Problematics of Empire

If anyone gets hurt or killed by America's latest anonymous bomber(s), it probably won't be the liberal elites at whom the terror is directed. It'll be the public or private security guard, the personal assistant, the mail sorter in the corporate basement, or the federal workers who sort and deliver our mail.

It will be the servant class. I suppose the talking heads could always appeal to the bomber's sense of class decency but then again, if the guy or gal sending the pipe bombs doesn't even know that former CIA Director John Brennan (misspelled as "Brenan" on the package) works as a highly-paid consultant at NBC rather than at CNN, he or she probably also doesn't know that Donald Trump is scapegoating the "immigrant-loving" rich and famous precisely to feed the resentment of the less well-off. 

IThe cure for Trumpism, or at least a start to the cure for Trumpism, would indeed be encouraging social solidarity in the bottom 90% of Americans. During the time of Occupy, in 2011, a motley crew of libertarians, anarchists, antifas, liberals, progressives and socialists did join in common cause against the oligarchy for a few hopeful months.

This solidarity could not stand, and so the mainly Democratic mayors of major US cities joined together in their own grotesque solidarity, orchestrating a coordinated mass police shutdown of all the camps.

The ruling class racketeers have lived to gorge their appetites for another 
seven years. And since the politicians beholden to them have done absolutely nothing to ameliorate the abysmal living conditions and despair of an increasingly sick society, along came Trump.

But to hear the mainstream media explain it, Trump is simply exploiting the electoral divisions between red and blue states. While it is very possible and even likely that Trump is the direct inspiration for the Mad Bomber(s), the media are almost all concentrating on his hate-filled campaign rallies without putting his rise to power and his continuing popularity among a sizeable minority of the electorate into historical context.

Doing so might put some of the onus on the less rabidly right-wing half of the Duopoly, and that would never do, not when they are so frantically trying to divert voter fear and loathing in their blue corner.

Somewhat surprisingly, Democrats and their media sycophants are not yet pinning responsibility for the package bombs on the Russians. Perhaps, since even the Establishment-preening Politico has quietly warned liberals to start damping down their hopes for a Mueller indictment of Trump - because, they ruefully acknowledge, never has there been any evidence that Trump "colluded" with Putin to swing the election in his favor.

Meanwhile, leave to the New York Times's Charles Blow to try and redirect the fear solely at the corpus of Trump. While careful not finger Trump as the actual mastermind of the bomb delivery campaign, he writes:

But we can say without equivocation that Trump's stoking of fear and riling of anger is deeply problematic and indeed dangerous.

(We can also say without equivocation that the pundit class's overuse of the catch-all weasel word, "problematic," is indeed problematic.)

Blow continues, quoting Trump:

"Do you know how the caravan (from Honduras) started? Does everybody know what this means? I think the Democrats has something to do with it."

There is no proof that the caravan of Honduran immigrants traveling through Mexico toward the United States was instigated by the Democrats, and the claim is ridiculous on its face.

Well, yes and no. My published comment:

 "The White House" - no way was it Trump - has sent out a mass email pleading for national unity, as though his fascist rhetoric at his rallies has nothing to do with anything.

Talk about washing dirty hands.

And plenty of people have dirty hands, including the oligarchs and corporations who've benefited so handsomely from his tax cuts and assaults on democracy. But look out. Coupled with the dangerous fallout from Trump's incitements to violence is the plunge in the stock market, caused largely by his trade war.

 Capitalism on crack, combined with the crackpot playing at being president, simply is no longer sustainable. With Trump taking off the gloves in that inept and hateful way of his, the mask is coming right off the whole American system.

The refugee caravan from Honduras is the result of the 2009 military coup which ousted the democratically elected Manuel Zelaya, whom the US viewed a socialist troublemaker for instituting such dangerous policies as a national minimum wage, free light bulbs for poor families, and privileging subsistence farmers over multinational agribusinesses. The US then "legitimized" the coup by sending a group of GOP congressmen to monitor another election, "won" by a corrupt strongman with ties to organized crime.

Since then, Honduras has plunged further into poverty and violence. People are fleeing for their lives.

The US, with the history of genocide and slavery it has never reckoned with, now has Strongman Trump to reckon with.

Now, given the wrath apparent within the righteous Times commentariat during these last tense pre-Midterm weeks, it would have been problematic for me to name actual names - namely those of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton - who were, at best, the passive-aggressive backers of the coup, and at worst, its architects, with the usual ass-covering bipartisan help from those nasty old Republicans.  But I think that it is more important to engage semi-closed minds rather than enrage them, particularly in the aftermath of the assassination attempts on their heroes.

A post-coup Wikileaks dump revealed that Hillary did indeed actively campaign against restoring Zelaya to rightful power after the coup, in favor of a more oligarch-friendly right-wing puppet. She covered her ass by asserting that the coup was not really a coup, much as her recent insistence that Bill Clinton's abuse of a White House intern was not technically sexual abuse or abuse of power. 

 And although she did admit her State Department's involvement in the coup in the hard-cover edition of her "Hard Choices" memoir, this chapter was curiously missing in the paperback version, published in the run-up to her second presidential campaign. She scrubbed it, largely because Berta Caceres, the feminist labor activist heroine of the Honduran protest movement for democracy, was murdered by the more corporate-friendly regime supported by the Democratic administration. Also, Clinton had sent notorious neocon John Negroponte to do "advance work" for the State Department, only weeks before Zelaya was hauled out his house, wearing only his pajamas, in the middle of the night. 

Do you think that these omissions and excuses are just a wee bit problematic? Some Democratic Party operatives certainly thought so, because when confronted by reporters about Hillary's role in the violent coup, they chalked up the scrubbing to an unexpected paper shortage as the cheaper edition went to press.

No wonder that addressing climate change is way down there on the Democrats' legislative to-do list, should they win back Congress. The dirtier the water, the less visible is the blood on so many guilty, well-manicured hands.