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A return to “normalcy' -- really?
I suspect many Democrats, Independents, and perhaps a few Republicans voted for Joe Biden in the last presidential election because they were tired of the “mean tweets” and the erratic behavior (at least as portrayed in the mainstream media) of President Donald J. Trump. Like many naïve creatures, they would prefer to stick their head in the sand and let the world unfold around them. Many were led to think the election of Joe Biden as the nation’s Commander in Chief would return the nation to a state of “normalcy.”
Since he assumed office, President’s Biden’s “normalcy” has included vilifying half of the nations’ electorate as evil MAGA Republicans; opening our once secure borders to a flood of illegal aliens and fentanyl while at the same time providing a booming business to Mexico’s cartels; a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan promoting Putin to invade Ukraine, which I suspect will also serve as a green light for China to seize Taiwan; “Bidenomics” and with it runaway inflation and a downgrade of the U.S. government's credit rating due to concerns over the state of the country's finances and its debt burden; the frequent tapping of our strategic petroleum reserve to artificially depress consumer gasoline prices etc. etc. If this is the new “normal” I will take the mean tweets any day !
Those of us old enough to live through the Watergate scandal remember that President Richard M. Nixon was not aware of nor authorized the break-in of the Democratic National Committee but rather he attempted to cover it up once the scandal was broken in the Washington Post by reporters Woodward and Bernstein. Rather than face possible impeachment, Nixon resigned and did not put the nation through the turmoil of a prolonged trial in the Senate. After the tumultuous years of the Vietnam conflict, America did not need to be divided again. Like Nixon or not, he made the right and honorable gesture by stepping down for lying while in office.
Similarly, through congressional testimony it is now apparent that Joe Biden has repeatedly not spoken the truth regarding his knowledge of his son Hunter’s business dealing with foreign business interests. Even the left-leaning Washington Post finally acknowledged the most obvious falsehood of the decade: Joe Biden, during the 2020 Presidential Debate, denied his son had made money in China, earning him the Post’s four “Pinocchio’s.” In addition, Hunter’s admission in court, before lawmakers privately interviewed his former business partner Devon Archer, who, according to accounts by both Democrats and Republicans, said that Hunter put his father on speaker phone with business associates about 20 times over the course of a decade. Again, this is in direct contradiction to candidate Biden’s assertion during the debate that he had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings.
So, if the “new normal” is that our nation’s chief executive can lie to the American people I would prefer the mean tweets any day. Perhaps it is time for President Biden to do the honorable thing for the good of the country and step aside aside as did his predecessor in 1974.
Image: National Archives
VIDEO: HOW MUCH DAMAGE HAVE THESE PEOPLE PERPETRATED? HOW MUCH MONEY HAVE THEY POCKETED DOING IT?
I suspect many Democrats, Independents, and perhaps a few Republicans voted for Joe Biden in the last presidential election because they were tired of the “mean tweets” and the erratic behavior (at least as portrayed in the mainstream media) of President Donald J. Trump. Like many naïve creatures, they would prefer to stick their head in the sand and let the world unfold around them. Many were led to think the election of Joe Biden as the nation’s Commander in Chief would return the nation to a state of “normalcy.”
Since he assumed office, President’s Biden’s “normalcy” has included vilifying half of the nations’ electorate as evil MAGA Republicans; opening our once secure borders to a flood of illegal aliens and fentanyl while at the same time providing a booming business to Mexico’s cartels; a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan promoting Putin to invade Ukraine, which I suspect will also serve as a green light for China to seize Taiwan; “Bidenomics” and with it runaway inflation and a downgrade of the U.S. government's credit rating due to concerns over the state of the country's finances and its debt burden; the frequent tapping of our strategic petroleum reserve to artificially depress consumer gasoline prices etc. etc. If this is the new “normal” I will take the mean tweets any day !
Those of us old enough to live through the Watergate scandal remember that President Richard M. Nixon was not aware of nor authorized the break-in of the Democratic National Committee but rather he attempted to cover it up once the scandal was broken in the Washington Post by reporters Woodward and Bernstein. Rather than face possible impeachment, Nixon resigned and did not put the nation through the turmoil of a prolonged trial in the Senate. After the tumultuous years of the Vietnam conflict, America did not need to be divided again. Like Nixon or not, he made the right and honorable gesture by stepping down for lying while in office.
Similarly, through congressional testimony it is now apparent that Joe Biden has repeatedly not spoken the truth regarding his knowledge of his son Hunter’s business dealing with foreign business interests. Even the left-leaning Washington Post finally acknowledged the most obvious falsehood of the decade: Joe Biden, during the 2020 Presidential Debate, denied his son had made money in China, earning him the Post’s four “Pinocchio’s.” In addition, Hunter’s admission in court, before lawmakers privately interviewed his former business partner Devon Archer, who, according to accounts by both Democrats and Republicans, said that Hunter put his father on speaker phone with business associates about 20 times over the course of a decade. Again, this is in direct contradiction to candidate Biden’s assertion during the debate that he had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings.
So, if the “new normal” is that our nation’s chief executive can lie to the American people I would prefer the mean tweets any day. Perhaps it is time for President Biden to do the honorable thing for the good of the country and step aside aside as did his predecessor in 1974.
Image: National Archives
This Seems illegal
The indictment of Trump and the threat of fascism in America
Former President Donald Trump was indicted and arraigned this week on four felony charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the mob attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The prosecution, conviction and imprisonment of the former president for seeking to overthrow the Constitution and establish a dictatorship are fully justified. But even if Trump were to go to prison, rather than returning to the White House in 2024, that would not put an end to the growing threat of fascist violence, world war and authoritarian rule.
These dangers do not arise from the deranged ego of the billionaire real estate con man but from the insoluble historical contradictions of American and world capitalism.
The leading outlets of the corporate media are seeking to spread complacency about the Trump indictment—the third felony criminal case brought against the former president—celebrating it as proof that the political institutions of capitalist America have survived his onslaught.
The New York Times, which sets the trend, wrote in an editorial Wednesday that the prosecution of Trump “demonstrates, yet again, that the rule of law in America applies to everyone, even when the defendant was the country’s highest-ranking official.”
It concluded: “A former president is now being charged with extreme abuse of office and will eventually be judged by a jury. Mr. Trump tried to overturn the nation’s constitutional system and the rule of law. That system survived his attacks and will now hold him to account for that damage.”
This is an effort to drug public opinion with an overdose of grade-school illusions in American democracy, disguising both the class character of the American government and the intensification of the social, economic and political crisis of American capitalism.
To begin with, the outcome of the legal process against Trump is hardly assured, despite self-deluded exercises in gloating. MSNBC devoted an entire panel discussion to speculation about what prison arrangements could be made for Trump that would not conflict with the lifetime Secret Service protection provided for all ex-presidents.
Trump remains the Republican frontrunner, and if he wins the presidential election—entirely possible thanks to the bankrupt, reactionary and militaristic policies of the Biden administration—he would reenter the White House and once again have control over the Department of Justice and any federal case against himself.
If Trump should fall by the wayside, there are plenty of equally vicious and anti-democratic replacements in the Republican Party. His leading challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has already mounted a frontal assault on democratic rights, public education, and efforts to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic in his own state. He boasted Wednesday that if he were to win the presidency, he would “start slitting throats on day one.” This was not just a metaphor but a grisly threat.
Nor does the reelection of President Joe Biden offer any respite from the ongoing attacks on jobs, living standards and democratic rights. Biden hails from that faction of the US ruling elite that seeks to rely on the trade unions to suppress the class struggle and enforce its attacks on working people. This corporatist program is part of the effort to subordinate American society to the imperialist war drive, now focused on the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, while the build-up continues for a war against China over Taiwan, the South China Sea or some other flashpoint.
The presentation of the case against Trump, in both the special counsel’s 45-page indictment and in the corporate media, amounts to a cover-up of the real dangers. The Times editorial argues, paraphrasing the indictment, that the “criminal scheme” began “on November 14, 2020, when Mr. Trump turned to Rudy Giuliani (acknowledged by his lawyer to be ‘co-conspirator 1’) to challenge the results in the swing state of Arizona, which Mr. Trump had lost.”
This is a whitewash both of Trump and his most powerful “co-conspirators,” unmentioned in the indictment—the officials in the military-intelligence apparatus on whom Trump was relying to carry out his plans to establish a dictatorial regime. As early as October 2019, Trump had declared his intention to defy any election defeat, and this became a constant drumbeat during the summer and fall of the 2020 election campaign. Even Democratic candidate Biden admitted in June 2020, as something of an aside, that his greatest fear was that Trump would refuse to accept the results of the election.
That same month, Trump made his first stab at outright dictatorship, proposing to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 against the mass protests against police violence that swept the country in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Another indicator of the danger of political violence came in October 2020, with the arrest of 14 fascist thugs, who were plotting to kidnap and murder the Democratic Governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer and had conducted surveillance on her vacation home, tested bombs and plotted escape routes. The group first came together in response to protests inspired by Trump earlier in the year against limited COVID-19 lockdowns. (He called on supporters to “liberate” Michigan from Whitmer’s supposed tyranny.)
In the weeks leading up to Election Day, with the polls pointing to a Biden victory, it was well known that Trump would not accept defeat. The World Socialist Web Site published warning after warning of the preparations for a post-election coup. One example of many such warnings came on September 24, 2020:
Trump is not running an election campaign. He is setting into motion a plot to establish a presidential dictatorship. This is a continuation of the entire conspiracy initiated with his June 1 speech threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military against domestic protests.
There is a staggering contrast between the ruthlessness with which Trump and his co-conspirators are implementing their plans and the fecklessness and cowardice of the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Joe Biden. Even as Trump is planning to stack the Supreme Court to facilitate his illegal seizure of power, the Democrats have declared that there is nothing that can be done to stop Trump’s appointment of another justice before the November election.” (Trump’s coup d’état election, by David North and Joseph Kishore)
Throughout the whole process, the Democratic Party did everything it could to cover up the significance of what was happening, even when leading members of its own party, like Whitmer, were targeted for assassination. No effort was made to alert the American people, let alone mobilize opposition, to a coup. On the day of the coup, the Democrats sat by and did nothing as it unfolded, with Biden even calling on the coup plotter-in-chief, Donald Trump, to address the country on national television.
Over the past two-and-a-half years, the Democrats have avoided any serious effort to expose what happened on January 6 and the social and political forces behind it. The Biden administration’s main priority has been to forge a bipartisan agreement with his “colleagues” in the Republican Party—who backed the coup—on the basis of war.
Biden himself has said as little about the coup as he could and nothing about the indictment since it was handed down. Trump plans to make his entire election campaign a referendum on the charges, but Biden wants it to be a non-issue.
The Times wrote in an article published Thursday, “Biden campaign officials and allies believe they can focus on topics with a more direct impact on the lives of voters—economic issues, abortion access and extreme weather—without explicitly addressing Mr. Trump’s issues.”
That is, the Democrats plan to run a campaign based on their standard and threadbare lies, while “Mr. Trump’s issues”—that is, the staggering crisis of American democracy, will be ignored to the extent possible. This is because the Democrats, a part of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, are far more concerned about defending the capitalist state, prosecuting war and suppressing working class opposition than they are about the growth of fascism.
In 1929, Leon Trotsky wrote of the decay of capitalist democracy under the impact of the gathering economic crisis and stormy class struggles:
By analogy with electrical engineering, democracy might be defined as a system of safety switches and circuit breakers for protection against currents overloaded by the national or social struggle. No period of human history has been—even remotely—so overcharged with antagonisms such as ours. … Under the impact of class and international contradictions that are too highly charged, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode. That is what the short circuit of dictatorship represents. (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1929, “Is Parliamentary Democracy Likely to Replace the Soviets?” pp. 52-57.)
The danger of dictatorship does not come from the degraded personality of Donald Trump. It comes from the social and class tensions ripping apart American society. Only the intervention of the working class on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program can provide an alternative.
CUT AND PASTE YOUTUBE LINKS
Bill Barr: Trump Knew He Lost & is Grifting
Robert Kennedy Jr: Power, Corruption, Freedom, & The Chronic Disease Epidemic Within America
Van Jones: Trump ‘Masterful’ at Getting Half the Country to Believe ‘Delusion’ He’s the Victim
CNN political commentator Van Jones said Thursday during the network’s special coverage of the indictment of Donald Trump that the former president was “masterful at getting half the country now to go along with this delusion that he has that somehow he’s the victim.”
