Saturday, January 14, 2017

Topsy-Turvy Duopoly

The fact that Donald Trump is a very dangerous man shouldn't distract us from the naked truth that corporate Democrats and their surrogates are trying their damnedest to overthrow his election by every slimy method at their disposal. By aligning themselves with the de facto fourth branch of government alternately known as the Deep State, the Surveillance State and the Intelligence Community, they're actually accomplishing the feat of attacking a right-wing demagogue from the very far right.

You'd almost think that they were repudiating democracy (such as still even exists) itself.

So you have to ask yourself: Just who, exactly, is the fascist thug in this mix? The whiff of beer hall putsch disguised as a Champagne brunch is wafting up the Potomac.

While the "socially liberal" oligarchic faction pretends to battle the sadistic oligarchic faction (step right up and buy our chic pink Pussycat hats for the big anti-Trump march, ladies!) ordinary people schlepping to their temporary service gigs will get caught in the crossfire. 

 The ruling class racketeers on both sides of the Uniparty are ignoring social and economic problems in favor of joining forces to scapegoat a third oligarchic faction named Vladimir Putin. They accuse him, with little to no evidence, of personally ordering the "hacking" of the presidential election and costing Hillary Clinton her prize of Empress of the Free World. By gluing the national attention, once again, to an Enemy Over There rather than toward the very real class war enemies over here, they're doing nothing less than preparing our hearts and minds for World War Three. Thousands of NATO (American) troops are massing on the Russian border even as we speak. From The Guardian: 
But their arrival was not universally applauded. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We perceive it as a threat. These actions threaten our interests, our security. Especially as it concerns a third party building up its military presence near our borders. It’s [the US], not even a European state.”
The Kremlin may hold back on retaliatory action in the hope that a Donald Trump presidency will herald a rapprochement with Washington. Trump, in remarks during the election campaign and since, has sown seeds of doubt over the deployments by suggesting he would rather work with than confront Putin.

But on Thursday Nato officials played down Trump’s comments, saying they hoped and expected that he would not attempt to reverse the move after he became president on 20 January. 
 That prediction was reinforced by Trump’s proposed defence secretary, James Mattis, and his proposed secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who backed Nato during Senate confirmation hearings.
As we have (apparently not) learned from history, it will be much harder to get out of a war than it will be to start one. And given that both the USA and Russia are nuclear weapons powerhouses, this could indeed be the war to end all wars. By whispering in Trump's ear that his alleged pal Putin has been spying on him, the "intelligence community" and their political enablers are trying to provoke (or blackmail) him into going along with plans for corporate hegemony put in place by the "defense industry" long before his shocking victory over Clinton. It seems to matter not a whit to Democrats that military men like Mattis are supposedly not allowed to lead the "Defense" Department out of a very real concern that we might end up with a domestic military coup.

How to persecute a persecutor who flits from idea to idea to idea with no regard for facts or respect for "norms?"  How do you solve a problem like Maria? Many a thing they know they'd like to tell him (and they have certainly tried to "brief" him, given his reputed short attention span.) How do you catch a wavy comb-over on the sand?

And he's been warned, as Chuck Schumer so elegantly put it on national TV, that the Deep State will exact its revenge "six ways from Sunday" if Trump doesn't go along to get along... with his actual life.

So while the liberal corporate Democrats are aligning with the unaccountable authoritarian surveillance/war state and attacking Trump from the right, those of us with a more socialist perspective find ourselves in the weird position of defending Donald Trump from the left via our criticism of liberal overreach.

For example: why on earth would a Democratic president be gifting Trump with such unprecedented extensions of the Authoritarian State if liberals are really so terrified of him? Obama quietly signed off on creation of a global/domestic propaganda bureau just before Christmas. Its unprecedented scope and funding would make even Joseph Goebbels green with brown-shirted envy. And in his most recent weekend dump on his sprint to the finish-line, Obama signed a terrifying order allowing the NSA to begin sharing all our personal email and telephone communications with all 17 police state ("intelligence community") agencies, including the CIA and the FBI. 

Given the current Democratic establishment's posturing over FBI Director James Comey's own alleged coup against Hillary Clinton, you'd think they'd be enraged by Obama's action. However, this latest blockbuster of a power grab has basically gone under the radar, thanks to the current epidemic of Russophobia making all the important people break out in a total body rash. So, do be sure to read Glenn Greenwald's piece on it at The Intercept if you haven't already done so.

Meanwhile, I have a sinking feeling that people are still making the mistake of underestimating Trump. He will no doubt use the ongoing manufactured mass hysteria to his own distinct and powerful advantage. After all, if even thinking people believe that he's got a valid point about being persecuted by a corrupt surveillance state, he's won half the public relations battle already.

