

It is as we stated 6-7 years ago, most of Trump's crimes are 'business as usual' for his peers, thus his nonchalance about these investigations:"Everybody does it."

Violations of justice, by any sane measure, but not of the laws of a capitalists nation built specifically for capitalists to thrive.

There is a major consistency of ruling classes throughout the ages of commodities: They refuse to pay any but the most insignificant of taxes and arrange their governments to that effect. And so the burden of government falls most heavily upon the 'middle' classes until that resource is depleted, and then upon the already poor workers Thus assuring the alienation of the workers from their governments, a prerequisite for those government's fall.

And please, please, please, let us not restrict this criticism to billionaires, that rightfully maligned top tier of the ruling class, but include a whole lot of these parasites, otherwise we engage in a most useless form of reformism, which will be thwarted before the sun sets.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 31, 2023 3:43 pm

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Trump indicted by New York grand jury
By AI HEPING in New York | China Daily Global | Updated: 2023-03-31 11:03

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A giant sign is seen displayed outside Manhattan Criminal Court after former US president Donald Trump's indictment by a Manhattan grand jury following a probe into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, in New York City, US, March 30, 2023. [Photo/Agencies]

A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict former US president Donald Trump on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star during the 2016 presidential campaign to silence claims of an extramarital sexual encounter.

Trump, 76, is the nation's first former president to face criminal charges.

Joe Tacopina, a lawyer for Trump, told The Associated Press he had been indicted. Tacopina said in a statement: "He did not commit any crime. We will vigorously fight this political prosecution in court."

The indictment, sought by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, isn't public. In New York, judges routinely keep charges under seal until defendants make their initial appearance in court.

Trump issued a statement upon news of the indictment: "This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history. From the time I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower, and even before I was sworn in as your President of the United States, the Radical Left Democrats the enemy of the hard-working men and women of this Country have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement."

Trump has called Bragg, who is black, "a racist" and an "animal" and said that his investigation was politically motivated.

In the weeks leading up to the indictment, Trump urged his supporters to protest on his behalf. Trump has threatened that there would be "potential death & destruction" if charges were filed against him in the case. He has said also that he wouldn't quit the 2024 presidential race if indicted.

The White House had no comment on Trump's indictment, spokesman Andrew Bates told USA Today.

Trump allies denounced the indictment, saying that it is an effort to stop the former president from being reelected.

US Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, tweeted one word Thursday evening in response to the news of Trump's indictment: "Outrageous."

Jordan is one of three Republican House committee chairs who called for testimony from Bragg. They said they have concerns Bragg's investigation of Trump would become "a politically motivated prosecutorial decision''.

The case in New York is unlikely to have any legal bearing on Trump's third presidential candidacy, even if he is ultimately convicted, according to legal experts, because the US Constitution imposes no requirement that candidates for the highest office have a clean record.

Trump was expected to surrender to authorities next week, according to a person familiar with the matter who wasn't authorized to discuss a matter that remained under seal, the AP reported.

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen says Trump told him to pay Stormy Daniels $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 election in exchange for her to keep quiet about the alleged sexual encounter with Trump. He has denied any affair with Daniels and said he followed Cohen's advice as his lawyer.

Cohen pleaded guilty to an array of federal felonies in 2018. Among them was a campaign-finance offense for the porn-star payment, as well as charges of lying to a bank and to Congress.

Cohen became a key witness, meeting with prosecutors nearly two dozen times, turning over emails, recordings and other evidence and testifying before the grand jury.

Cohen said in a written statement about the indictment: "Now that the charges have been filed, it is better for the case to let the indictment speak for itself. The two things I wish to say at this time is that accountability matters and I stand by my testimony and the evidence I have provided.

"I take no pride in issuing this statement," Cohen said, "and wish to also remind everyone of the presumption of innocence; as provided by the due process clause."

Cohen added that, "I do take solace in validating the adage that no one is above the law; not even a former president. Today's indictment is not the end of this chapter; but rather, just the beginning."

It may take several days for Trump to appear at the courthouse in Manhattan. The prosecutors and Trump's defense lawyers are expected to negotiate the terms of his surrender. Lawyers for Trump have said he will surrender to face the charges and fly from his Florida home.

Besides the New York case, a US Justice Department special counsel is investigating the handling of classified documents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and his efforts to reverse his election loss. And Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia is investigating attempts by Trump and his supporters to influence Georgia's 2020 election results.

The indictment raises questions about its impact on Trump and the GOP presidential race, including whether supporters will remain supporters and if Republicans will turn to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his leading political rival in polls, or someone else.

On Thursday, DeSantis issued a statement critical of the indictment.

"The (George) Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent," the statement said.

"Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda."

