USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!!

[Peter Lemkin]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, on Friday, the Trump administration said its request to add a question on citizenship status to the 2020 census is under legal review. The Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, now faces a March 31st deadline to evaluate the legal basis for the controversial question's inclusion in the upcoming census.
Data from the once-a-decade census has major implications for shaping the political landscape. The population count is used to determine how congressional seats are distributed across the country and where hundreds of billions of federal dollars are spent.
AMY GOODMAN: Critics warn that including a citizenship question on the census will deter undocumented residents from participating in the questionnaire out of fear the government could use the information against them.
For more, we're joined by Ari Berman, senior writer at Mother Jones, reporting fellow at The Nation Institute, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. His new for piece for Rolling Stone, "How the GOP Rigs Elections."
Ari Berman, welcome back to Democracy Now!
ARI BERMAN: Good to see you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: "Are you a U.S. citizen?" They will possibly ask this question. Talk about it.
ARI BERMAN: It sounds like a simple question, but the experts that I talked to say that it will destroy and sabotage the entire census, that given the climate of fear with the Trump administration, nobody, particularly immigrant groups, both noncitizens and citizens, want to answer the question, if they're a citizen, for fear of how it will be used by the Trump administration. If this question is on the census, it will massively depress responses among immigrant groups.
That will lead to fewer seats, fewer resources, for areas that have lots of immigrants, particularly Democratic areas, places like New York and California. And it will shift power even more to Republican areas, that are whiter and more conservative. So, this has very, very, very profound implications for our democracy. And the 2020 census is already facing an extreme number of problems, and this will just make it that much worse.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And whatthe legal basis here, in terms of the Constitution and Congress, the United States is supposed to count every person in the United States, right? Not every citizen.
ARI BERMAN: Exactly. The census is supposed to count every person in America, noncitizen or citizen. And it's really a constitutionally mandated accurate count. So, if the census is manipulated for political purposes or the count is done wrong, there is no way to fix that, because the census is supposed to be the final word that determines how districts are drawn, how $600 billion in federal funding is spent. This is one of the most important things the federal government has done, every 10 years since 1790. And it's facing unprecedented threats from the Trump administration, from lack of funding, to the people that might run it, to this question about citizenship. It's a perfect storm facing the census right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Who's behind this?
ARI BERMAN: Well, I think if you look at who the request is coming from, it's coming from the Department of Justice, run by Jeff Sessions. And they say they need this question to enforce the Voting Rights Act, which is hysterical, because the Trump Justice Department has no interest in enforcing the Voting Rights Act, and, in fact, is actively trying to subvert the Voting Rights Act. This is a smokescreen to try to depress responses from immigrant communities, so that immigrant communities get far less resources than other communities, with the census.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you answer those who say, "Well, if this is about congressional representation, they shouldn't have it. They are undocumented, or they are not U.S. citizens. If it's about federal aid, they shouldn't have it, because they're not U.S. citizens"?
ARI BERMAN: Well, first off, the Constitution very clearly says, with regards to the census, that all persons should be counted. Secondly, there was a Supreme Court case in 2016 called the Evenwel case, that came out of Texas, where they dealt with this question. The Supreme Court very clearly said, in an 8-to-0 unanimous opinion, that districts should be drawn based on all people, because everyone here deserves representation, everyone here counts. When someone goes to a hospital, they don't ask you, "Are you a citizen or not?" Everyone deserves to be treated. And this would radically redefine American society by asking if you're a citizen or not on the census.

[Peter Lemkin]

The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump


Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The problem with Donald Trump is not that he is imbecilic and ineptit is that he has surrendered total power to the oligarchic and military elites. They get what they want. They do what they want. Although the president is a one-man wrecking crew aimed at democratic norms and institutions, although he has turned the United States into a laughingstock around the globe, our national crisis is embodied not in Trump but the corporate state's now unfettered pillage.
Trump, who has no inclination or ability to govern, has handed the machinery of government over to the bankers, corporate executives, right-wing think tanks, intelligence chiefs and generals. They are eradicating the few regulations and laws that inhibited a naked kleptocracy. They are dynamiting the institutions, including the State Department, that served interests other than corporate profit and are stacking the courts with right-wing, corporate-controlled ideologues. Trump provides the daily entertainment; the elites handle the business of looting, exploiting and destroying.
Once democratic institutions are hollowed out, a process begun before the election of Trump, despotism is inevitable. The press is shackled. Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of citizens are irrelevant. Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of democracy become farce. This is the road we are traveling. It is a road that leads to internal collapse and tyranny, and we are very far down it.
The elites' moral and intellectual vacuum produced Trump. They too are con artists. They are slicker than he at selling the lies and more adept at disguising their greed through absurd ideologies such as neoliberalism and globalization, but they belong to the same criminal class and share many of the pathologies that characterize Trump. The grotesque visage of Trump is the true face of politicians such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The Clintons and Obama, unlike Bush and Trump, are self-aware and therefore cynical, but all lack a moral compass. As Michael Wolff writes in "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," the president has "no scruples." He lives "outside the rules" and is "contemptuous of them." And this makes him identical to those he has replaced, not different. "A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similarexcept that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not," Wolff writes.

