This has already been implied by some of the comments above, but it appears increasingly clear Trump was controlled opposition from the onset. An ideal/widely successful iteration of it, in many respects. He keeps his 'target audience' captivated by these theatrical would-be legal actions to pacify his fervent base, but it's never intended to be anything more than optics/theatrics. Selecting Rudy to support his case was the reveal for those paying attention: this was not an earnest effort. It helps offset frustration Re: LEGITIMATE VOTER FRAUD, which certainly occurred in this election, while never actually changing anything about outcome or process. Par for the course, naturally. Both establishment parties partake in it, historically. Sure, part of his current voter fraud pursuits are to help corral would-be consumers for his next venture (OAN, etc -- as dada alludes), but we shouldn't discount other back-door agreements. One doesn't arrive as Stooge-In-Chief without certain arrangements made -- prior to, during, and post-tenure.
The other great value-add Trump brings to the table is his ability to inspire practically half the population to be vehemently opposed to certain talking points simply because it may be tied to a tweet or comment uttered by Trump. This is quite powerful stuff.
We observed an example of this right here in RI, on another thread.
Exhibit A, from a couple days ago:
Me:
A virus will spread. It's what it does. We all want the virus to end, needless to say.
The key factors here are finding a balanced approach towards managing virus impact while also minimizing, to the extent possible, devastation to lives and/or livelihoods as a result of excessive and unwarranted lockdown measures/mandates.
A more balanced approach is what's needed here.
Govt overreach has caused -- and will continue to cause -- far more damage to lives and livelihoods than the virus itself.
Don't be controlled by fear.
Fellow RI'er:
OH FOR GODS SAKE! You're quoting Trump.
Quoting Trump!! Fascinating, really. Anything that may even hint towards a comment uttered by Trump will be quite literally summarily dismissed instantly. This is far from an isolated phenomenon.
(again, much of what Trump conveys is worthy of prompt transfer to the memory hole, but my larger point is how powerful this is as a means to shape sentiment; half the population will rebuke it outright without scrutiny, the other half will adopt it outright without scrutiny.)
OF course, Trump will twist and corrode the messaging for other ends, which is precisely what limited hangouts/controlled opposition are intended to do. There've been numerous examples of this, and the twittersphere/paid journos lap it up dutifully/predictably.
The current ubiquity of easily accessible information has only facilitated mass, large-scale hypnosis/conditioning. These tactics have been in place, in various forms, since early civilization, but the internet and social media have combined to act as force multipliers on steroids.
We need only observe the lunacy in play during this current health crisis for an explicit showcase of how such sorcery can be so effective.
Also have to agree with Harvey here; I've iterated along similar lines here in the past. I see no other method for the average plebe to gain leverage. Welcome other suggestions, of course.
Marionumber1 » Mon Nov 09, 2020 7:30 pm wrote:I also do have to agree with Elvis that voting, while not a substitute for other types of action, is still more worth doing than disengaging in.
As I said, *structured disengagement*. If you want leverage, at this stage you have little to none, how do you get it? What I'm suggesting is a way to do that, to have leverage.
I heard something I hadn't thought about before on cable news. Anecdotally, many working and poor people who got COVID relief/stimulus cheques with Trump's signature, were moved by the signature--- saw it as Trump's keeping a promise to help them. It influenced how they voted. I saw this as mere vanity back in April, and didn't realize it was very good strategy.
^^Probably a bit of both, and unfortunately a significant percentage of the recipients were dumb enough to think this was money straight from Trump to them. The same kind of people who want to cancel Obamacare because they're already covered by the Affordable Care Act.
But the whole stimulus check thing was a kind of a clusterfuck. My brother and his family all got it, and they haven't lived in the US for over ten years. He's not even a citizen, just an expired green card holder, but he's not above saying thank you to free money from Uncle Sam. He can buy something nice on Amazon to support the economy.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
norton ash » Thu Nov 26, 2020 10:55 pm wrote:I heard something I hadn't thought about before on cable news. Anecdotally, many working and poor people who got COVID relief/stimulus cheques with Trump's signature, were moved by the signature--- saw it as Trump's keeping a promise to help them. It influenced how they voted. I saw this as mere vanity back in April, and didn't realize it was very good strategy.
