What is most interesting, is the variety of interpretations of how and why the
riot took place and what the proper response should have been and should be
now, among the various voices on the far left. There is clear evidence that
there was complicity between some people within the government with the right
wing rioters. There are various explanations as to why, given the chatter on
social media that took place for weeks in advance of January 6, there was no
security outside the Capitol. But none of these explanations, including the
story that the rally leaders had not sought a permit to march to the Capitol,
makes any sense except that people within the government were supporting a
violent takeover. There's also a debate about the nature of the rioters.
Obviously, there was a variety of people within that mob. However, whatever
their social class or deep motivation for being there, they supported racist
rhetoric and overturning an election by lawless means. Then there's all this
talk about social class. Repeatedly, I've read statistics that attest to the
fact that a majority of Trump supporters are not low income workers, but people
with middle and higher incomes. Would they have different opinions if the
history of this country were different? Undoubtedly, Would their opinions
change if the Democratic Party suddenly decided to adopt a single payer health
system? I don't have a clue. Does anyone really know? As for Twitter and
Facebook in relation to Trump, of course they should be treated as public
utilities. They should be broken up. But currently, they are what they are.
I've rethought my position and decided that treating the utterances of the
President of the United States who has power over the Military and Security of
our country when he's clearly out of his mind, as if he were like any other
citizen, would be insane and irresponsible. While Trump is still in office, I
think he should be banned. I also think he attempted to lead an insurrection.
I think he should be charged with that criminal offense. I don't know if that
can be done while he's still in office. If it can legally be done, it should
be, as should be those in our government who assisted him.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Sunday, January 17, 2021 11:05 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Trump fanatics invade Capitol as his presidency
disintegrates
Trump fanatics invade Capitol as his presidency disintegrates
https://socialistaction.org/2021/01/12/trump-fanatics-invade-capitol-as-his-presidency-disintegrates/
January 12, 2021
By Jeff Mackler
Chaos and disarray marked an electrified Washington, D.C. political scene in
the days immediately following the Wednesday, Jan. 6 President Donald
Trump-instigated rampaging mob that stormed the Capitol Building aimed at
preventing an in-session joint meeting of the U.S. House of Representatives and
Senate from certifying Joseph Biden’s Nov. 3 Electoral College victory.
The several hundred rightwing racist rioters – a small portion of the several
thousands that Trump mobilized for a rally earlier in the day – carrying Trump
and Confederate flags, an array of weapons paraphernalia, military gear and
noxious gas explosives, easily breached the Capitol Police’s unusually thin
line of security. The raging Trumpists, virtually unhindered for two-plus
hours, smashed Capitol building windows with iron bars, entered the Capitol
Dome and took possession of the Senate chambers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
office, among several others, was occupied and vandalized. The handful of
overwhelmed security guards inside proved helpless to intervene; some literally
took selfies and high fived the rioters, according to a report by Amy Goodman’s
Democracy Now! Senate security officials organized the hurried evacuation of
the assembled members of the House and Senate while others barricaded the doors
to the House in an armed standoff against the marauding intruders.
This high drama violent spectacle was captured live and broadcast around the
world including videos of frightened elected officials seeking refuge under
desks or laying on the ground as the chamber was inundated with tear gas.
Trump’s mass rally
At least 25,000, perhaps 50,000 Trump supporters had rallied earlier in the day
at the Ellipse near the White House for a long planned Trump-initiated “Stop
the Steal” mobilization to challenge the joint session’s expected Biden
certification. Said Trump in tweets to build the rally. “Big protest in DC on
January 6th. Be there! Will be wild!”
Trump addressed the rally for an hour proclaiming, “You’ll never take back our
country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We
have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the
electors who have been lawfully slated.” Declaring that he would “never
concede,” and claiming that he won the election, Trump’s presidency was
nevertheless disintegrating. The joint session reconvened early the next
morning to certify Biden’s victory, with 139 House members and 10 Senators
dissenting. Hours later, a deflated Trump, with his staff and cabinet members
resigning in droves, tweeted that he would assist in the transition to the new
president but that would not attend Biden’s Jan. 20 inaugural.