Trump, backed by the most retrograde elements of corporate capitalism, including Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Sheldon Adelson and Carl Icahn, is the fool who prances at the front of our death march. As natural resources become scarce and the wealth of the empire evaporates, a shackled population will be forced to work harder for less. State revenues will be squandered in grandiose projects and futile wars in an attempt to return the empire to a mythical golden age. The decision to slash corporate tax rates for the rich while increasing an already bloated military budget by $54 billion is typical of decayed civilizations. Empires expand beyond their capacity to sustain themselves and then go bankrupt. The Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires all imploded in a similar fashion. The lessons of history are clear. But the illiterate charlatans who seize power in the dying days of empire know nothing of history. They are driven by a primal and inchoate lust for wealth, one that is never satisfied no matter how many billions they possess.
The elites in dying cultures turn everything into a commodity. Human beings are commodities. The natural world is a commodity. Government and democratic institutions are commodities. All are mined and wrecked for profit. Nothing has an intrinsic value. Nothing is sacred. The relentless and suicidal drive to accumulate greater and greater wealth by destroying the systems that sustain life is idolatry. It ignores the biblical injunction that idols always begin by demanding human sacrifice and end by demanding self-sacrifice. The elites are not only building our funeral pyre, they are building their own.
The elites, lacking a vision beyond satiating their own greed, revel in the intoxicating power to destroy. They confuse destruction with creation. They are agents of what Sigmund Freud calls the death instinct. They find in acts of national self-immolation a godlike power. They denigrate empathy, intellectual curiosity, artistic expression and the common good, virtues that sustain life. They celebrate a hyper-individualism embodied in celebrity, wealth, hedonism, manipulation and the ability to dominate others. They know nothing of the past. They do not think about the future. Those around them are temporarily useful to their aims and must be flattered and rewarded but in the end are ruthlessly cast aside. There is no human connection. This emotional numbness lies at the core of Trump's personality.
"[Stephen] Bannon described Trump as a simple machine," Wolff writes. "The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny. The flattery was dripping, slavish, cast in ultimate superlatives, and entirely disconnected from reality: so-and-so was the best, the most incredible, the ne plus ultra, the eternal. The calumny was angry, bitter, resentful, ever a casting out and closing of the iron door."
The elites in a dying culture confuse what the economist Karl Polanyi calls "real" and "fictitious" commodities. A commodity is a product manufactured for sale. The ecosystem, labor and money, therefore, are not commodities. Once these fictitious commodities are treated as real ones for exploitation and manipulation, Polanyi writes, human society devours itself. Workers become dehumanized cogs. Currency and trade are manipulated by speculators, wreaking havoc with the economy and leading to financial collapse. The natural world is turned into a toxic wasteland. The elites, as the society breaks down, retreat into protected enclaves where they have access to security and services denied to the wider population. They last longer than those outside their gates, but the tsunami of destruction they orchestrate does not spare them.
As long as Trump serves the interests of the elites he will remain president. If, for some reason, he is unable to serve these interests he will disappear. Wolff notes in the book that after his election there was "a surprising and sudden business and Wall Street affinity for Trump." He went on: "An antiregulatory White House and the promise of tax reform outweighed the prospect of disruptive tweeting and other forms of Trump chaos; besides, the market had not stopped climbing since November 9, the day after the election."
The Russia investigationlaunched when Robert Mueller became special counsel in May and which appears to be focused on money laundering, fraud and shady business practices, things that have always characterized Trump's financial empireis unlikely to unseat the president. He will not be impeached for mental incompetence, over the emoluments clause or for obstruction of justice, although he is guilty on all these counts. He is useful to those who hold real power in the corporate state, however much they would like to domesticate him.
Trump's bizarre ramblings and behavior also serve a useful purpose. They are a colorful diversion from the razing of democratic institutions. As cable news networks feed us stories of his trysts with a porn actress and outlandish tweets, the real work of the elites is being carried out largely away from public view. The courts are stacked with Federalist Society judges, the fossil fuel industry is plundering public lands and the coastlines and ripping up regulations that protected us from its poisons, and the Pentagon, given carte blanche, is engaged in an orgy of militarism with a trillion-dollar-a-year budget and about 800 military bases in scores of countries around the world.
Trump, as Wolff describes him in the book, is clueless about what he has unleashed. He is uninterested in and bored by the complexities of governance and policy. The faster Trump finds a member of the oligarchy or the military to take a job off his hands the happier he becomes. This suits his desires. It suits the desires of those who manage the corporate state. For the president there is only one real concern, the tumultuous Trump White House reality show and how it plays out on television. He is a creature solely concerned with image, or more exactly his image. Nothing else matters.
"For each of his enemiesand, actually, for each of his friendsthe issue for him came down, in many ways, to their personal press plan," Wolff writes of the president. "Trump assumed everybody wanted his or her fifteen minutes and that everybody had a press strategy for when they got them. If you couldn't get press directly for yourself, you became a leaker. There was no happenstance news, in Trump's view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to some extent fakehe understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the fake news' label. I've made stuff up forever, and they always print it,' he bragged."
Yes, the elites wish Trump would act more presidential. It would help the brand. But all attempts by the elites to make Trump conform to the outward norms embraced by most public officials have failed. Trump will not be reformed by criticism from the establishment. Republican Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, who denounced Trump, saw their approval ratings plummet and have decided not to run for re-election. Trump may have public approval of only 39 percent overall, but among Republicans the figure is 78 percent. And I don't think those numbers will decrease.
The inability of the political establishment and the press to moderate or reform Trump's egregious behavior is rooted in their loss of credibility. The press, along with political and intellectual elites, spent decades championing economic and political policies that solidified corporate power and betrayed and impoverished American workers. The hypocrisy and mendacity of the elites left them despised and distrusted by the victims of deindustrialization and austerity programs. The attempt to restore civility to public discourse and competency to political office is, therefore, fruitless. Liberal and establishment institutions, including the leadership of the two main political parties, academia and the press, squandered their moral authority. And the dogged refusal by the elites to address the engine of discontentsocial inequalityensures that they will remain ineffectual. They lay down the asphalt for the buffoonery of Trump and the coming tyranny.