If Trump had masked and delivered copious amounts of MAGA and Trump emblazed masks to his base, Trump likely would have been re-elected POTUS. Instead Trump proclaimed the cv19 virus a hoax and dissuaded people from wearing masks and encouraged society to open up prematurely. Oops for us all. Unfortunately far too many are stuck in deep denal now.
Not implying that Trump should have been re-elected but that Trump had a political gimmee and did not take advantage to promote his agendas.
Now the nation would also would not be facing the same ongoing and worsening crisis with cv19
The planet cannot begin to heal until we rip the mask off the West’s war machine
27 November 2020, by Jonathan Cook
Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.
In a recent post, I wrote about “externalities” – the ability of companies to offset the true costs inherent in the production process. The burden of these costs are covertly shifted on to wider society: that is, on to you and me. Or on to those far from view, in foreign lands. Or on to future generations. Externalising costs means that profits can be maximised for the wealth elite in the here and now.
My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism's perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis – to break our understanding of the causal link between the two https://t.co/S4Aby314FX
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 25, 2020
Societies at home must deal with the externalised costs of industries ranging from tobacco and alcohol to chemicals and vehicles. Societies abroad must deal with the costs of the bombs deployed by our “defence” industries. And future generations will have to deal with the lethal costs incurred by corporations that for decades have been allowed largely unregulated to pump out their waste products into every corner of the globe.
Divine right to rule
In the past, the job of the corporate media was to shield those externalities from public view. More recently, as the costs have become impossible to ignore, especially with the climate crisis looming, the media’s role has changed. Its central task now is to obscure corporate responsibility for these externalities. That is hardly surprising. After all, the corporate media’s profits depend on externalising costs too, as well as hiding the externalised costs of their parent companies, their billionaire owners and their advertisers.
Once, monarchs rewarded the clerical class for persuading their subjects to passively accept their exploitation through the doctrine of divine right. Today’s “mainstream” media are no different. They are there to persuade us that capitalism, the profit motive, the accumulation of ever greater wealth by elites, and externalities destroying the planet are are the natural order of things, that this is the best economic system imaginable.
Most of us are now so propagandised by the media that we can barely imagine a functioning world without capitalism. Our minds are primed to imagine, in the absence of capitalism, an immediate lurch back to Soviet-style bread queues or an evolutionary reversal to cave-dwelling. Those thoughts paralyse us into an inability to contemplate what might be wrong or inherently unsustainable about how we live right now, or to imagine the suicidal future we are hurtling towards.
Lifeblood of empire
There is a reason that, as we rush lemming-like towards the cliff-edge, urged on by a capitalism that cannot operate at the level of sustainability or even of sanity, the push towards intensified war grows. Wars are the lifeblood of the corporate empire headquartered in the United States.
My latest: The new documentary on Greta Thunberg – I Am Greta – isn’t about climate change. It’s about something even more important: the elusiveness of sanity in an insane world https://t.co/uU2G6i821I
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 17, 2020
US imperialism is no different from earlier imperialisms in its aims or methods. But in late-stage capitalism, wealth and power are hugely concentrated. Technologies have reached a pinnacle of advancement. Disinformation and propaganda are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree. Surveillance is intrusive and aggressive, if well concealed. Capitalism’s destructive potential is unlimited. But even so, war’s appeal is not diminished.
As ever, wars allow for the capture and control of resources. Fossil fuels promise future growth, even if of the short-term, unsustainable kind.
Wars require the state to invest its money in the horrendously expensive and destructive products of the “defence” industries, from fighter planes to bombs, justifying the transfer of yet more public resources into private hands.
The lobbies associated with these “defence” industries have every incentive to push for aggressive foreign (and domestic) policies to justify more investment, greater expansion of “defensive” capabilities, and the use of weapons on the battlefield so that they need replenishing.
Whether public or covert, wars provide an opportunity to remake poorly defended, resistant societies – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – in ways that allow for resources to be seized, markets to be expanded and the reach of the corporate elite to be extended.
War is the ultimate growth industry, limited only by our ability to be persuaded of new enemies and new threats.
Fog of war
For the political class, the benefits of war are not simply economic. In a time of environmental collapse, war offers a temporary “Get out of jail” card. During wars, the public is encouraged to assent to new, ever greater sacrifices that allow public wealth to be transferred to the elite. War is the corporate world’s ultimate Ponzi scheme.
The “fog of war” does not just describe the difficulty of knowing what is happening in the immediate heat of battle. It is also the fear, generated by claims of an existential threat, that sets aside normal thinking, normal caution, normal scepticism. It is the invoking of a phantasmagorical enemy towards which public resentments can be directed, shielding from view the real culprits – the corporations and their political cronies at home.
The “fog of war” engineers the disruption of established systems of control and protocol to cope with the national emergency, shrouding and rationalising the accumulation by corporations of more wealth and power and the further capture of organs of the state. It is the licence provided for “exceptional” changes to the rules that quickly become normalised. It is the disinformation that passes for national responsibility and patriotism.
Permanent austerity
All of which explains why Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, has just pledged £16.5 billion on “defence” at a time when the UK is struggling to control a pandemic and when, faced by disease, Brexit and a new round of winter floods, the British economy is facing “systemic crisis”, according to a new Cabinet Office report. Figures released this week show the biggest economic contraction in the UK in three centuries.
If the British public is to stomach yet more cuts, to surrender to permanent austerity as the economy tanks, Johnson, ever the populist, knows he needs a good cover story. And that will involve further embellishment of existing, fearmongering narratives about Russia, Iran and China.
To make those narratives plausible, Johnson has to act as if the threats are real, which means massive spending on “defence”. Such expenditure, wholly counter-productive when the current challenge is sustainability, will line the pockets of the very corporations that help Johnson and his pals stay in power, not least by cheerleading him via their media arms.
New salesman needed
The cynical way this works was underscored in a classified 2010 CIA memorandum, known as “Red Cell”, leaked to Wikileaks, as the journalist Glenn Greenwald reminded us this week. The CIA memo addressed the fear in Washington that European publics were demonstrating little appetite for the US-led “war on terror” that followed 9/11. That, in turn, risked limiting the ability of European allies to support the US as it exercised its divine right to wage war.
The memo notes that European support for US wars after 9/11 had chiefly relied on “public apathy” – the fact that Europeans were kept largely ignorant by their own media of what those wars entailed. But with a rising tide of anti-war sentiment, the concern was that this might change. There was an urgent need to futher manipulate public opinion more decisively in favour of war.
The US intelligence agency decided its wars needed a facelift. George W Bush, with his Texan, cowboy swagger, had proved a poor salesman. So the CIA turned to identity politics and faux “humanitarianism”, which they believed would play better with European publics.
Part of the solution was to accentuate the suffering of Afghan women to justify war. But the other part was to use President Barack Obama as the face of a new, “caring” approach to war. He had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – even though he had done nothing for peace, and would go on to expand US wars – very possibly as part of this same effort to reinvent the “war on terror”. Polls showed support for US wars among Europeans increased markedly when they were reminded that Obama backed these wars.
Obama’s most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging wars, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic population in the US and then on the global stage, and specifically to pretend that endless barbaric US wars are really humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people — the pretext used to justify every war by every country in history.
Obama-style facelift
Once the state is understood as a vehicle for entrenching elite power – and war its most trusted tool for concentrating power – the world becomes far more intelligible. Western economies never stopped being colonial economies, but they were given an Obama-style facelift. War and plunder – even when they masquerade as “defence”, or peace – are still the core western mission.
That is why Britons, believing days of empire are long behind them, may have been shocked to learn this week that the UK still operates 145 military bases in 42 countries around the globe, meaning it runs the second largest network of such bases after the US.
Such information is not made available in the UK “mainstream” media, of course. It has to be provided by an “alternative” investigative site, Declassified UK. In that way the vast majority of Britons are left clueless about how their taxes are being used at a time when they are told further belt-tightening is essential.
REVEALED — The UK military’s overseas base network involves 145 sites in 42 countries.
— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) November 24, 2020
The UK’s network of bases, many of them in the Middle East, close to the world’s largest oil reserves, are what the much-vaunted “special relationship” with the US amounts to. Those bases are the reason the UK – whoever is prime minister – is never going to say “no” to a demand that Britain join Washington in waging war, as it did in attacking Iraq in 2003, or in aiding attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen. The UK is not only a satellite of the US empire, it is a lynchpin of the western imperial war economy.
Ideological alchemy
Once that point is appreciated, the need for external enemies – for our own Eurasias and Eastasias – becomes clearer.