Although some if not most of the comparisons of Trump to Adolf Hitler are overblown, there are eerie similarities in the political climates of both Weimar Germany and End-Stage Capitalistic 21st Century America. People are out of work or underpaid. Xenophobia is simmering while global demagogues suddenly made hate not only politically correct, but something to be encouraged. Democratic political systems institute austerity for impoverished people in order to pay off onerous IMF/World Bank debt and bail out banksters and CEOs, while billionaires off-shore their record wealth in hidden tax-free accounts. Income disparity soars to unprecedented levels.

 The left wing becomes the whipping boy of both right-wingers and corporate centrists. "Moderate" leaders in both Weimar and America barred leftist candidates from public discourse and coverage before the elections, of Hitler and Trump respectively. Intellectuals and pundits nearly all prophesied, regarding both Trump and Hitler, that such an extremist clown would never last. They yawned when Hitler became chancellor. They similarly predict that Trump will be impeached and kicked out of office before the year is over.

All it took for Hitler to gain sole dictatorial power after a series of perfectly legal democratic victories was one traumatic event: the burning of the Reichstag in his first year as Chancellor. He was able to unite all of Germany against one scapegoat. You guessed it: Communist Russia. Jews had always been the enemy, but blaming the arson on a Marxist, with absolutely no evidence, was pretty much the same thing in Adolf's fevered little brain.

All it might take for Trump to, if not seize dictatorial power, at least enjoy a mass uptick in his public approval ratings and the strengthening of his personality cult, would be for a terrorist attack or other catastrophe to occur within our borders. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have certainly paid forward some of the most extreme and violent executive/deep state powers in American history for him to play around with and shoot up with his own designer steroids. Americans have been programmed all too well to see threats and dangers wherever we're told to look.

It certainly hasn't helped the weakened Democratic Party's cause to continue demonizing both the Sanders/Warren wing and the independent leftist media as being just as dangerous and extremist as Trump. They're ironically employing the same tactics as Joseph Goebbels did in Nazi Germany. In their fevered campaign of equating fascism with socialism, they are only stifling dissent and solidifying further our pre-existing condition of obedience, repression, and fear. 

Influential centrist pundit Jonathan Chait is a case in point. As Timothy Shenk describes Chait's "dead center" Cold War 2.0 straw-manning worldview,
Chait has been less successful at interpreting the left, which in his analysis becomes an undifferentiated mass of rabid Marxists, politically correct ideologues, and postmodern academics. Rather than attacking these distinct factions at their strongest points, he lumps them together as products of the illiberal left, and then takes fire at the caricature he has drawn. “Marxist theory does not care about individual rights,” his readers learn, while, “Political correctness borrows its illiberal model of political discourse from Marxism”—as if Marxist theory and political correctness are buddies who meet up for drinks to plot the demise of free speech.

 Such topsy-turvy "right is left, and left is right" centrist propaganda tactics have historically not ended well.

9 comments:

annenigma said...

Topsy-turvy indeed. Dimwitted Democrats claim that Hillary lost the election because of Putin, but they also claim Hillary actually won by 3 million votes. That Putin is a genius, swaying just a few key states. If the Democrats keep up their mass psychosis, I think they'll end up destroying their own Party. I hope they do.

Why would Obama give Trump even more police state power if he feared him? Maybe because he knows Trump will never become President, or that he'll not last long enough to do any harm, or he knows, as Schumer and everyone else does, that the Deep State is in charge and plays dirty. Talk about a chilling effect - as in the Deep Chill. Not surprisingly, no-drama no-guts Obama gets an A+ on his secret Deep State report card, locked away forever like the Torture Report, the legal rationale for targeted assassination, etc.

All the scare talk about Trump being treasonous and dangerous is a flashback to the Kennedy era for me. I was young, but I recall hearing the hatred for Kennedy and the claims he was dangerous. JFK was also a President who spoke about breaking up the CIA, although their bad blood was after he was elected - or after he allegedly stole the election in Chicago. Feels eerily familiar.

In the years since then, just as Eisenhower warned, the MIC has grown and consolidated into a destructive, global monster we now call the Deep State.

Trump would be wise to maintain good relations with Russia/Putin. After all, it was Russia that futilely warned us, multiple times, about the young man who planned and successfully carried out the Boston Marathon bombing.

Trump's life, as well as our country's safety, might depend on good relations with Russia. Who better to know what our Deep State is up to? Trump might get a lifesaving tip-off someday.

Jay–Ottawa said...

If I keep reading the papers and the blogs (cough), I'll only get more depressed in 2017. So I've taken to looking for silver linings wherever I can find them. That's my New Year's resolution because everybody said I was getting them down after I'd, unintentionally of course, crank up the downer machine by saying: "Have you heard that …? Then followed the news, real or faux but always awful. This year I've resolved to keep hoping that, after President Hope leaves office, I'll take his place and give you reason to keep hoping. Expect a lot of links to happy sites in the future from yours truly.

So here goes: Trump has promised to make millions of jobs by spending billions of dollars on infrastructure improvements. Hey !!! May that program succeed mightily and serve as a substitute for the anticipated, and in some quarters much desired, major terrorist attack (real or faux) on the homeland, which is needed, they say, to boost both White House approval ratings and dictatorial powers.