Earlier in the day Trump promised to join the planned “Stop the Steal”
march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, but instead immediately headed
to the White House, where he later frantically phoned hoped for loyal
Republicans, who had been evacuated from the Capitol and sequestered to safe
and unidentified locations, to press them to reject Biden’s certification when
the session resumed. Trump’s son and featured rally speaker Donald Trump Jr.,
denounced VP Mike Pence and other Republicans for refusing in advance to use
the joint session to reject Biden’s certification. The marching crowd chanted,
“Hang Mike Pence!
Hang Mike Pence!” A Reuters photographer, Jim Bourg, stated that he heard
Capitol Hill rioters declaring “they hoped to find Vice President Mike Pence
and execute him by hanging him from a Capitol Hill tree as a traitor.” Pence
was present when the rioters later entered the chambers, mocked, but unharmed.
Said Trump Jr. at the rally, “We’re coming for you and we’re going to have a
good time doing it.” Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolf Giuliani, who previously
played a key role in filing some 60 failed lawsuits challenging the election
results, egged on the crowd of rightwingers, “Let’s have trial by combat… Stand
up and fight!”
Minimal security forces present at Capitol
With regard to calling on security forces to defend the beleaguered and
occupied Capitol, not to mention to rescue the sequestered congresspersons and
senators, the increasingly disoriented Trump, viewing the moment as his last
hope to retain his presidency, played no role. In his absence, VP Pence took
charge of calling in various police agencies to protect House and Senate
members. In a matter of hours, not minutes, a virtual army of National Guard
troops, Capitol Police, FBI and other armed forces appeared and slowly, gently
to be sure, cleared the area following the DC Mayor Muriel Bowser” declaration
of a 6:00 pm curfew. Most of the occupying racist bigots were initially allowed
to freely leave the premises. The great portion of the original marchers that
headed toward the Capitol, wanting no part of a confrontation with security
officials, gradually dispersed and disappeared. But thousands remained.
Capitol Police shot and killed one of the intruders, 35-year-old Air Force
veteran Ashli Babbitt of San Diego, later described by officials as a strong
QAnon conspiracy theory believer. Four other Trump supporters outside the
Capitol were later reported to have died due to unspecified “medical
emergencies.” Some 14 rioters were initially arrested; 83 more were
subsequently taken into police custody as of Jan.
9. One member of the Capitol Police died, reportedly from injuries inflicted
from a fire extinguisher.
DC Mayor Bowser, in anticipation of planned acts of violence from organized
rightwing groups, including the neo-fascist Proud Boys, had earlier in the week
requested the Pentagon to deploy the National Guard.
Weeks before the event thousands of Facebook and Twitter communications
revealed violent far right intentions. Her request was denied according to some
reports, on Trump’s orders.
The stunning absence of Capitol security, especially when some 535 members of
the House and Senate were present – the formal elected national leadership of
the U.S. – appeared to be no accident. A day after the security fiasco, with
lawmakers demanding accountability from responsible officials and an
investigation demanded Republican leader Mitch McConnell, among others, Capitol
Police Chief Steven Sund submitted his resignation. By the end of Thursday, the
top security officials in the Capitol also resigned including Senate Sergeant
at Arms Michael Stenger and his House equivalent.
Ongoing resignations from Trump’s team
VP Pence’s recent break with Trump in refusing to use the proceedings to
challenge the election results put him among a rapidly growing group of top
Republican officials who have deserted Trump’s two-month campaign to retain the
presidency. Resigning Trump cabinet members immediately following the Jan. 6
Capitol takeover included Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Education
Secretary Betsy DeVos. Said DeVos in her resignation letter to Trump, “There is
no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation.” No doubt, DeVos,
Trump’s reactionary champion of the privatization of public education and the
sister of Trump pal Erik Prince, founder of the private mercenary army
corporation, Blackwater USA, (now called Academi) considered resigning rather
than take the political risk of voting against Trump’s removal should Pence
invoke procedures to do so under the 25th amendment to the Constitution.