Some of those enemies, the minor ones, come and go, as demand dictates. Iraq dominated western attention for two decades. Now it has served its purpose, its killing fields and “terrorist” recruiting grounds have reverted to a mere footnote in the daily news. Likewise, the Libyan bogeyman Muammar Gaddafi was constantly paraded across news pages until he was bayonetted to death. Now the horror story that is today’s chaotic Libya, a corridor for arms-running and people-trafficking, can be safely ignored. For a decade, the entirely unexceptional Arab dictator Bashar Assad, of Syria, has been elevated to the status of a new Hitler, and he will continue to serve in that role for as long as it suits the needs of the western war economy.
Notably, Israel, another lynchpin of the US empire and one that serves as a kind of offshored weapons testing laboratory for the military-industrial complex, has played a vital role in rationalising these wars. Just as saving Afghan women from Middle Eastern patriarchy makes killing Afghans – men, women and children – more palatable to Europeans, so destroying Arab states can be presented as a humanitarian gesture if at the same time it crushes Israel’s enemies, and by extension, through a strange, implied ideological alchemy, the enemies of all Jews.
Quite how opportunistic – and divorced from reality – the western discourse about Israel and the Middle East has become is obvious the moment the relentless concerns about Syria’s Assad are weighed against the casual indifference towards the head-chopping rulers of Saudi Arabia, who for decades have been financing terror groups across the Middle East, including the jihadists in Syria.
During that time, Israel has covertly allied with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, because all of them are safely ensconced within the US war machine. Now, with the Palestinians completely sidelined diplomatically, and with all international solidarity with Palestinians browbeaten into silence by antisemitism smears, Israel and the Saudis are gradually going public with their alliance, like a pair of shy lovers. That included the convenient leak this week of a secret meeting between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.
My latest: Pompeo’s declaration that criticism of Israel and the peaceful movement urging a boycott of its settlements are ‘antisemitic’ marks the logical endpoint of a foreign policy consensus rapidly taking shape in the US and Europe https://t.co/0fLC8TKnzm
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 24, 2020
The west also needs bigger, more menacing and more permanent enemies than Iraq or Syria. Helpfully one kind – nebulous “terrorism” – is the inevitable reaction to western war-making. The more brown people we kill, the more brown people we can justify killing because they carry out, or support, terrorism against us. Their hatred for our bombs is an irrationality, a primitivism we must keep stamping out with more bombs.
But concrete, identifiable enemies are needed too. Russia, Iran and China give superficial credence to the war machine’s presentation of itself as a “defence” industry. The UK’s bases around the globe and Boris Johnson’s £16 billion rise in spending on the UK’s war industries only make sense if Britain is under a constant, existential threat. Not just someone with a suspicious backpack on the London Tube, but a sophisticated, fiendish enemy that threatens to invade our lands, to steal resources to which we claim exclusive rights, to destroy our way of life through its masterful manipulation of the internet.
Crushed or tamed
Anyone of significance who questions these narratives rationalising and perpetuating war is the enemy too. Current political and legal dramas in the US and UK reflect the perceived threat such actors pose to the war machine. They must either be crushed or tamed into subservience.
Trump was initially just such a figure that needed taming. The CIA and other intelligence agencies assisted in the organised opposition to Trump – helping to fuel the evidence-free Russiagate “scandal” – not because he was an awful human being or had authoritarian tendencies, but for two more specific reasons.
First, Trump’s political impulses, expressed in the early stages of his presidential campaign, were to withdraw from the very wars the US empire depends on. Despite most of the media’s open disdain, he was criticised much more for failing to prosecute wars than for being too hawkish. And second, even as his isolationist impulses were largely subdued by the permanent bureaucracy and his own officials after the 2016 election, Trump proved to be an even more disastrous salesman for war than George W Bush. Trump made war look and sound exactly as it is, rather than packaging it as “intervention” intended to help women and people of colour.
But Trump’s amateurish isolationism paled in comparison to two far bigger threats to the war machine that emerged over the past decade. One was the danger – in our newly interconnected, digital world – of information leaks that risked stripping away the mask of US democracy, of the “shining city on the hill”, to reveal the tawdry reality underneath.
Julian Assange and his Wikileaks project proved just such a danger. The most memorable leak – at least as far as the general public was concerned – occurred in 2007, with publication of a classified video, titled Collateral Murder, showing a US air crew joking and celebrating as they murdered civilians far below in the streets of Baghdad. It gave a small taste of why western “humanitarianism” might prove so unpopular with those to whom we were busy supposedly bringing “democracy”.
The threat posed by Assange’s new transparency project was recognised instantly by US officials.
The political and media establishments, exhibiting a carefully honed naivety, have sought to disconnect the fact that Assange has spent most of the last decade in various forms of detention, and is currently locked up in a London high-security prison awaiting extradition to the US, from his success in exposing the war machine. Nonetheless, to ensure his incarceration till death in one of its super-max jails, the US empire has had to conflate the accepted definitions of “journalism” and “espionage”, and radically overhaul traditional understandings of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment.
My latest: Julian Assange was on the front line of a war to remake journalism as a true check on the runaway power of government. Journalists had a chance to ally with him. Instead they served him up as a sacrificial offering to their corporate masters https://t.co/oF2nPOix49
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) September 2, 2020
Dress rehearsal for a coup
An equally grave threat to the war machine was posed by the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of Britain’s Labour party. Corbyn presented as exceptional a problem as Assange.
Before Corbyn, Labour had never seriously challenged the UK’s dominant military-industrial complex, even if its support for war back in the 1960s and 1970s was often tempered by its then-social democratic politics. It was in this period, at the height of the Cold War, that Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was suspected by British elites of failing to share their anti-Communist and anti-Soviet paranoia, and was therefore viewed as a potential threat to their entrenched privileges.
As a BBC documentary from 2006 notes, Wilson faced the very real prospect of enforced “regime change”, coordinated by the military, the intelligence services and members of the royal family. It culminated in a show of force by the military as they briefly took over Heathrow airport without warning or coordination with Wilson’s government. Marcia Williams, his secretary, called it a “dress rehearsal” for a coup. Wilson resigned unexpectedly soon afterwards, apparently as the pressure started to take its toll.
‘Mutiny’ by the army
Subsequent Labour leaders, most notably Tony Blair, learnt the Wilson lesson: never, ever take on the “defence” establishment. The chief role of the UK is to serve as US war machine’s attack dog. Defying that role would be political suicide.
By contrast to Wilson, who posed a threat to the British establishment largely in its overheated imagination, Corbyn was indeed a real danger to the militaristic status quo.
He was one of the founders of the Stop the War coalition that emerged to challenge the premises of the “war on terror”. He explicitly demanded an end to Israel’s role as a forward base of the imperial war industries. In the face of massive opposition from his own party – and claims he was undermining “national security” – Corbyn urged a public debate about the deterrence claimed by the “defence” establishment for the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine programme, effectively under US control. It was also clear that Corbyn’s socialist agenda, were he ever to reach power, would require redirecting the many billions spent in maintaining the UK’s 145 military bases around the globe back into domestic social programmes.
In an age when the primacy of capitalism goes entirely unquestioned, Corbyn attracted even more immediate hostility from the power establishment than Wilson had. As soon as he was elected Labour leader, his own MPs – still loyal to Blairism – sought to oust him with a failed leadership challenge. If there was any doubt about how the power elite responded to Corbyn becoming head of the opposition, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times newspaper soon offered a platform to an unnamed army general to make clear its concerns.
Weeks after Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the general warned that the army would take “direct action” using “whatever means possible, fair or foul” to prevent Corbyn exercising power. There would be “mutiny”, he said. “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it.”
My latest: Corbyn's election to lead the Labour party didn't overturn the rigged political system or end the corporate chokehold on power. His victory was an accident, and the system has been fighting back with all its might to correct the error ever since https://t.co/2u0Vyo0qLU
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 3, 2019
Such views about Corbyn were, of course, shared on the other side of the Atlantic. In a leaked recording of a conversation with American-Jewish organisations last year, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and a former CIA director, spoke of how Corbyn had been made to “run the gauntlet” as a way to ensure he would not be elected prime minister. The military metaphor was telling.
In relation to the danger of Corbyn winning the 2019 election, Pompeo added:“You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”
This was from the man who said of his time heading the CIA: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses.”
Smears and Brexit
After a 2017 election that Labour only narrowly lost, the Corbyn threat was decisively neutralised in the follow-up election two years later, after the Labour leader was floored by a mix of antisemitism slurs and a largely jingoistic Brexit campaign to leave Europe.
Claims that this prominent anti-racism campaigner had overseen a surge of antisemitism in Labour were unsupported by evidence, but the smears – amplified in the media – quickly gained a life of their own. The allegations often bled into broader – and more transparently weaponised – suggestions that Corbyn’s socialist platform and criticisms of capitalism were also antisemitic. (See here, here andhere.) But the smears were nevertheless dramatically effective in removing the sheen of idealism that had propelled Corbyn on to the national stage.