Jones said, “In this some ways this is a normal persons worst nightmare and a narcissist’s dream to be martyred, you know, for his cause, for his people, to have to face the establishment. ‘I’m doing this for you,’ and he goes back and does a rally or something.”
He continued, “You know, at some point I would imagine this is not the way that he thought it was going to work out. I think that when you run for office, you know, city council, class president, you have some idea it’s going to be a good thing for you. And this is turning out to be something quite different.”
Jones added, “You know, I think the other thing is that if you listen to the other network that we never mention, it’s the exact same storyline, it’s just flipped. Everybody agrees that it’s wrong for a president to abuse power to stay in office. I think myself, I look at this, yes, it’s wrong. Trump abused power to try to stay in office. But there’s a reverse mirror world narrative that says, no, it’s Biden abusing his power by sicking the DOJ on Trump so Biden can stay in office.”
He concluded, “So Trump has been masterful at getting half the country now to go along with this delusion that he has that somehow he’s the victim here when he’s not.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Trump indicted on 4 counts for seeking to overturn 2020 election defeat
Former President Donald Trump was indicted Tuesday on four felony charges stemming from his illegal and corrupt efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Trump will be arraigned Thursday before Federal District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan.
The prosecution and imprisonment of Trump for his actions leading up to and during the fascistic insurrection of January 6, 2021 is entirely justified and necessary. The charges brought by a Washington D.C. grand jury convened by Special Counsel Jack Smith are presented in cautious and legalistic language, but the indictment is nonetheless damning.
However, it details only a fraction of Trump’s crimes and is silent on his greatest crime: the attempt to overthrow the government by force and maintain himself in the White House as president-dictator.
The four charges detailed in the indictment are: conspiracy to defraud the federal government (through filing false slates of electors in seven closely contested states won by Democrat Joe Biden); conspiracy to violate the rights of the American people (the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted); conspiracy to obstruct a federal proceeding, namely the certification of the Electoral College vote by Congress on January 6, 2021; and actual obstruction of the federal proceeding, since the mob which he summoned to Washington and then unleashed on the Capitol did actually delay the congressional certification by many hours.
Nearly all 123 paragraphs of the indictment are concerned with Trump’s efforts to substitute bogus Trump electors for the Biden electors chosen by the voters in seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This involved various illegal backroom maneuvers devised by his lawyer co-conspirators, involving state legislators, the Department of Justice and Vice President Mike Pence.
These actions have become widely known over the past two years: setting up phony slates of Trump “electors,” who submitted false affidavits to Congress; seeking to induce state legislatures to claim the right to appoint electors to replace those elected in November; asking the Justice Department to send out letters to state legislatures saying that the DOJ was investigating credible claims of election fraud in their states; and finally, having Pence use his ceremonial position, presiding over the counting of the Electoral College votes on January 6, to block certification of Biden electors, either substituting Trump electors outright or sending the issue back to the states where Republican-controlled state legislatures would do the dirty job.
The indictment makes clear that Trump’s actions were an attack on democracy: “on the pretext of baseless fraud claims, the defendant pushed officials in certain states to ignore the popular vote; disenfranchise millions of voters; dismiss legitimate electors; and ultimately, cause the ascertainment of and voting by illegitimate electors in favor of the defendant…”
The indictment lists six unindicted co-conspirators only by number, although the description of their activities is so detailed that at least five have been identified, all lawyers: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, and Kenneth Chesebro, all working for Trump and his reelection campaign; and Jeffrey Clark, who was an assistant attorney general at the time.
This selection of co-conspirators and the nature of the charges are indications of the extremely limited scope of the indictment. None of the fascist thugs engaged in the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6 is named as a co-conspirator, including the leaders of fascist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, several of whom have been convicted of seditious conspiracy.
This charge, tantamount to seeking to overthrow the government, has not been brought against Trump, although he was the leader of the seditious conspiracy. He was in contact with the fascist leaders through political cronies like Roger Stone and during a debate before the election instructed the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” Both the leaders and the foot soldiers of these groups regarded themselves as Trump’s warriors who had come to Washington on January 6 at his command.
The indictment makes no mention of Trump’s co-conspirators in the Republican Party, who played a critical role in the attempted coup, including by holding up the certification of electors while it was underway.
Most importantly, the indictment makes no mention of any official of the US national security apparatus, which played a critical role on January 6 by ignoring intelligence reports about the plans for violence being widely discussed on social media, allowing the violent attack on the Capitol to go forward, and blocking the dispatch of National Guard troops for many hours while the mob overpowered Capitol Police and then battled with police reinforcements sent by local governments in the Washington D.C. area.
To imagine that these events took place without Trump playing a directing role is sheer nonsense. But the indictment avoids any suggestion that Trump was doing anything more than taking advantage of the actions of the mob to put pressure on Vice President Pence to reject certification of the election.
Throughout the slow-moving investigation into January 6, the top priority of the Biden administration has been to protect the key agencies of the military-intelligence apparatus and avoid anything that might disrupt its efforts, first to provoke and then to escalate a war with Russia in Ukraine.
The indictment details conversations in which Trump’s co-conspirators referred openly to the likelihood of a mass popular rebellion if Trump sought to retain the presidency and the consequent necessity to crush opposition using military force.
Paragraph 81 recounts a conversation between the White House Deputy Counsel and “Co-Conspirator 4” (Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark), in which the counsel warned that if no significant election fraud was found and Trump tried to stay in office anyway, “there would be ‘riots in every major city in the United States.’ Co-Conspirator 4 responded, ‘Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.’”
A major consideration in the non-response of the Democratic Party to the coup as it was happening was to avoid doing anything that would mobilize popular opposition to the attempted overthrow of the Constitution. Since the coup, the principal aim of the Biden administration has been to shield his “colleagues” in the Republican Party.
It is indeed remarkable that it has taken two and a half years to bring criminal charges against Trump relating to a violent assault on the Capitol that was televised to billions of people and in which Trump himself, through his own words in tweets and a video statement, provided evidence of his sympathy for and complicity in the attack.
The White House sought to avoid this for as long as possible, seeking, as Biden said on first taking office, to preserve a strong Republican Party and to disguise the increasingly fascist character of the party Biden seeks to engage in bipartisan collaboration. In June, the Washington Post reported on the actions of the Biden Justice Department to avoid an investigation of Trump for the January 6 coup.
Like every other aspect of administration policy, the timing of the Trump indictment seems conditioned by the demands of the war against Russia in Ukraine. With the Ukrainian “spring offensive” resulting in a bloody stalemate, Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus cannot tolerate Trump’s erratic and disruptive interventions in US foreign policy.
Whatever the immediate calculations, they will not resolve the deep-going political crisis and civil war atmosphere that is engulfing the American state. Trump remains the head of the Republican Party and its leading candidate in the upcoming presidential election.
As the WSWS wrote when news of the impending indictment first came out:
The political system in the United States, the center of global finance capital and the cockpit of imperialist conspiracy, has reached the breaking point. Washington’s claim to lead the “free world” and uphold democracy globally is suffering a shattering blow. Even if Trump were to be removed from the political scene, it would not resolve the deep-going crisis of American democracy. There are many figures eager to take his place within the Republican Party and within the military-state apparatus.
The defense of democratic rights is inseparably connected to the development of a movement of the working class against both capitalist parties, based on a socialist perspective that connects opposition to the escalating assault on jobs and wages to the fight against war and authoritarianism.
Barr: Trump ‘Knew Well’ He Lost in 2020
On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Source,” former Attorney General Bill Barr said that while he wasn’t sure at the beginning, he now believes that 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump knew he lost the 2020 election.
Barr said, “At first, I wasn’t sure, but I have come to believe that he knew well that he had lost the election, and — now, what I think’s important is, the government has assumed the burden of proving that. The government, in their indictment, takes the position that he had actual knowledge that he had lost the election and the election wasn’t stolen through fraud. And they’re going to have to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt.”
He added that he came to believe this because “Number one, comments from people like Bannon and Stone before the election saying that he was going to claim it was stolen if he was falling behind on election night and that that was the plan of action. I find those statements very troubling. And then you see that he does that on election night, and then the evidence that has come out since that, the press reports and the indictment and his lack of curiosity as to what the actual facts were. Just me — that’s my personal opinion. And we’ll see if the government can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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