Pence or Trump, it's all quite depressing to me. About all I can do
is make what sense I can from the information I have access to, and
observe. I know that I can hold to my own values, and that keeps me
going. Sadly, I don't hold out much hope for the people most in need.
The Brain Washing today is so all inclusive, and money worship has
become such a dominant factor in our lives, it seems that I am pushing
that big rock up the steep hill...over and over.
Mostly I stay in my routine, listening to all the tragic news. But
from time to time I simply have to pull my head in and listen to some
good music instead. This morning I heard of a little 7 year old girl
gunned down while riding in a car with her mother and her 3 sisters.
A little life stolen by an insane man. Yes, he is White, and yes, she
and her family were all Black. But they could have been Muslims, or
Asians, or Indians, Or Mexicans, or Gay, or simply just in the way of
that man's rage.
On 1/3/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A lot of people talk about the danger of Pence. I understand what they're
saying. But there is something about Trump's madness, coupled with his
ability to attract media attention and gather extremist elements of our
society, that is very worrying. I don't think that Pence has the charisma to
do that. He's an extremist and he's more organized, but he wouldn't have the
same kind of following as Trump.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2019 6:00 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Could This Be Our Best Hope of Removing Trump
From Office?
Miriam,
If I begin to ponder an answer to this note of yours, I will probably hunt
down that bottle of rum. I begin thinking, and suddenly it's like I'm in a
maze of looking glasses. Or maybe i'm in a rubber room.
We seem to have even fewer options than Americans had back in the 1890's. I
keep telling myself that I have faith in the working class.
But then I look around and find that many of them are living under the
bridges.
I just don't see Pence making things better.
And I don't see a Democratic Party holding the line.
The good news is that Cathy is brewing up a Turkey Noodle Soup. Some things
never change!
Carl Jarvis
On 12/29/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
That may be true. But I have this feeling that even though the system
would remain the same, it would be a very good idea, for several
reasons, if it were possible, to remove this particular madman from
the Presidency. The author of this article, is basically saying what
Chris Hedges says, which is what you just said. But I think that the
longer Trump stays in office, the more power he will have, the more
danger he will bring to all of us, and the harder it will be to return to
any kind of sanity in this country.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2018 11:50 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Could This Be Our Best Hope of Removing
Trump From Office?
Removing Donald Trump is like removing a Thorn, but failing to clean
out the Pus.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/27/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Could This Be Our Best Hope of Removing Trump From Office?
President Donald Trump. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
The dog whistle couldn’t have been any clearer. When Donald Trump
said two weeks ago that “the people would revolt” if he were
impeached, his extremist base of neo-Nazis, Klan members, right-wing
militias and sympathetic service members likely heard the following:
“Feel free to attack Democrats, liberals, leftists and progressives
if the coming Democratic Party-run House of Representatives acts on
its constitutional right to impeach me.”
Impeachment alone probably wouldn’t trigger a right-wing uprising.
But impeachment followed by the unlikely prospect of removal, which
requires 67 votes in the Republican-majority U.S. Senate, might well
make it happen. So too could invoking the 25th Amendment on the
grounds that Trump is incapable of performing his presidential duties.
Officially, the Democratic Party—led by corporate allies like Chuck
Schumer and Nancy Pelosi—isn’t interested in moving ahead with either
of these constitutionally available processes. That could change,
however, if and when the report from special counsel Robert Mueller
directly implicates Trump. But even if the party’s efforts proved
successful, America would be left with President Mike Pence—an
honest-to-goodness Christian fascist.
The case for Trump’s ouster grows stronger by the week. Beyond his
possible obstruction of justice, criminal acceptance of foreign
emoluments while in office and felonious campaign finance
violations—any one of which could provide grounds for legal
proceedings against him—the president has routinely embraced
authoritarian rulers around the world and engaged in obvious appeals
to violence. He has, at every turn, revealed himself to be entirely
unfit for office.
Ironically, the most effective means of achieving his removal may be
to revolt, albeit in a fashion radically different from the one the
president has envisioned. America must instead engage in civil unrest
that targets not just the current inhabitant of the Oval Office but
the entire bipartisan ruling class that birthed his monstrous
presidency. Forget Watergate; think sit-down strikes and the march
from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.