The billionaire financier Soros contributed to a group that supported Bragg, according to The New York Times.

In social media posts, Trump has attacked DeSantis over issues including Florida's public health restrictions early in the pandemic and the governor's perceived lack of loyalty to Trump, who gave DeSantis a key endorsement during his 2018 campaign.

DeSantis hasn't directly attacked Trump but has alluded to Trump's personal conduct.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... b7a5e.html

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The Big Problem With the Trump Indictment
BY MARK JOSEPH STERN
MARCH 30, 20236:08 PM

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Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg arrives at Manhattan Criminal Court March 29, 2023 in New York City. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Donald Trump was indicted on Thursday, according to a report in the New York Times, for his role in a hush money scheme prior to the 2016 election. The vote to indict, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, indicates that a grand jury found probable cause that Trump committed an offense, which must now be proved to a jury, while paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Bragg faces an uphill battle in this case, but the task before him is not impossible. Were the defendant not a former president in the midst of a reelection campaign, the prosecution probably wouldn’t draw much controversy. With Trump’s liberty on the line, however, the district attorney—really, the entire criminal legal system—is in for the fight of a lifetime. The Times reported that the specific charges would be announced in the coming days.

Bragg’s case against Trump is one of several moving through the courts today. It is the first to result in an indictment, though arguably the toughest to win. No former president has ever been indicted, and Trump is already in the midst of a reelection campaign. So any prosecutor taking on Trump begins at a disadvantage, facing widespread accusations of political persecution from the GOP. The problem for Bragg is not a mismatch between New York law and the misconduct alleged here; his reported theory of the case is defensible. The problem is that an extremely unusual set of circumstances gave rise to this alleged crime, denying Bragg the ability to fortify his charges with precedent and thereby leaving Trump ample room to question their legitimacy.

Here are the facts, as alleged: In 2016, Stormy Daniels contacted the National Enquirer through a representative to offer the story of her affair with Trump. The paper’s publisher, David Pecker, under a previous “catch and kill” agreement with the Trump campaign reportedly declined to run the story and the Trump campaign was made aware that Daniels was coming forward. At this point, days before the 2016 election, Michael Cohen—Trump’s longtime fixer—gave the porn actress $130,000 in hush money through a shell company. Trump gave Cohen $420,000 for his effort, but allegedly sought to conceal Cohen’s payments by listing them as legal expenses for a retainer agreement that did not exist. Trump allegedly falsified these records to prevent the public from learning that he, a presidential candidate, paid off an adult film actress to stop her from acknowledging their affair. It seems safe to say that the story might have hurt his chances in that election, which he won with a margin of fewer than 80,000 combined votes in three tipping point states.

Federal prosecutors later charged Cohen for his role in the scheme, and he pleaded guilty to various charges, including violation of campaign finance law. He admitted all of this information in the process, accusing Trump of directing his actions throughout the sordid episode. There is also an audio recording of Cohen and Trump discussing the details of the deal.

It had long been a curious feature of this case that its central participant, Donald Trump, faced no legal repercussions, while a supporting player, Michael Cohen, got a three-year prison sentence. No longer. Following a lengthy investigation, Bragg persuaded a grand jury that the former president, too, likely broke the law in paying off Daniels. (The gap between Trump’s alleged crime and indictment should not create any problems; the five-year statute of limitations for this offense paused when he was outside New York, as he was for most of this time.)

The district attorney’s theory of the case, as reported prior to the indictment, is coherent but somewhat complicated. Under New York law, it is a felony offense to falsify business records when this “intent to defraud” includes “an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” But the payment seemed to violate either state or federal election laws on transparency and campaign limits. Put all that together, and you have a crime under New York law: falsifying business records (by lying about the payments to Cohen) in the furtherance of another crime (the illegal contribution to Trump’s campaign).

Thursday’s indictment shows that Bragg has already convinced a grand jury that probable cause exists to believe Trump committed an offense related to this scheme. Winning at trial will be much harder, requiring the district attorney to prove each element of the crime to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. That would likely include proving Trump’s intent to contravene campaign finance law. Succeeding here will require Bragg to put Cohen on the stand and persuade a jury that he is more credible than the former president.

That’s a tall order, and not just because Cohen is a disgraced felon. Despite existing evidence of Trump’s extensive involvement in the Daniels scheme, we have not yet seen a smoking gun that proves his fraudulent intent (1) to falsify records in furtherance of (2) helping his campaign. It is notable, though, that the former parent company of the National Enquirer, American Media Inc., signed a non-prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice in 2018 in which it admitted that its role in the payoff scheme was “to ensure that a woman did not publicize damaging allegations about that candidate before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence that election.” The former CEO of AMI, Pecker, testified before the grand jury and will likely prove a critical witness in any jury trial.