By happy coincidence for the power establishment, Brexit also posed a deep political challenge to Corbyn. He was naturally antagonistic to keeping the UK trapped inside a neoliberal European project that, as a semi-detached ally of the US empire, would always eschew socialism. But Corbyn never had control over how the Brexit debate was framed. Helped by the corporate media, Dominic Cummings and Johnson centred that debate on simplistic claims that severing ties with Europe would liberate the UK socially, economically and culturally. But their concealed agenda was very different. An exit from Europe was not intended to liberate Britain but to incorporate it more fully into the US imperial war machine.
Which is one reason that Johnson’s cash-strapped Britain is now promising an extra £16bn on “defence”. The Tory government’s priorities are to prove both its special usefulness to the imperial project and its ability to continue using war – as well as the unique circumstances of the pandemic – to channel billions from public coffers into the pockets of the establishment.
A Biden makeover
After four years of Trump, the war machine once again desperately needs a makeover. The once-confident, youthful Wikileaks is now less able to peek behind the curtain and listen in to the power establishment’s plans for a new administration under Joe Biden.
We can be sure nonetheless that its priorities are no different from those set out in the CIA memo of 2010. Biden’s cabinet, the media has been excitedly trumpeting, is the most “diverse” ever, with women especially prominent in the incoming foreign policy establishment.
There has been a huge investment by Pentagon officials and Congressional war hawks in pushing for Michèle Flournoy to be appointed as the first female defence secretary. Flournoy, like Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, has played a central role in prosecuting every US war dating back to the Bill Clinton administration.
The other main contender for the spot is Jeh Johnson, who would become the first black defence secretary. As Biden dithers, his advisers’ assessment will focus on who will be best positioned to sell yet more war to a war-weary public.
The role of the imperial project is to use violence as a tool to capture and funnel ever greater wealth – whether it be resources seized in foreign lands or the communal wealth of domestic western population – into the pockets of the power establishment, and to exercise that power covertly enough, or at a great enough distance, that no meaningful resistance is provoked.
A strong dose of identity politics may buy a little more time. But the war economy is as unsustainable as everything else our societies are currently founded on. Sooner or later the war machine is going to run out of fuel.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me "The greatest thing You'll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return"
This has already been implied by some of the comments above, but it appears increasingly clear Trump was controlled opposition from the onset. An ideal/widely successful iteration of it, in many respects. He keeps his 'target audience' captivated by these theatrical would-be legal actions to pacify his fervent base, but it's never intended to be anything more than optics/theatrics. Selecting Rudy to support his case was the reveal for those paying attention: this was not an earnest effort. It helps offset frustration Re: LEGITIMATE VOTER FRAUD, which certainly occurred in this election, while never actually changing anything about outcome or process. Par for the course, naturally. Both establishment parties partake in it, historically. Sure, part of his current voter fraud pursuits are to help corral would-be consumers for his next venture (OAN, etc -- as dada alludes), but we shouldn't discount other back-door agreements. One doesn't arrive as Stooge-In-Chief without certain arrangements made -- prior to, during, and post-tenure.
The other great value-add Trump brings to the table is his ability to inspire practically half the population to be vehemently opposed to certain talking points simply because it may be tied to a tweet or comment uttered by Trump. This is quite powerful stuff.
There isn't a day when I don't consider this as a possibility.
Let's look at all the ways in which that thing we sometimes shorthand as the "deep state" went after him: a) ignored the many pecuniary crimes of the family/org before they took power and b) ignored the actual crimes against humanity of the Trump regime in power, while c) fabricating accusations about less serious crimes that d) were supposed to originate not in American ruling class SOP, as practiced by Trump his whole life, but in some vague non-existent plot by an official foreign enemy, which e) also contributed to the false take among many on the left that Trump was somehow antiwar or at least isolationist, even as he amped up the wars, and f) also promoted aggressive New Cold War policy among the anti-Trump liberals, and g) won sympathies among his supporters, since anti-Trumpism was associated with a "witchhunt" rather than real accusations, and, after the multi-year soap opera that enraptured the entire establishment, corporate media and liberal technocracy although 98 percent of the population did not even follow, h) it all shockingly (I mean predictably, of course) turned out to have no effect whatsoever in displacing trump from office, let alone putting the motherfucker in prison, but solidified his support while also turning the educated liberal set into a cultish anti-Trump following ready to believe any story about Russia etc. no matter how outlandish and prepared to be as authoritarian as the right-wingers always were, if with a non-fascist ideology and different ideas of whom they wish to stamp out. Both "sides" in this artificial binary will, in their own way, support austerity and the roll-back of speech and political rights that will mainly hit the real left, organized manifestations of real protest among the lower orders, eco-movements, and anti-war and anti-statist/capitalist critique. To take another shorthand: Trump regime and "liberal establishment" are both working to kill Assange. That about right?