Unless Trump finds a way to pay for those jobs on infrastructure, economists say the debt will rise and US will then suffer inflation. I assume an economist will make that clear to Trump and that he finds a way, other than taxing the rich of course, to find the money to offset the cost of putting people back to work. Good times (employment) increase the amount of taxes taken in from wages, but will that be enough?

Well ... Trump might find more money in the Pentagon budget. Alas, the Pentagon budget is the new third rail replacing Social Security. Trump did say he wants to make nice with Putin, so NATO might get sent back to the barracks instead of shadow boxing on Putin's doorstep. So, back to the good news aspect: maybe it's a wise thing on Trump's part to appoint a harrumphing retired "Mad Dog" general in charge of the War [sic] Department (given the past twelve years, our Founding Fathers had the name right the first time), assuming, hopefully, that Mattis is already on board to swing that deal for Trump.

Just looking at the sleek, unbuttoned Trump and the ever-so-trim Obama when they're standing presidentially side by side, you just know that Trump has more guts. Wanna bet? To put it another way, we'll know soon enough whether Trump is a dog who wags his tail (as well as his stubby fingers), or whether his tail wags him. Should be lots of surprising good news during Trump's first One Hundred Days.

In the meantime, I hope I've not given anybody more reason to feel down today. If there's still a downer problem, give a listen below (skip the ad); almost 65 million people have been helped by this tune:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-diB65scQU

stranger in a strange land said...

@Jay - Should be lots of surprising good news...' Agreed, so much low-hanging fruit. Maybe the prez's best antidote to the Deep State's "six ways from Sunday" is enthusiastic approval by The People. Enthusiastic, as in: not the kind of trembling patriotism illicited by things going BOOM in our towns.

annenigma said...

Here's some good news.

"The incoming Trump administration is considering moving White House press briefings out of the West Wing to accommodate more than the “Washington media elite,” President-elect Donald Trump’s press secretary said.

“This is about greater accessibility, more people in the process,” Sean Spicer said Sunday on Fox News Channel’s “Media Buzz.” Involving more people, including bloggers and others who aren’t from the mainstream media, “should be seen as a welcome change,” he said."

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-01-15/trump-team-may-move-briefings-from-west-wing-to-accommodate-more

Jay–Ottawa said...

This IS good news. Keep it coming. And if Spicer goes a step further to admit any one of the following to the WH Press Corps––Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges or Paul Street––I'll eat my hat and consider voting Republican.

annenigma said...

Imagine.

Just imagine if those protesters in D.C. this week could all get on the same page and demand MEDICARE FOR ALL! Imagine a massive rally, one that can't help but get the maximum media attention, that's FOR something. Imagine a Democratic Party with half a brain. Too bad they have no leader. Oh wait, they've got the Clintons and Obamas.

This is an opportunity of a lifetime but the Democrats will blow it just as surely as they killed Bernie's candidacy and for essentially the same reason - to preserve Obama's legacy and corporate profits.

Unknown said...

I've long pointed out the similarities between Hitler's rise to power and Trumps. This post is spot on. As bad as that is, I also see a lot of similarities between Clinton and Stalin. She is the "insider" to Trump's "outsider." She's paid her dues to establishment, she has no problem lying and cheating to win. When in power things like laws don't trouble her.

Had Clinton won, the MIC and MSM would be lining up to help her sell social security privatization while we marched into Syria to start a shooting war with Russia that we can't "Gulf of Tonkin" our way into in Europe.

It's also good to remember that as horrible as Hitler was, Stalin killed far more of his own people than Hitler did, and Stalin died in power. The saddest point of all this is that our own Stalin corrupted the primary to "win" against our own FDR, Bernie.

Jay–Ottawa said...

"Hey, hey, let's tell Trump to go away." (Just practicing some revolutionary chants.)

What are you saying, Annie? That march is a joke? I was about to buy a bus ticket down to D.C. for the "after it's all over anyway" feminist march. But we ARE for something: FOR the lesser of two evils.

"We are a force!" (Another shout line to practice; the timing, not the rhyming, is important on that one.)

I like to think of myself as one of those feminist guys. Got my pink-knit hat (called for by protest organizers) right here in my pocket––the hat, not the organizers. Yes, ma'am, imagine: 100,000 pink hats in the sun ought to bring the establishment to its knees. At least it makes for a colorful clip of the crowds shown over and over on CNN for a day.

But now you've got me thinking this big march is just another fake nothing to soak up my energy in futility. Guess I won't go, after all. I so wanted the chance to shake hands with greats like Gloria Steinem.

stranger in a strange land said...

BS vowed to gift his supporters to the D nominee before the race even started. Glen Ford's "sheepdog" assessment rings so true and so loud... They're not missing an opportunity, they're dropping the mask - it's all bare now.

We frogs need a better option than the two scorpions on our backs. We shouldn't expect or hope for them to behave otherwise.

Is electoral politics the solution? Is that the only (crooked) game in town?