Still, Bragg will likely need to prove both the falsifying records to help his campaign elements to secure a conviction, putting immense pressure on Cohen’s credibility. He’ll also need to refute Trump’s defense (already previewed on Truth Social) that Cohen (1) told him the payoff was legal and (2) he relied on this advice in good faith. Again, the resolution of this dispute may well hang on the jury’s determination of credibility between the two men.

Of course, the district attorney will have some say over who, exactly, sits on that jury. Both sides can strike up to 10 jurors for virtually any reason (though not a protected trait like race or sex). Bragg’s team may well use these peremptory strikes to exclude jurors who are sympathetic toward Trump, including Republican voters. The defense may, in turn, use its strikes to exclude Democratic voters. But the jury pool will be drawn from an overwhelmingly Democratic district. So it will be much easier for prosecutors to build an all-Democratic jury than for the defense to build an all-Republican jury.

Say Bragg lawfully establishes a sympathetic jury and secures a conviction. Then what? The crime, according to reports prior to the indictment, in question would be a class E felony, which carries a four-year maximum sentence of incarceration. New York judges are generally unlikely to impose a prison sentence on a first-time offender convicted of a non-violent class E felony. It’s a fair assumption that a judge will be especially hesitant to impose jail time on a former president. If the judge sentences Trump to any kind of confinement, house arrest is most plausible, since it could accommodate the Secret Service agents that the former president is entitled to retain under federal law.

To state the obvious, this is a difficult, high-stakes prosecution. That’s not because any one piece of the indictment is unprecedented; Trump’s own former finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty to falsifying business records in furtherance of fraud, the same charge that Trump likely now faces. Rather, the difficulty comes from a concatenation of unique factors, not least of all the involvement of an ex-president fighting to reclaim the White House. It is not easy to explain, in a single sentence, how paying off an adult film actor (which is not a crime in itself) set off a chain of events that culminating in a felony offense. The complexity and downright strangeness of the case leaves room for Republicans to delegitimize the prosecution and muddy the public’s understanding of Trump’s alleged offense.

Other pending cases involving Jan. 6, classified records, and election interference are much more straightforward. Perhaps Bragg’s move will embolden other prosecutors to bring charges related to the former president’s alleged misconduct in these arenas. If so, that domino effect may be the case’s most important legacy.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... enges.html

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Plant the leader
March 31, 4:32 p.m

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One of the reasons for the intensification of the campaign of attempts to put Trump.
2024 Republican Primary Poll Results

• Trump - 52%
• DeSantis - 26%
• Pence - 7%
• Haley - 5%
• Cheney - 3%
• T. Scott - 2%
• Abbott - 1%
• Noem - 1 %
• Pompeo - 1%
• Yonkin - 1%
• Ramaswami - 1%

By the way, the ultimate Trump-DeSantis tandem cannot be ruled out.

At the same time, according to current polls, Trump defeats Biden in the elections. There is something to worry about.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8264807.html

Google Translator

Well, I guess ya can't expect a Russian blogger to understand the nuances of US politics, society and ruling class machinations, though I'd expect more from an avowed Marxist. On the face of it Trump tried to play nice with Russia while Biden pushed Russia into war. The Russians ain't fools and realize that Trump is a cheap-jack hustler out for his own petty gain, but then again, so is Biden, given the 'Hunter' affair. So that's a wash and what's left is relations with Russia. The latter part of the Trump regime saw a shift away from the friendlier view, this after serious political and policy pressure from all quarters. So yeah, given a dichotomy, and that's all we got in these parts, the Rus pull for the Orange Man.

What the author of the above piece doesn't 'get' is that US policy, at the higher levels, has been unitary since about 1945 and the party in the White House adds a little nuance at best to the policy of hegemony. Trump didn't 'get' that either, thus his bumpy ride in foreign policy, and that's why I believe he will not be prez again, come hell or high water. They tried to house break that spoiled, recalcitrant rich asshole but it only halfway worked when they 'showed him the paper'. So they ain't letting him in the (White) House no more.

Trump's current woes in New York are small change, nothing compared to his legal thefts. And while it may improve the over-all trump negatives from the Democratic view it will probably not move the needle much among the Republican base unless they got a lot more than this. I still think the Dems would rather face Trump than anyone else the Republicans might nominate because they ain't got nothin'. A yappy little dog could beat Biden but Trump, probably not.

Things could change, the economy, Ukraine...Trump has been talking isolationism, which cannot endear his to the imperial policy people but might strike a chord with the greater public if things go south for Ukraine. So it seems the trick is to keep Trump out of the White House (where he would only muck things up, again) but at the same time get the warmonger elected despite himself. If Desantis gets bellicose about Russia that could solve the imperialists' problem....