Okay, so the idea of a fully scripted kayfabe version of the Trump years as one complete psyop with him playing his role is not a joke. It is unprovable, and also something that could have predictably arisen from existing elements in interaction autopoetically (I have decided this is the right spelling henceforth for this word).
All that being said, BS, you are regularly downplaying the extent to which the white supremacist/Christian fanatic/fascistoid-reactionary right-wing is a real manifestation, better organized than liberals or "the left," more systemically powerful in both conventiona politics and arguably the political economy. This convergence of ideologies has been used to organize a base by the GOP for five decades now. The success and outrages of the right have been the real hammer by which the liberals were shaped into a unified counter-authoritarianism and anti-laborism, and diverted both from any liberatory agenda as well as near any remaining sense of reality on their own part. And this genuine and powerful right-wing has also been cultivated by a lot of fucking extreme right wing authoritarian billionaire money that usually gets downplayed on RI, since y'all are so busy decrying the plots of those extreme authoritarian billionaires whom the corporate media has identified as "liberal," as if this is what they ever were.
By the way, anyone noticed the surviving Koch brother pretending to be sorry he was so partisan, even as his outfit continues to pump hundreds of millions into more of the same? I think it's a form of victory dance. You get to make your omelette and pretend you're sorry about the eggs.
As for real voter fraud, BS, I assume you mean the accustomed vote suppression measures?
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We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.
To Justice my maker from on high did incline: I am by virtue of its might divine, The highest Wisdom and the first Love.
This has already been implied by some of the comments above, but it appears increasingly clear Trump was controlled opposition from the onset. An ideal/widely successful iteration of it, in many respects. He keeps his 'target audience' captivated by these theatrical would-be legal actions to pacify his fervent base, but it's never intended to be anything more than optics/theatrics. Selecting Rudy to support his case was the reveal for those paying attention: this was not an earnest effort. It helps offset frustration Re: LEGITIMATE VOTER FRAUD, which certainly occurred in this election, while never actually changing anything about outcome or process. Par for the course, naturally. Both establishment parties partake in it, historically. Sure, part of his current voter fraud pursuits are to help corral would-be consumers for his next venture (OAN, etc -- as dada alludes), but we shouldn't discount other back-door agreements. One doesn't arrive as Stooge-In-Chief without certain arrangements made -- prior to, during, and post-tenure.
The other great value-add Trump brings to the table is his ability to inspire practically half the population to be vehemently opposed to certain talking points simply because it may be tied to a tweet or comment uttered by Trump. This is quite powerful stuff.
There isn't a day when I don't consider this as a possibility.
Let's look at all the ways in which that thing we sometimes shorthand as the "deep state" went after him: a) ignoring actual pecuniary crimes of the family/org starting before taking power and b) ignoring actual crimes against humanity of the regime in power, while c) fabricating accusations about less serious crimes that d) originate not in American ruling class SOP but in some vague non-existent plot by an official foreign enemy which e) creates the false suggestion he's somehow antiwar or at least isolationist even as he amps up the wars, f) promotes aggressive New Cold War policy, g) wins sympathies among his supporters since it all appears to be a witchhunt that discredits the real accusations, and h) all shockingly turns out to have no effect whatsoever in displacing him from office or putting the motherfucker in prison but solidifies his support while also creating a cultish anti-Trump following among the educated liberal set who i) end up as fucking authoritarian as the right-wingers always were, if with different points of emphasis as to what it is that they wish to stamp out. Both will in their own way support the roll-back of speech and political rights that will, in any case, be mainly hitting the real left and organized manifestations of real protest among the lower orders, eco-movements, and antiwar. To take another shorthand, Trump regime and "liberal establishment" both working to kill Assange. That about right?