[Tracy Riddle]

Noam Chomsky: American intellectual on the rise of Donald Trump and the Doomsday Clock
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-07/no...ia/9406072

The World

"The most powerful country in history is now leading the way towards what may be terminal destruction."
That's how famed American scholar and public intellectual Noam Chomsky assessed the consequences of Donald Trump's presidency a year after his election.
Key points:

• The doomsday clock now the closest it has been to terminal disaster since 1953
  
• Elements of the TPP are "seriously objectionable, others are positive"
  
• Australia has "a difficult balancing act" pursuing a positive path in world affairs
  

Perhaps best know for his penetrating critiques of socio-political systems, Mr Chomsky, 89, is also the founder of modern linguistics, a pioneer of cognitive science, and a recipient of the 2011 Sydney Peace Prize.
He has authored more than 100 books with topics ranging from politics and war to history and mass media and is one of the most cited scholars in modern history.
Mr Chomsky spoke to the ABC's The World program on President Trump's slide towards midnight on the Doomsday Clock, the TPP and Australia's significance in world affairs.
Donald Trump and the Doomsday Clock

"I think the best and most authoritative assessment [of Mr Trump's first year] was perhaps given by the famous Doomsday Clock. As you know every year since 1947 leading distinguished physicists and political analysts assess the state of the world and set the Doomsday Clock at a certain number of minutes before midnight. Midnight means terminal disaster. It began seven minutes before midnight in 1947 after that atom bombing, it's been oscillating since. Just now a week ago it was moved two minutes to midnight, after a year of Trump. That's the closest it's been to terminal disaster since 1953 when the US and later the USSR exploded thermonuclear weapons demonstrating that human intelligence had now developed the capacity to destroy everything on earth.

Is there room for optimism?