Trump must be allowed to run seriously crippled with no chance at all or not be allowed to run, period. The latter would probably be more difficult and less desirable than the former, which could still be tricky. Egomaniac that he is, the former might be acceptable to him in the delusional hope of inciting a real insurrection next time. It would be very gratifying....
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 02, 2023 6:13 pm

Former US President Trump incited a right-wing insurrection. But that’s not why he’s being indicted

A Manhattan grand jury has indicted Trump in connection to hush money that he allegedly paid to cover up an affair. This does not even scratch the surface of his many crimes

March 31, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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Rioters storm the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 (Photo: Tyler Merbler)

On March 30, former US president Donald Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury based on charges levied against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. These charges are in connection to hush money that Trump allegedly paid to pornstar Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair when Trump was first running for president. This money could constitute an illegal donation to Trump’s campaign.

Trump is likely to be arraigned on Tuesday. While he could be arrested, it is most likely that he will surrender himself to avoid a spectacle. However, people in the US will see a mugshot of a former president for the first time in history.

Although sitting US presidents are legally immune to indictment, former presidents are not, however, a former US president has never been indicted for a crime. US leaders have committed many crimes, but for over 200 years, US presidents have been essentially above the law. This has just changed.

However, it is notable that of all of Trump’s many criminal acts, it is this relatively minor infraction that could land him in prison. Moreover, Trump can still continue his campaign for president—even from prison.

Donald Trump incited a riot on January 6, 2021, when he claimed that the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden was “stolen” from him and riled up a crowd of his supporters who proceeded to carry out a deadly attack on the US Capitol building. While a few insurrectionists with no political power have faced some legal consequences for their actions, the most powerful architects of January 6, such as Trump, were never held accountable.


Trump, during his time in office, oversaw numerous operations in direct violation of international law and the UN Charter such as the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, the attempted invasion of Venezuela, the backing of the ultra-right coup in Bolivia, the declaration of Jerusalem the capital of Israel, the escalation of sanctions against countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, and the crushing of the aspirations of the people of Palestine, Western Sahara, and Yemen.

Trump also oversaw a vast redistribution of wealth to the already ultra-wealthy through the 2017 tax cuts for the rich, which cost the nation at least USD 1.5 trillion. These are public funds that one could argue were effectively stolen from the people of the US, most of whom have difficulty paying weekly expenses. His delayed pandemic response, in which he undermined his own government’s efforts to contain the virus, made the United States the leader in COVID-19 deaths globally, a title the nation still holds.

This list still only scratches the surface of Trump’s crimes against working and poor people across the globe. For these, he faces no threat of arrest. Although former US presidents are no longer de facto above the law that governs the rest of the country, the question remains if Trump is truly being brought to justice.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/03/31/ ... -indicted/

I would not privilege the events of Jan 062021 with the descriptive of 'insurrection', rather it was a mere riot. As the arch-scumbag John Bolton said, 'he knows something about inciting and carrying out insurrections and if that was one it was the sorriest, sloppiest imaginable.' There was a lot of wishful thinking but damn little execution. competent or otherwise, on all parts. Fear of the Right should not have us repeating Dem memes.

'Progressives,' while piling on during the media program of melding Trump and Russia into a unitary evil, helped to pave the way to the war on Russia.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 03, 2023 2:13 pm

Skepticism voiced over Trump indictment
By HENG WEILI in New York | China Daily Global | Updated: 2023-04-03 09:50


As former US president Donald Trump prepared to be arraigned Tuesday on a New York indictment, a former US attorney general expressed reservations Sunday about the effect on the legal system.

Former US attorney William Barr, who had a falling out with Trump over the latter's challenging the 2020 presidential election results, predicted the indictment would set off a wave of politically motivated prosecutions across the country.

"The real danger of this thing over the long term," he said on Fox News Sunday, is that "we now have thousands" of district attorneys nationally who because "the Rubicon has been crossed, any one of them can find federal candidates or federal officeholders and so forth, can find some state law they want to pursue the person on and get themselves into the national political arena".

"I do think that this is a watershed moment, and I don't think it's going to end up good for the country," Barr added.

Also, two senators who voted to impeach Trump over the Jan 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol were skeptical of the indictment.

"It's just a very, very sad day for America," said Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia, in an interview on Fox News Sunday.

"Especially when people are maybe believing that the rule of law or justice is not working the way it's supposed to and it's biased — we can't have that," Manchin said. "But on the other hand, no one's above the law. But no one should be targeted by the law."

Trump, 76, is expected to be arraigned, fingerprinted and photographed at a Manhattan courthouse on Tuesday as he becomes the first former US president to face criminal charges. The indictment stems from hush money paid to a porn star before the 2016 presidential election.

Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who also voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges stemming from Jan 6, questioned the prosecution.

"It's wrong. I'll put it this way — no one should be the target of the law," Cassidy said on Fox News Sunday. "This seems to be more about the person than about the crime."

Joe Tacopina, an attorney for Trump, said Sunday that he expects more details surrounding the arraignment to be resolved on Monday and noted that the Secret Service, which protects former presidents, also has a role to play on Tuesday.

"All the Tuesday stuff is still very much up in the air, other than the fact that we will very loudly and proudly say, ‘Not guilty,'" Tacopino told CNN's State of the Union program.

"Hopefully, this will be as painless and classy as possible for a situation like this," Tacopino added. He said it was unlikely there will be a "perp walk", in which an individual who has been charged is paraded in front of the news media, because of security concerns.

Before the indictment, the grand jury heard evidence about a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels has said she was paid to keep silent about a sexual encounter she had with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied any such encounter.

Word of the indictment surfaced on Thursday, although the specific charges against Trump arising from the investigation led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, have not been made public.

"We're not doing anything at the arraignment because that would be showmanship and nothing more — because we haven't even seen the indictment," Tacopina said.

Tacopina said that Trump's lawyers will review the indictment once it is made public and will look at "every potential issue" to challenge.

"And of course I very much anticipate a motion to dismiss coming because there's no law that fits this," Tacopina added.

A court official said the arraignment is scheduled for 2:15 pm on Tuesday. The official said the judge has asked both sides to submit their positions on whether cameras and video should be allowed in the courtroom.

Trump plans to deliver remarks later Tuesday at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, at 8:15 pm, his office said Sunday.

Trump, who launched his 2024 presidential candidacy in November, plans to fly to New York on Monday from Mar-a-Lago and spend the night at Trump Tower in Manhattan before his court appearance, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters last week.

He is expected to appear before Justice Juan Merchan of the criminal court in Manhattan. Merchan also presided over a criminal trial last year in which Trump's real estate company was convicted of tax fraud, though Trump himself was not charged.

Trump on Friday lashed out at Merchan, saying the judge hates him and treated the Trump Organization "viciously".

Tacopina, however, said Sunday: "I have no issue with this judge whatsoever. He has a very good reputation."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... b7ff4.html

Yeah, it's harassment, however richly deserved. Had the Chumpster been viewed favorably by that portion of his peers who control the press this might have been buried like the Hunter Biden story.They'll be stretching out these accusations from now until the election like a trail of breadcrumbs for the so-called independents to follow into the voting booth. I don't think the Rs can prevent Trump from running if he wants to. Even if they somehow deny him the nomination the egomaniac will likely run as an independent.

Seems like just about every scenario spells doom for the Republicans but the Dems shouldn't get to happy about that. A broken duopoly will leave their erstwhile base with no one to vote against. And without that holding one's nose to vote for the purported 'lesser evil' becomes a lot more challenging.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 04, 2023 3:05 pm

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The indictment of Donald Trump: A politically bankrupt diversion
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on March 31, 2023 by Joseph Kishore (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted Apr 04, 2023)

Donald Trump is expected to turn himself in on Tuesday for arraignment on indictments handed down by a New York grand jury, reportedly in connection to payouts made on Trump’s behalf to a former porn star. The first-ever charges against a former president of the United States mark a new stage in the degradation of American politics.

There are no issues of democratic import in the indictment. Rather, the Democratic Party has chosen to focus on the flimsiest and most inconsequential matter possible. Trump is being accused of falsifying the nature of payments to the porn star, Stormy Daniels, made in 2016 before he was president, which were channeled through Trump’s longtime “fixer”-turned-government witness, Michael Cohen.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is reportedly planning on leveraging this charge, which is a misdemeanor that has exceeded the statute of limitations, into a felony by arguing that the business records were falsified to cover up an illegal donation to Trump’s campaign, namely the money from Cohen to pay off Daniels.

The tenuous and convoluted character of the charges has promoted concern within sections of the Democratic Party itself. The Washington Post in its editorial on Friday worried that “of the long list of alleged violations, the likely charges on which a grand jury in New York state voted to indict [Trump] are perhaps the least compelling.”

The Democrats’ decision to focus on this issue will serve to strengthen the fascistic wing of the Republican Party and even provide Trump with the opportunity to posture as a martyr. Trump is already denouncing the “political witch-hunt,” while Republicans are rallying around the former president. Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, whom the Democrats have upheld as a paragon of democracy, denounced the indictment as an “outrage.”

The indictment has nothing to do with the many grave crimes of which Trump is clearly guilty—above all, the January 6, 2021 fascistic insurrection that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 elections and establish a presidential dictatorship. The Post notes that “a failed prosecution over the hush-money payment could put” all other investigations into Trump’s actions “in jeopardy.”