Okay, so it's not a joke, if also not unprovable and something that could also predictably arise from existing elements in interaction autopoetically (I have decided this is the right spelling henceforth for this word). But still, you are regularly downplaying the extent to which the white supremacist/Christian fanatic/fascistoid-reactionary right-wing is a real manifestation. That's what's been cultivated by the GOP for five decades now, and its success and outrages have been the real hammer by which the liberals have been shaped into a unified counter-authoritarianism and diverted both from any liberatory agenda as well as remaining sense of reality on their own part. And this genuine and powerful right-wing has lso been cultivated by a lot of fucking extreme right wing authoritarian billionaire money that usually gets downplayed on RI, since y'all are so busy decrying the plots of those extreme authoritarian billionaires whom the corporate media has identified as "liberal," as if.
By the way, anyone noticed the surviving Koch brother pretending to be sorry he was so partisan, even as his outfit pumps hundreds of millions into more of the same? I think it's a form of victory dance.
As for real voter fraud, I assume you mean the accustomed vote suppression measures?
What you describe is pretty much how I perceive reality but don't like to dwell on nor relate to folks in meat life. Plus the two party system appears to work as opposing sides of a political Lazy Susan. The last 30 years of the Democratic party looks that way, too little too late (failure to impeach GWB, Fitzmas, impeachment of Trump, Mueller Report, 9-11 Commission, not prosecuting Iran-Contra, Democratic Administration ennacting soft versions of GOP policy).
If seriously powerful folks in the shadows didn't want Trump as POTUS or subsequently wanted Trump gone, Trump would never or at least now ever been POTUS. Seldom having a Demcratic candidate that I wanted and with one exception on the state wide level (Governor Brown) or never nationa level having the Party have a final election candidate I actually supported.
Why would you think I support Flournoy, Haines, and Haspel?
I am prepared and unfortunately expect to be disappointed by Biden and so far have been way less than impressed by his proposed appointments.
As long as neo-liberals control the Democratic party, one can expect a continuation of the neo-conservative / PNAC foreign policy agenda.
What I hope for is a path out of chaos. As long as chaos reigns, the USA will continue its death spiral with bad results for the USA and the World. The USA is not an honest or dependable broker on the World stage. Biden over Trump is a beginning and that is all.
PufPuf93 » Fri Nov 27, 2020 4:29 pm wrote:If seriously powerful folks in the shadows didn't want Trump as POTUS or subsequently wanted Trump gone, Trump would never or at least now ever been POTUS.
This is what I've had to argue quite a lot in the parapolitical community, as it goes against the general, and in my view utterly fraudulent, perception that Trump is a pariah of the so-called deep state. But what do you call someone who was basically encouraged to run by his friend Bill Clinton, afforded billions in free media coverage that helped make him the GOP frontrunner, and installed against the will of the electorate through the standard voter suppression and electronic vote rigging tactics that have benefited the likes of George W. Bush in the past, other than a deep state pick?
I post this because it's a useful compendium, and if nothing else, proves that your jesters have a firmer grasp of just what the fuck is going on than either the citizenry or media. If anyone has seen Mark Ruffalo's Dark Waters a very 'worthy' film about industrial environment murderers DuPont chemical (it's a moving and extremely infuriating movie (for all the right reasons) and also a reasonably decent drama, even if not 'great' cinema) you'll be wondering what the fuck one of their former consultants is doing running the EPA. Par for the fucking course.
If you believe you have a democracy, then any one of you who voted for any of these fucks is as responsible as they are for everything they are going to do. Just don't tell us that Trump was somehow exceptionally bad and so it was 'necessary' to continue doing exactly the same thing he did with a different brand name. He was exactly as American as Biden will be, and just as American as President Harris will turn out to be.
You cannot vote out the assholes.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me "The greatest thing You'll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return"
FUCK Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Hollywood’s Sean Penn and the reclusive Israeli billionaire, Vivi Nevo. The Clintons, House of BUSH, The Trumps, ALL, ALL!!! THAT CONSPIRE TO FULL-FILL THEIR GREED INSTEAD OF BETTERMENT OF HUMANITY.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”
Isn't there something to be said for the rise of the fascist international during Donald's tenure, by which I mean the people and parties that identify as fascists. I'd say Donald provides a certain global sense of empowerment to the far-right wing.
I don't like that. Not to mention what he's done to the poor internet.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