"Yes there are many quite hopeful signs. Go back to the 2016 election, the focus of attention is of course on the Trump victory … however something else happened that was astonishing: Bernie Sanders, who came from nowhere, even used the scare word "socialist", had no support from private wealth or [the media] … he might've won the election, and is now far and away the most respected political figure in the country.
That breaks with well over a century of American political history, in which predictability of election is very well given simply by looking at variables like campaign spending. This is astonishing and it's a real positive prospect for the future."

Elements of TPP 'objectionable, others positive'

"The TPP was quite unpopular in the US, in fact both candidates [Hillary] Clinton and Trump were opposed to it, but you have to look at why they were opposed. There are elements of the TPP which are seriously objectionable, and others that are positive, and unfortunately the reason Trump pulled out was not the objectionable features but the positive ones.
One consequence of this is to reduce US influence in the Pacific region, and the world, in fact it's a gift to China and increases their influence. On the other hand integration of the global economy can be of benefit to people. So it's not the question of integration, of globalisation, but it's a question of what form it takes."

Australia's 'difficult balancing act'

"China is a growing expanding power, its expanding its influence, carrying out aggressive actions in the South China Sea and is pursuing its interests in many ways, some benign, some destructive. The United States has been the dominant world power, and is seeking to maintain its influence and control. It's certainly not averse to using force, no need to go through the record.
And Australia its not a major super world power but a significant one has to choose ways which will tend towards alleviating and reducing conflicts and opening ways for more beneficial, international policies to take place, meanwhile attending to quite serious issues arising within Australia.
It's a difficult balancing act but Australia has the intellectual, economic resources to pursue a positive path in world affairs."

[Tracy Riddle]

BOB MUELLER'S INVESTIGATION IS LARGERAND FURTHER ALONGTHAN YOU THINK

[FONT=&amp]https://www.wired.com/story/bob-muellers...you-think/
PRESIDENT TRUMP CLAIMED in a tweet over the weekend that the controversial Nunes memo "totally vindicates" him, clearing him of the cloud of the Russia investigation that has hung over his administration for a year now.[/FONT]
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, if anything, the Mueller investigation appears to have been picking up steam in the past three weeksand homing in on a series of targets.
Last summer, I wrote an analysis exploring the "known unknowns" of the Russia investigationunanswered but knowable questions regarding Mueller's probe. Today, given a week that saw immense [FONT=&amp]sturm und drang over Devin Nunes' memoa document that seems purposefully designed to obfuscate and muddy the waters around Mueller's investigationit seems worth asking the opposite question: What are the [FONT=&amp]known knowns of the Mueller investigation, and where might it be heading?[/FONT]

The first thing we know is that we know it is large.

We speak about the "Mueller probe" as a single entity, but it's important to understand that there are no fewer than five (known) separate investigations under the broad umbrella of the special counsel's officesome threads of these investigations may overlap or intersect, some may be completely free-standing, and some potential targets may be part of multiple threads. But it's important to understand the different "buckets" of Mueller's probe.
As special counsel, Mueller has broad authority to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump," as well as "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation," a catch-all phrase that allows him to pursue other criminality he may stumble across in the course of the investigation. As the acting attorney general overseeing Mueller, Rod Rosenstein has the ability to grant Mueller the ability to expand his investigation as necessary and has been briefed regularly on how the work is unfolding. Yet even without being privy to those conversations, we have a good sense of the purview of his investigation.
Right now, we know it involves at least five separate investigative angles:

1. Preexisting Business Deals and Money Laundering.Business dealings and money laundering related to Trump campaign staff, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former campaign aide Rick Gates, are a major target of the inquiry. While this phase of the investigation has already led to the indictment of Gates and Manafort, it almost certainly will continue to bear further fruit. Gates appears to be heading toward a plea deal with Mueller, and there is expected to be a so-called "superseding" indictment that may add to or refine the existing charges. Such indictments are common in federal prosecutions, particularly in complicated financial cases where additional evidence may surface. Mueller's team is believed to have amassed more than 400,000 documents in this part of the investigation alone. There have also been reportslargely advanced through intriguing reporting by Buzzfeedabout suspicious payments flagged by Citibank that passed through the accounts of the Russian embassy in the United States, including an abnormal attempted $150,000 cash withdrawal by the embassy just days after the election.

2. Russian Information Operations. When we speak in shorthand about the "hacking of the election," we are actually talking about unique and distinct efforts, with varying degrees of coordination, by different entities associated with the Russian government. One of these is the "information operations" (bots and trolls) that swirled around the 2016 election, focused on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, possibly with the coordination or involvement of the Trump campaign's data team, Cambridge Analytica.
Presumably these so-called active measures were conducted by or with the coordination of what's known colloquially as the Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, in St. Petersburg. The extent to which these social media efforts impacted the outcome of the election remains an open question, but according to Bloomberg these social media sites are a "red hot" focus of Mueller's team, and he obtained search warrants to examine the records of companies like Facebook. In recent weeks, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have begun working to notify more than a million users they suspect interacted with Russian trolls and propaganda.

3. Active Cyber Intrusions. Separate from the trolls and bots on social media were a series of active operations and cyber intrusions carried out by Russian intelligence officers at the GRU and the FSB against political targets like John Podesta and the DNC. We know that Russian intelligence also penetrated Republican networks, but none of those emails or documents were made public.* This thread of the investigation may also involve unofficial or official campaign contacts with WikiLeaks or other campaign advisers, like Roger Stone, as well as the warningvia the Australian governmentthat former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos appeared to have foreknowledge of the hacking of Democratic emails.
Western intelligence, specifically the Dutch intelligence service AIVD, has evidently been monitoring for years the "Advanced Persistent Threats"government-sponsored hackers who make up the Russia teams known as Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, which were responsible for the attacks on Democratic targets. AIVD even evidently managed to penetrate a security camera in the workspace of Cozy Bear, near Red Square in Moscow, and take screenshots of those working for the team. According to [FONT=&amp]The Wall Street Journal, there are at least six Russian intelligence officers who may already be identified as personally responsible for at least some of these intrusions. Bringing criminal charges against these individuals would be consistent with the practices established over the past five years by the Justice Department's National Security Division, which indictedand in some cases even arrestedspecific government and military hackers from nation-states like Iran, China, and Russia.[/FONT]

4. Russian Campaign Contacts. This corner of the investigation remains perhaps the most mysterious aspect of Mueller's probe, as questions continue to swirl about the links and contacts among Russian nationals and officials and Trump campaign staff, including Carter Page, the subject of the FISA warrant that was the focus of the Nunes memo. Numerous campaign (and now administration) officials have lied about or failed to disclose contacts with both Russian nationals and Russian government officials, from meetings with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to government banker Sergey Gorkov to the infamous Trump Tower meeting arranged by Donald Trump Jr. with Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya.
At least two members of the campaignPapadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynnhave already pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about these contacts. But many other Trump aides face scrutiny, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, White House adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr. Some of these contacts may go back years; Page himself originally surfaced in January 2015 as "Male #1" in the indictment of three Russian SVR agents, working undercover in New York City, who had tried to recruit Page, an oil and gas adviser, as an intelligence asset, only to decide that he was too scatterbrained to be a useful source.

5. Obstruction of Justice. This is the big kahunathe question of whether President Trump obstructed justice by pressuring FBI director James Comey to "look past" the FBI's investigation of Michael Flynn and whether his firing in May was in any way tied to Comey's refusal to stop the investigation. This thread, as far as we know from public reporting, remains the only part of the investigation that stretches directly into the Oval Office. It likely focuses not only on the President and the FBI director but also on a handful of related questions about the FBI investigation of Flynn and the White House's statements about the Trump Tower meeting. The president himself has said publicly that he fired Comey over "this Russia thing."
There's fresh reason to believe that this is an active criminal investigation; lost amid the news of the Nunes memo on Friday was a court ruling in a lawsuit where I and a handful of other reporters from outlets like CNN and [FONT=&amp]Daily Caller are suing the Justice Department to release the "Comey memos": The ruling held that, based on the FBI's private testimony to the courtincluding evidence from Michael Dreeben, one of the leaders of the special counsel's officereleasing the memos would compromise the investigation. "Having heard this, the Court is now fully convinced that disclosure could reasonably be expected to interfere' with that ongoing investigation," the judge wrote in our case.[/FONT]