The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) in France have given us a taste of
what’s required. Among their list of demands is a real and
functioning democracy—popular self-rule. Further to that, they have
called for a referendum whereby 700,000 citizen signatories would
force the French Parliament to debate and vote on a given law within
one year. Evoking the French Revolution of 1789, there have even been
calls for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution meant to
create a new French government—a Sixth Republic based on popular
sovereignty and majority rule rather than the demands of a de facto
corporo-financial dictatorship.
Imagine!
That Trump has never had a functioning democracy to overthrow is
evidence enough that this kind of activism is long overdue. Released
in the early spring of 2008, Sheldon Wolin’s classic study “Democracy
Incorporated:
Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism”
revealed that the U.S. was no longer a “democracy,” if it ever had
been. America, Wolin found, had mutated into a new sort of
totalitarian regime wherein economic power and state power were
conjoined and virtually unchecked by a demobilized, atomized and
politically disinterested populace, conditioned to stay that way. “At
best,” Wolin determined, “the nation has become a ‘managed democracy’
where the public is shepherded, not sovereign.”
“Should Democrats somehow be elected,” he prophesied, they would do
nothing to “alter significantly the direction of society” or
“substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a
Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the
crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and
anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.”
Sure enough, a nominal Democrat was elected president along with
Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2008. What
followed under Barack Obama (as under the prior Democratic
administration of Bill Clinton) was standard-issue neoliberal rule in
the service of big-money bankrollers and their global empire. The
nation’s first black president implemented the preferred policies of
Wall Street and the Pentagon more effectively than wealthy white
Republicans like John McCain or Mitt Romney could have ever hoped to.
America’s “inverted totalitarianism” was rebranded, to deadly effect.
Fed by a widespread and easily exploited sense of abandonment and
betrayal, the country’s rightward shift grew more pronounced, as the
Democrats depressed and demobilized their purported base. Over a
period of eight years, the party lost more than 1,000 elected offices
nationwide, including the U.S. presidency.
Along the way, its power brokers managed to stamp out a progressive
insurgency from Bernie Sanders through dubious means, clearing the
field for a deeply unpopular candidate in Hillary Clinton. And in so
doing, they handed the populist torch to a far-right reactionary in a
change election.
We should expect a similar outcome from the Democrats’ presidential
nomination process in 2020. The smart money is on anti-populist Joe
Biden or the telegenic faux-progressive Beto O’Rourke—this despite
the continued popularity of Sanders and his progressive agenda.
One year after Hillary’s ignominious defeat, the distinguished
liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin
Gilens
(Princeton) published their expertly researched book “Democracy in
America?”
The volume’s key finding: “The best evidence indicates that the
wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on
the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and
organized interest groups—especially business corporations—have had
much more political clout.
When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the
general public has been virtually powerless. …”
Whether we vote or not, Mammon reigns in the United States, where, as
Page and Gilens note, “government policy … reflects the wishes of
those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens
who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved,
money-vetted candidates for federal office” (emphasis added). Plus ça
change, plus c’est la même chose.
(“The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”)
Perhaps our only hope is a mass movement for “the radical
reconstruction of society itself”—what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
called “the real issue to be faced”—and the replacement of the
unelected and interrelated dictatorships of capital and empire by
popular sovereignty and workers’ control. As Chris Hedges wrote
earlier this year:
“The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a
half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process
of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our
failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live
in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations
around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished
in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The
problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by
corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties,
in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by
dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained
civil disobedience. … If we do not stand up, we will enter a new dark
age.”
(Emphasis added.)
“A new dark age” may ultimately prove euphemistic. The original Dark
Ages concluded with the planet still habitable. Humanity now faces
the near-term historical threat of extinction thanks to the grave
“ecological rifts”
generated by a global profit system upheld by both ruling parties
that is turning earth into a great, big Greenhouse Gas Chamber. “The
uncomfortable truth,” philosopher Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 17
years ago, “is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement
in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.”
Sustained civil disobedience in the United States could provoke a
response far bloodier than anything seen in France. But while the
human costs of revolution are great, none can compare with the
ecocidal rule of capital.
Paul Street
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton
University.
He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago
Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous
