Coup-Coup For Democracy

Mere hours after unleashing a series of angry tweets accusing the FBI of plotting a coup to overthrow him, Donald Trump managed to get in a leisurely round of golf at his Florida club before going the Feds one better and showing them who's still the boss.

 You see, the FBI planned their coup in the dark. Trump actually staged a  televised rally in broad daylight on President's Day, no less, to officially announce to the whole world that he and his team of neocons are staging a coup to overthrow the government of Venezuela.

The revelations of two coup attempts in one day must have set a new record in the annals of global political intrigues. And Trump's game of coup d'etat tit-for-tat also gives new meaning to the conventional wisdom that not only is he completely lacking a sense of irony, he is absolutely nuts, a/k/a coup-coup. And since his latest medical exam also now places him in the clinically obese category, for all we know he might even be Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs along with suffering that creepy, kooky obsession with border walls.

Of course, since the US is the world's sole remaining superpower and Venezuela is a lesser country having the gall to balk at US corporate plunder, one of these coups is not like the other. The attempted coup against Trump, revealed by former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, was "illegal," according to the president and his cronies.

The attempted coup against Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, on the other hand, is simply the latest in a long line of "humanitarian interventions" against a small country which persists in disrespecting the inalienable rights of multinational corporations to plunder it of its natural resources. Maduro still hasn't gotten the message that his country, already squeezed to the breaking point by multiple factors, including US economic sanctions and embargoes going back for years, can only recover its stability if he allows Trump to destabilize it with much creative destruction and outright theft, not to mention bloodshed.

That is why the Powers That Be are fully on board with Trump's meddling in Venezuela's affairs while still whining that alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election is not only just like Pearl Harbor, but that Trump himself was meddling in the FBI investigation of the meddling.

NBC News explains the planning and the plotting by the federal police to get rid of Trump:

The conversations came in the chaotic days after James Comey was fired as FBI director, McCabe told CBS, as the FBI became increasingly convinced that the president was obstructing into the agency's investigation in Russian meddling in the U.S. election. Rosenstein went as far to offer to wear a wire to the White House to gather information, McCabe said. (Officials have previously told NBC News Rosenstein made the remark sarcastically.)

Trump, calling McCabe "deranged," added in a tweet that "there is a lot of explaining to do to the millions of people who just elected a president they really like and who has done a great job for them with the Military, Vets, Economy and so much more."

One reason that the permanent ruling class of the United State doesn't likewise think that it's "deranged" to try to overthrow the democratically-elected leaders of other countries is because they have self-immunized themselves from international war crimes statutes. Should any US official ever be hauled before the international court of The Hague for an act of mass murder, meddling and destruction, Congress has passed a law that would allow such a defendant to be rescued, by any weaponized means necessary, as though he or she were a hostage and not an alleged coup-instigator, aggressor, mass murderer, or torturer.

Before Trump came along, US leaders were more circumspect while plotting their regime-changing coups, invasions and wars. This secrecy served the purpose of keeping the inherent racist and class war aspects of these depredations hidden from the folks in the Homeland, lest any unabashed racist and classist rhetoric from the ruling class racketeers encourage too much freelance violence and racist rhetoric from within the ranks of the ordinary folks. If US leaders had to talk publicly about their depredations, they did so in the guise of protecting the human rights of the foreign people whom they were about to maim, torture, rape, kill, expel, or if the victims were especially lucky, simply rob.

Trump doesn't do fake-humanitarianism well. When he speaks of Central Americans as rapists, infestations, criminals and invaders, the standard "responsibility to protect" propaganda as he applies it to Venezuelans just doesn't ring as true as it did when previous presidents dished out their rhetoric in more tasteful globs of unctuous rectitude.

When Trump delivers the propaganda, any pretense at high-mindedness about Venezuela falls absolutely flat. His choice of the far right white nationalist Proud Boys chairman to act as his human backdrop at Monday's Miami rally while pledging assistance to brown-skinned Venezuelans probably didn't win many hearts and minds. When the embattled Maduro later went on TV to opine that Trump was acting just like a Nazi, he didn't have to convince his audience.