Even the most generous interpretation of the Nunes memowhich has been widely debunked by serious analystsraises questions only around the fourth thread of this investigation, insofar as it focuses on Carter Page, the one-time foreign policy adviser who appears to be ancillary to most of the rest of the Russia probes. All of the other avenues remain unsullied by the Nunes memo.
The second thing that we know is that large parts of the investigation remain out of sight. While we've seen four indictments or guilty pleas, they only involve threads one (money laundering) and four (Russian campaign contacts). We haven't seen any public moves or charges by Mueller's team regarding the information operations, the active cyber intrusions, or the obstruction of justice investigation.
We also know there's significant relevant evidence that's not yet public: Both Flynn and Papadopoulos traded cooperation and information as part of their respective plea deals, and none of the information that they provided has become public yet.
We also know that, despite the relative period of quiet since Flynn's guilty plea in December, Mueller is moving fast. While parts of the case will likely unfold and continue for years, particularly if some defendants head for trial, Mueller has in recent weeks been interviewing senior and central figures, like Comey and Sessions. He's also begun working to interview President Trump himself. Given that standard procedure would be to interview the central figure in an investigation lastwhen all the evidence is gatheredit seems likely that such interest means that Mueller is confident he knows what he needs to know for the obstruction case, at least.
All of these pieces of public evidence, the "known knowns," point to one conclusion: Bob Mueller has a busy few weeks ahead of himand the [FONT=&amp]sturm und drang of the last week will likely only intensify as more of the investigation comes into public view.[/FONT]
[/FONT]

[Peter Lemkin]