Indeed, this may be the intention on the part of a section of the Democratic Party establishment. It would certainly conform with the stated aim of the Biden administration to “look forward” rather than backward, as part of Biden’s efforts to establish a bipartisan consensus for the escalation of the U.S.-NATO war against Russia and preparations for war against China.

During Trump’s presidency, the entire approach of the Democratic Party was a combination of subservience and complicity. Its opposition to Trump was centered almost entirely on matters of foreign policy, in particular on Ukraine and the demand for a more aggressive policy against Russia—the focus of the first impeachment of Trump in 2019.

The Democrats responded to the January 6 coup with fecklessness and cover-up. After the coup failed, not through any action on their part, the immediate response of the Biden administration was to exculpate the Republican Party and its leaders and to ignore entirely the role of sections of the military and police in the coup.

The second impeachment of Trump in February 2021, based on the charge of incitement of insurrection, was a pro forma affair held over four days, with the Democrats not even bothering to call witnesses. The various congressional hearings into the fascistic coup, whatever facts and details they have revealed, have gone nowhere. In the end, only minor bit players have been prosecuted.

The Democrats turned the focus first on “state secrets,” in relation to allegations that Trump took classified documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago resort, and now on charges of hush money paid out to suppress a sex scandal. These issues appeal to two of the main components of the base of the Democratic Party: the military-intelligence-state apparatus and affluent layers of the middle class that are relentlessly focused on issues of racial and gender identity.

The indictment of Trump for the payout to Daniels has nothing to do with educating the population about the real dangers posed by the fascistic transformation of the Republican Party. Rather, it diverts attention from issues of deadly seriousness into a political circus. The “national debate” is now to be focused, with the assistance of the media, on whether or not Trump paid off an actress to cover up an affair.

While a trial of Trump on this basis may energize the upper-middle class base of the Democratic Party, the working class will view it with indifference. The Republicans will exploit the obvious hypocrisy on such matters by the Democrats, whose own leaders, including Clinton, were involved in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

While the Democrats have sought to maintain “bipartisan” unity on the basis of war, behind the indictment are ongoing and intense divisions within the ruling class, accelerated by a series of crises facing American capitalism—economic, geopolitical and internal.

The American presidency has been wracked by crisis for more than half a century, extending back at least to the assassination of John F. Kennedy 60 years ago. As the White House is the cockpit of the capitalist national security state and imperialist war planning, it has been the focal point of conspiracies against democratic rights (i.e., the Watergate crisis of 1972-74 and the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986-87) and bitter conflicts within the ruling class itself. The Republicans made use of a sex scandal in their failed attempt to remove Clinton from the White House.

Both the Watergate crisis and the Iran-Contra scandal were followed by extensive public hearings and even the criminal indictments of high-ranking figures in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, even though the presidents were exempted from the legal consequences of their crimes. There has been no comparable investigation into the January 6 coup, which was at a far higher level of criminality than Nixon’s involvement in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and Reagan’s sanctioning of the violation of a law passed by Congress.

Issues raised in the January 6 coup have the potential to expose not only the criminality of Trump but the extent of a far broader anti-democratic conspiracy, which reached into the highest echelons of the military. The Democrats have been opposed to this because they are far more fearful of the development of popular opposition from below than the conspiracies of fascists that dominate the Republican Party.

The working class should not be misled by this politically bankrupt diversion from the central issues of war, social inequality and the growth of political reaction. Regardless of the outcome of the indictment, the fascistic conspiracies will continue.

The antidote to the filth and rot of the entire political system is the development of the class struggle, which is emerging powerfully in the United States and throughout the world. The Biden administration, wracked by crisis, leans on the Republicans for support in the prosecution of war abroad and the suppression of the class struggle at home.

The Socialist Equality Party opposes the fascistic policies of Trump and the Republican Party on the basis of the independent organization of the working class, in opposition to both the Democrats and the Republicans, and the fight for a socialist alternative to capitalism.

https://mronline.org/2023/04/04/the-ind ... ald-trump/

It is typical of trotskyists that they start out with a perfectly good premise and then twist it into it's opposite. The indictment is lame but if it's purpose is to wound but not kill the Chumpster's 2024 campaign it makes a little more sense. This, and the expected follow-ups effect upon the electorate will not be upon party partisan but rather the mushy middle, the so-called independents.

And then we get this fascist coup palaver, straight out of the Dem playbook. This is effectively an endorsement of the Dems as the lesser evil, an insidious mis-characterization and the comfort zone of the sheepdog Sanders and his pups. How does that advance socialism? The Democratic Party must be abandoned by right thinking folks post-haste. The longer we wait the worse it gets.