This, of course, also puts the pretend-opposition Democratic Party in a quandary. They are just as enthused about regime changes and wars of aggression as the Republicans are. Democrats in South Florida, which has a sizable Venezuelan population, also want to get rid of Maduro. But as the New York Times puts it,

To Democrats, all that suggests that the president may be more interested in wooing Venezuelan-Americans and other Latino voters than in promoting bipartisanship on the Maduro issue.
“I’m concerned about the Trump administration politicizing this issue, using Venezuelans’ suffering to score political points here in Florida,” said Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, Democrat of Miami. “We shouldn’t be using this as a political weapon.”

So much for the plight of actual Venezuelans. They apparently have no say in the leadership or direction of their own country. They must be portrayed as incapable of acting in their own best interests. What really matters is which side of the US Uniparty can score the most political points off the backs of suffering, starved-out people. Meddling is fine, just so long as the United States does it, and as long as the purpose of the meddling can be sold to the US public in a palatable series of lies.

As Noam Chomsky has written, FDR's famous Four Freedoms: of speech and worship, and from fear and want, are traditionally vaunted and then wantonly disregarded by leaders as they undertake their myriad invasions, coups and wars. But missing from the propaganda ("we must rescue the oppressed starving victims of X's reign and stop him from abusing his own people!") that they spread for domestic consumption is the all-important Fifth Freedom, the unspoken precept which explains much of what "we" do in the world. From his book Turning the Tide, an examination of US interventions in Central America up to the Reagan years:

(It is) the freedom to rob and exploit. Infringement of the four official freedoms in enemy territory always evokes much agonized concern. Not, however, in our own ample domains. Here, as the historical record demonstrates with great clarity, it is only when the fifth and fundamental freedom is threatened that such a sudden and short-lived concern for other forms of freedom manifests itself, to be sustained for as long as it is needed to justify the righteous use of force and violence to restore the Fifth Freedom, the one that counts.

No matter that Communism collapsed decades ago. US Leaders, most loudly and recently Trump, still use the bugaboo of "socialism" to justify their meddling in other countries. In the latest variation of the "domino" effect or rotten apple theory, Donald Trump vows to defeat socialism in Venezuela lest the "virus" spread beyond any physical wall that he succeeds in building.

 "The rot and infection," added Chomsky, "of course are code words for successful social and economic development that might constrain the Fifth Freedom." 

Trump fails Coup Propaganda 101, his ruling class critics fret, because he makes this alleged virus of socialism too much about politically protecting himself rather than glibly lying about protecting "the country" -- which is code for protecting and enriching corporations and oligarchs. By railing against socialism in so vociferous and ignorant and self-serving a manner, Trump actually makes it look pretty good to everyday Americans - by which I mean citizens of the United States. The people in the rest of the Americas are not fooled by anti-socialist imperialistic cant, and haven't been since Columbus first sailed the Ocean Blue. Trump cannot effectively frighten the folks of the US Homeland about the proper designated strongman and bogeyman to overthrow, because he can't disguise the fact that he himself, in the miscast role of our duly elected president, is the de facto thug and bogeyman.

Oafish Greedy Selfish Trump-Style Imperialism

"Responsibility to Protect" Style-Savvy Liberal Imperialism

The man whom the establishment corporate media righteously lambastes for never reading, and for never getting his facts straight even on the rare occasions when he doesn't deliberately set out to lie, ironically brayed in Miami that "socialism is a sad and discredited ideology rooted in the total ignorance of history and human nature."

But Trump also inadvertently acknowledged the inconvenient truth, which is that in the United States, the only existing and thriving socialism is the kind which benefits the plutocrats at the expense of the rest of us - a system of socialized risk for privatized profit.

"Which is why socialism must always give rise to tyranny...Socialism is about one thing only: power for the ruling class."

It was corporate socialism, or neoliberalism, which gave rise to the tyrannical Trump. And it may well be Trump himself who ironically gives rise to true democratic socialism of, by and for the people.

Now, wouldn't that be a refreshingly crazy coup?