By Chris Hedges
There will be no economic or political justice for the poor, people of color, women or workers within the framework of global, corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism, which uses identity politics, multiculturalism and racial justice to masquerade as politics, will never halt the rising social inequality, unchecked militarism, evisceration of civil liberties and omnipotence of the organs of security and surveillance. Corporate capitalism cannot be reformed, despite its continually rebranding itself. The longer the self-identified left and liberal class seek to work within a system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls "inverted totalitarianism," the more the noose will be tightened around our necks. If we do not rise up to bring government and financial systems under public controlwhich includes nationalizing banks, the fossil fuel industry and the arms industrywe will continue to be victims.
Corporate capitalism is supranational. It owes no loyalty to any nation-state. It uses the projection of military power by the United States to protect and advance its economic interests but at the same time cannibalizes the U.S., dismantling its democratic institutions, allowing its infrastructure to decay and deindustrializing its factory centers to ship manufacturing abroad to regions where workers are treated as serfs.
Resistance to this global cabal of corporate oligarchs must also be supranational. It must build alliances with workers around the globe. It must defy the liberal institutions, including the Democratic Party, which betray workers. It is this betrayal that has given rise to fascist and protofascist movements in Europe and other countries. Donald Trump would never have been elected but for this betrayal. We will build a global movement powerful enough to bring down corporate capitalism or witness the rise of a new, supranational totalitarianism.
The left, seduced by the culture wars and identity politics, largely ignores the primacy of capitalism and the class struggle. As long as unregulated capitalism reigns supreme, all social, economic, cultural and political change will be cosmetic. Capitalism, at its core, is about the commodification of human beings and the natural world for exploitation and profit. To increase profit, it constantly seeks to reduce the cost of labor and demolish the regulations and laws that protect the common good. But as capitalism ravages the social fabric, it damages, like any parasite, the host that allows it to exist. It unleashes dark, uncontrollable yearnings among an enraged population that threaten capitalism itself.
This is a crisis of global dimensions," David North, the national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, told me when we spoke in New York. "It is a crisis that dominates every element of American politics. The response that we're seeing, the astonishing changes in the state of the government, in the decay of political life, the astonishingly low level of political and intellectual discourse, is in a certain sense an expression of the bewilderment of the ruling elite to what it's going through."
"We can expect a monumental explosion of class struggle in the United States," he said. "I think this country is a social powder keg. There is an anger that exists over working conditions and social inequality. However [much] they may be confused on many questions, workers in this country have a deep belief in democratic rights. We totally reject the narrative that the working class is racist. I think this has been the narrative pushed by the pseudo-left, middle-class groups who are drunk on identity politics, which have a vested interest in constantly distracting people from the essential class differences that exist in the society. Dividing everyone up on the basis of race, gender, sexual preference fails to address the major problem."
North argues, correctly, that capitalism by its nature lurches from crisis to crisis. This makes our current predicament similar to past crises.
"All the unanswered questions of the 20th centurythe basic problem of the nation-state system, the reactionary character of private ownership with the means of production, corporate power, all of these issues which led to the first and Second world warsare with us again, and add to that fascism," he said.
"We live in a global economy, highly interconnected," North went on. "A globalized process of production, financial system. The ruling class has an international policy. They organize themselves on an international scale. The labor movement has remained organized on a national basis. It has been completely incapable of answering this [ruling-class policy]. Therefore, it falls behind various national protectionist programs. The trade unions support Trump."
The sociologist Charles Derber, whom I also spoke with in New York, agrees.
"We don't really have a left because we don't have conversations about capitalism," Derber said. "How many times can you turn on a mainstream news like CNN and expect to hear the word capitalism' discussed? Bernie [Sanders] did one thing. He called himself a democratic socialist, which was a bit transformational simply in terms of rhetoric. He's saying there's something other than capitalism that we ought to be talking about."
"As the [capitalist] system universalizes and becomes more and more intersectional, we need intersectional resistance," Derber said. "At the end of the 1960s, when I was getting my own political education, the universalizing dimensions of the left, which was growing in the '60s, fell apart. The women began to feel their issues were not being addressed. They were treated badly by white males, student leaders. Blacks, Panthers, began to feel the whites could not speak for race issues. They developed separate organizations. The upshot was the left lost its universalizing character. It no longer dealt with the intersection of all these issues within the context of a militarized, capitalist, hegemonic American empire. It treated politics as siloed group identity problems. Women had glass ceilings. Same with blacks. Same with gays."
The loss of this intersectionality was deadly. Instead of focusing on the plight of all of the oppressed, oppressed groups began to seek representation for their own members within capitalist structures.
"Let's take a modern version of this," Derber said. "Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, she did a third-wave feminism thing. She said lean in.' It captures this identity politics that has become toxic on the left. What does lean in' mean? It means women should lean in and go as far as they can in the corporation. They should become, as she has, a major, wealthy executive of a leading corporation. When feminism was turned into that kind of leaning in, it created an identity politics that legitimizes the very system that needs to be critiqued. The early feminists were overtly socialists. As was [Martin Luther] King. But all that got erased."
"The left became a kind of grab bag of discrete, siloed identity movements," Derber said. "This is very connected to moral purity. You're concerned about your advancement within the existing system. You're competing against others within the existing system. Everyone else has privilege. You're just concerned about getting your fair share."
"People in movements are products of the system they're fighting," he continued. "We're all raised in a capitalistic, individualistic, egoistic culture, so it's not surprising. And it has to be consciously recognized and struggled against. Everybody in movements has been brought up in systems they're repulsed by. This has created a structural transformation of the left. The left offers no broad critique of the political economy of capitalism. It's largely an identity-politics party. It focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it doesn't offer a contextual analysis within capitalism."
Derber, like North, argues that the left's myopic, siloed politics paved the way for right-wing, nativist, protofascist movements around the globe as well as the ascendancy of Trump.
"When you bring politics down to simply about helping your group get a piece of the pie, you lose that systemic analysis," he said. "You're fragmented. You don't have natural connections or solidarity with other groups. You don't see the larger systemic context. By saying I want, as a gay person, to fight in the military, in a funny way you're legitimating the American empire. If you were living in Nazi Germany, would you say I want the right of a gay person to fight in combat with the Nazi soldiers?"
"I don't want to say we should eliminate all identity politics," he said. "But any identity politics has to be done within the framework of understanding the larger political economy. That's been stripped away and erased. Even on the left, you cannot find a deep conversation about capitalism and militarized capitalism. It's just been erased. That's why Trump came in. He unified a kind of very powerful right-wing identity politics built around nationalism, militarism and the exceptionalism of the American empire."
"Identity politics is to a large degree a right-wing discourse," Derber said. "It focuses on tribalism tied in modern times to nationalism, which is always militaristic. When you break the left into these siloed identity politics, which are not contextualized, you easily get into this dogmatic fundamentalism. The identity politics of the left reproduces the worse sociopathic features of the system as a whole. It's scary."
"How much of the left," he asked, "is reproducing what we are seeing in the society that we're fighting?"

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Tracy Riddle]

Peter, do you realize that this story was also reported at the same time by...wait for it....the dreaded New York Times? Yes, the MSM. The NSA and CIA wanted their stupid hacking tools back, they were willing to pay for them, and a Russian tried to slip in some kompromat (real or fake, who knows?). The spooks backed away from the deal. Is there anything more here that I'm missing?