************

Lock him up!
April 3, 2023 Stephen Millies

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A Trump campaign billboard in Houston was corrected by anonymous artists in 2020.

Should Donald Trump be prosecuted on charges filed by the Manhattan DA? When two million poor people are in prison, how can Trump not be put on trial?

Trump should have been jailed decades ago. He conspired with his daddy―Ku Klux Klan supporter Fred Trump―to keep Black people out of his family-owned apartment complexes.

In 1980, Donald Trump hired Polish immigrants to demolish the building on Manhattan’s posh Fifth Avenue that became the site of his flagship skyscraper, Trump Tower. They were given almost no safety equipment to remove deadly asbestos and paid just $5 per hour while working 12-hour shifts. Some must have died later of mesothelioma, a deadly lung cancer.

In 1989, Trump ran full-page newspaper ads demanding the return of the death penalty in New York state. This was in response to the arrest of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise on charges of raping and beating a woman jogging in New York City’s Central Park.

False confessions were coerced by police from these five Black and Latinx youth. They spent years in prison for crimes they did not commit before being exonerated. Trump’s racist campaign helped frame them.

When he announced his presidential campaign on June 16, 2015, Trump denounced Mexican people as “rapists.” One day later a white fascist murdered nine Black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church.

Trump’s racist rhetoric promotes fascist violence. White anti-racist Heather Heyer was murdered by a Trump supporter during the 2017 neo-Nazi mobilization in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump’s response to Heather’s death was to claim there were “fine people on both sides,” meaning both the Nazis and their opponents.

Trump bombed and killed thousands in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. As president he helped starve children in Yemen while keeping immigrant children in cages in the United States.

By refusing to take absolutely necessary public health measures―as was done in the socialist People’s Republic of China, socialist Cuba and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam―Trump condemned hundreds of thousands to die of COVID-19. At the same time, he promoted anti-Asian hate that led to the 2021 Atlanta spa murders.

Trump wanted to declare martial law to suppress the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Every killer cop knows Trump is on their side.

The Jan. 6, 2021, fascist insurrection in the U.S. Capitol that attempted to overturn the presidential election was instigated by Trump.

None of these crimes will be covered in the New York indictment. They should be. It should be remembered, however, that the gangster Al Capone wasn’t convicted of murder but of not paying his income tax.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Black man, has been the target of racist attacks from Trump supporters. The only reason Trump was charged with anything was because of the deep, justified hostility of millions of poor and working people.

This is particularly so in the Asian, Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities. Trump supporters are now targeting transgender people.

Some may question whether indicting Trump will drive more Republican voters to the polls. Trial or no trial, only by mobilizing the power of the people can all the Trumps be defeated.

Never forget that Kalief Browder, a Black youth, spent over two years in New York City’s notorious Rikers Island prison simply because he couldn’t make bail. After being released, without being convicted, he was driven by the cruelty in Rikers to hang himself.

If Kalief Browder can be jailed, so can the super-rich racist pig Donald Trump.

Jail Trump!

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2023/ ... ck-him-up/

Is that you, Nancy Pelosi?

We all know what a criminal scumbag he is(tho most of his crimes legal in capitalism), but should we be doing the Dem's legwork?

When are 'leftists' going to call for the jailing of Joe & Hunter for their Ukrainian scam? Much less for inciting the war in Ukraine?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 05, 2023 2:57 pm

Trump Derangement Syndrome Returns
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 05 Apr 2023

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Donald Trump and his defense team at his arraignment. (Photo: Seth Winig AP)

If democrats were smart, Donald Trump would be a former disgraced president, forgotten by all but his most ardent admirers. But they aren't smart and they may have given him a political resurrection.

Donald Trump is back in the news. He is facing a 34-count indictment for paying people to be silent about his private life. What should be fodder for the gossip pages has instead resulted in criminal charges, an historic precedent for a former president. The amount of news coverage is surpassed only by the level of glee created by scenes of his arrest.

Trump is certainly a polarizing figure, more so perhaps than any other president. His unexpected win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 resulted in trauma for millions of people who have never recovered and they still allow the man they dislike to live rent free in their heads.

As this columnist has pointed out, neither Trump nor any other president has ever faced consequences for their worst offenses, crimes against humanity. George Bush invaded Iraq, Barack Obama destroyed Libya. Both men enjoy popularity and have no reason to fear any kin of censure for killing thousands of people. Trump also committed such crimes in office, such as killing up to 40,000 Venezuelans through his sanctions regime, and assassinating Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. As with his predecessors, those crimes go unpunished.