"Several American intelligence officials said they made clear that they did not want the Trump material from the Russian, who was suspected of having murky ties to Russian intelligence and to Eastern European cybercriminals. He claimed the information would link the president and his associates to Russia. Instead of providing the hacking tools, the Russian produced unverified and possibly fabricated information involving Mr. Trump and others, including bank records, emails and purported Russian intelligence data. The United States intelligence officials said they cut off the deal because they were wary of being entangled in a Russian operation to create discord inside the American government. They were also fearful of political fallout in Washington if they were seen to be buying scurrilous information on the president… American intelligence officials were also wary of the purported kompromat the Russian wanted to sell. They saw the information, especially the video, as the stuff of tabloid gossip pages, not intelligence collection, American officials said. But the Americans desperately wanted the hacking tools… Early this year, the Americans gave him one last chance. The Russian once again showed up with nothing more than excuses.
So the Americans offered him a choice: Start working for them and provide the names of everyone in his network or go back to Russia and do not return.
The Russian did not give it much thought. He took a sip of the cranberry juice he was nursing, picked up his bag and said, "Thank you." Then he walked out the door."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/po...trump.html

As even the Intercept story admits, buried at the end:

"The Russian told the American that he had first become aware of Russian efforts targeting U.S. political activities in late 2014 or early 2015, according to the documents reviewed by The Intercept. The Russian stated that he had no knowledge of a "master plan" to cause major disruption to U.S. election activities, but the effort was generally understood as a "green light" from Russian security officials to enlist cyber-related groups in probing and harassing activities directed at U.S. targets."
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/09/dona...ction-nsa/

I see a lot of people on the alt-left embracing the confusing narrative: The Russia story is just a fake, but even if it's not and Russia did interfere, the US deserved it because of America's interference in other countries, so who cares? Well, some of us are against oligarchy and elite corruption no matter where it is: I hate the Trump family, the Clinton family, the Bush family, Putin, the FSB, the CIA, Russian mobsters and oligarchs, American mobsters and oligarchs, Chinese, Indian, Turkish, European, whatever.

[Lauren Johnson]

Tracy,

Would you mind specifying how you think the Russians interred in the elections? This is not a trolling question btw? I just need some clarity from you.

[Peter Lemkin]

Maybe there are better threads to get into that debate which is tearing the Nation in two now. I was hoping to keep this mostly focused on Trump, his ethos [sic], his deeds, his times, our latest brush with the unspeakable in his evil administration and in that evil/sick man. I find the Democrats and many who dislike Trump also wanting, in many ways, and distorting some things related to the 'Russia' debate. Parts of it are IMO true, and much of it is not. But even those parts that are true are being misrepresented for political points and from a neo-Cold War outlook. Russia ultimately is not the enemy. Trump and neofascists like him in our own nation are much more dangerous than any boogey men in Russia. Russia has its mafioso and it oligarchs and its undemocratic authoritarian features - and so increasingly does the US. Russia has tried to effect our polity as we have tried to effect theirs and nearly everyone else's. The truth IMO lies somewhere in the middle of the two extreme current memes. People are so brain washed by the propaganda that everything is like a team sport - with two sides, choose one and one must win and one must loose. Reality is infinitely more complex than that and there is a continuum - not sides. This the the false paradigm that has destroyed US polity with the two 'teams' [parties] that seem different and are in some ways - even some important ways - but are also the same in many other ways and both will not allow other voices in the continuum to be heard. In Russia they play a similar game and don't allow anyone to really run against the strongman Putin who will be replaced someday by a new strongman. That is for the Russians to deal with, and we have our own problems to deal with. We have met the real enemy and the enemy is US [more than any other place/nation/philosophy/ethos]. There are many evil persons and groups outside of the USA and many we have had more than a hand in creating or making more powerful - some we had nothing to do with. Best to clean up our own house first before we point the finger and barrels of our weapons everywhere else........WE killed JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm and so many others. WE overthrew hundreds of nations and caused hundreds of millions of deaths since WWII. WE have been going around the World destabilizing, stealing, fomenting coups and impoverishing naturally rich lands. WE alone have destroyed two cities with nuclear weapons. WE pulled off 911 and so many other covert ops too numerous to list. WE have a lot of accounting to do and the old game used by Hitler as now used by Trump of blaming things on the outsider, the other, those that are or seem different is what brings war, hate, destruction, chaos, police states and fascism. Time to wake up USA, the hour is very late and the problem is here - not somewhere else.