Trump’s prosecution is obviously political. He is charged with falsifying business records , which can be treated as a misdemeanor but Manhattan’s district attorney says he sought to avoid taxes and influence an election, allowing him to charge Trump with felonies. The Justice Department already declined to charge Trump with election interference. It seems that District Attorney Alvin Bragg looked for something, anything, that would rise to the level of a felony charge. One doesn’t need to be a Trump supporter to conclude that thumbs were on the scales of justice.

The arraignment was a typical media and political circus. Conservative Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene came to protest and proclaimed Trump’s innocence, while Congressional Black Caucus member Jamaal Bowman showed up for the purpose of shouting her down. Bowman yelled that Greene should, “Take her ass back to Washington,” and added with rhetorical flourish, “Do something about gun violence. Do something about affordable housing. Do something about childhood poverty.” The same could be said of Bowman, who along with his colleagues does nothing to address any of those issues, and who refuse to confront Joe Biden who was marketed as “the most progressive president since FDR,” while emergency SNAP nutritional benefits end and millions may be thrown off of Medicaid , as the pandemic era automatic enrollment ends.

Bowman and others of his ilk make far too much of the impact of the Trump indictment calling it, “... one step toward accountability,” and adding, “... America needs a reckoning and I think Trump is essential to that reckoning, when you consider his rhetoric, his behavior and his policies.” This country certainly needs a reckoning, for many reasons, but there is nothing about Trump being criminally charged for offenses that had nothing to do with his office, that addresses the terrible wrongs that are committed by this system every day.

Trump has already announced he is running for president again. The charges don’t prevent him from running, winning or serving again. The republican establishment want to be rid of him but they are caught in a bind because republican voters are still Trump supporters. He could win the nomination again and given the apathy and disappointment created by the phony “most progressive president since FDR,” Trump could win again. His case may not go to trial before the November 2020 election and we face the prospect of a presidential candidate campaigning while facing charges. Trump has upended the system before and he could do so again.

The phenomenon known as Trump Derangement Syndrome has returned with a vengeance. People who should know better are applauding his legal troubles, completely forgetting that he was counted out in 2016, only to emerge victorious with the help of Democratic Party incompetence and overconfidence.

If democrats want to be rid of Trump they should have done a better job of meeting the people’s needs. So-called progressives like Congressman Bowman should have taken on their party leadership and made demands on behalf of the people they claim to care so much about. But Bowman and others went down the line with Biden and were silent as he refused to do anything about student loan debt and helped him to undermine railroad workers by preventing them from going on strike.

Instead of action we get posturing outside of a courthouse and going along to get along with their discredited leadership. Actually they are all discredited, not fit for any purpose other than trying to fool the public.

As for Trump, he has been politically resurrected by cynical forces. The latest polls show him leading his main challenger, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. We all deserve better than Trump or Biden too for that matter, but those working to get rid of Trump may have ensured that the 45th president will be the 47th as well.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/trump ... -returns-0

The Dems have nothing to fear from the masses and therefore see no need to lift a finger in meeting their needs. And because of that they need Trump in order to give people a reason to vote for them. Their best case scenario is Trump getting the Republican nomination after a grueling fight with De Santis which leaves them both diminished along with a non-stop train of legal/court issues which alienate the 'middle'. Otherwise Joe or whichever shome the Dems run is toast

For the Dem leadership another Trump regime is probably better than another Republican not so polarizing. However, the folks who run imperialist policy on the day-by-day won't have that, they got big wheels turning and don't want that amateur mucking things up for them.

Whoppers of Boss Tweet...
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence 05 Apr 2023

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(Photo: Reuters)
Whoppers of Boss Tweet…

A thief
a thug
Clown in a rug
A tweet
deceit
A lie
a cheat—
Embellish, embroider:
a lying disorder…

A myth
a fable
a bit unstable
Flimflam, claptrap
bunkum—bull crap!
An empty wagon
a puffed up dragon…

A whopper
a fib
You peeped
from your crib!
A sham
a fake
a major ‘mistake—’
Pathological lying
false-flag flying…

A grope
a trope
Bad jokes
breaststrokes
A grope of the crotch—
another ‘man notch’
where they debauch
over water and scotch…

A trumped up
story— cock-and-bull
glory
A foot in the mouth
for strategy south
Pie in the sky—
a barefaced lie
A pig in disguise
fooling some eyes…
Playing fast and loose
with Jim Jones Juice
A masquerade—
a Nazi parade
A fake ‘great nation’
same plantation

A bug in the hall
a fly on the wall
A great big whale
an ongoing tale
A parade in July
another big lie
A wink of an eye—
enough outcry?

A thief
a thug
Clown in a rug
A tweet
deceit
A lie
a cheat—
Time for feet
in the street
Sustaining…
…street heat!!

Poet’s note: Inspired by the great Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March”

© 2017. Raymond Nat Turner,The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/whoppers-boss-tweet-0

"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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