Mick Mulvaney, a former White House chief of staff now U.S. special envoy for
Northern Ireland, also quit Trump’s administration as did a number of White
House officials, including deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger
and Stephanie Grisham, chief of staff and press secretary to first lady Melania
Trump.
Trump fired a State Department official, Gabriel Noronha, who wrote that the
president was “entirely unfit to remain in office.” Noronha tweeted, “President
Trump fomented an insurrectionist mob that attacked the Capitol today. He
continues to take every opportunity to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.
These actions threaten our democracy and our Republic. Trump is entirely unfit
to remain in office, and needs to go.”
Noronha added, “All government officials swear to uphold and defend the
Constitution. That is where our loyalties must lie, not to any man or political
party.”
After Chad Wolf, acting Department of Homeland Security secretary, urged Trump
to “strongly condemn the violence” at the U.S. Capitol. Trump removed him as
the president’s nominee to head the agency.
Former Attorney General William Barr, who resigned just before Christmas, said
that Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 was a “betrayal of his office and
supporters.”
The kid glove treatment of the racist Trump mob that aimed at physically
preventing the certification of Biden’s presidency stood in marked contrast to
last summer’s brutal clubbing, gassing and blinding rubber bullet firing
violence and mass arrests unleashed against the peaceful DC mass mobilizations
to protest the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. Trump took the lead
in orchestrating that horror, pretending to invoke the authority of the 1807
Insurrection Act. Whether or not the relative absence of security forces on
Jan. 6 will be attributed to Trump himself or to complicit racist security
forces remains to be determined.
Biden, himself, with a decades long record of complicity with, if not
facilitation of southern racist segregation norms, not to mention his more
recent role crafting racist mass incarceration oriented legislation, felt to
the need to comment on the near absence of security forces. Said Biden, “No one
can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting
yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently from the mob
of thugs that stormed the Capitol.
We all know that’s true. And it’s unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.”
Debate over Trump impeachment vs, invoking 25th amendment to remove Trump
Whether to impeach Trump with a second House resolution or to press his now
estranged VP Pence to invoke the 25th amendment to immediately remove Trump
from office are among the issues now under discussion at a time when Trump’s
very stability, if not sanity, is being questioned as never before. House
Speaker Pelosi was reported to have called General Mark Milley, chair of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss barring Trump from access to the secret
doomsday security codes required to launch nuclear war!
The 25th amendment allows Vice President Pence and a majority of Trump’s
sitting cabinet to affirm that the president is unable to fulfill the duties of
his office. If they should so affirm, Pence, who to date has declined invoke
the 25th amendment, would immediately becomes the acting president and then
president, following a required two-thirds vote of the House and Senate. In the
waning days of Trump’s presidency neither of the above scenarios is likely.
Should one or another come to pass nothing of great import for the American
people will result, other than the further humiliation and possible prosecution
of an already ruling class-discredited Trump and a legal ban on his running for
president in 2024.
On the real issues of the day – the great issues of out times – an
unprecedented economic crisis where the real rates of unemployment and
underemployment have approached 40 percent, where millions face immediate
eviction or foreclosures, where daily COVID-19 deaths have reached 4,000, where
a raging climate crisis threatens cataclysmic disaster and the U.S. imperial
war machine inflicts daily horrors on poor and oppressed people around the
world – neither party of the ruling rich has any solutions.
Historical truths revealed
The unfolding events surrounding the storming of the Capitol inadvertently
revealed some historical truths long hidden from public scrutiny. Illinois
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, for example, in countering Ted Cruz’s joint
session move to establish a commission to review the elections results rather
than certify them as the law requires, invoked the memory of an 1877 Electoral
College commission whose “compromise” effectively changed the outcome of the
1876 election.
Referring to this “devastating Compromise of 1877” Durbin stated, “The senator
from Texas [Ted Cruz] says we just want to create a little commission. Ten
days, we’re going to audit all the states…and find out what actually occurred.
It’s parallel to 1876, Hayes and Tilden. Don’t forget what that commission
achieved: It was a commission that killed Reconstruction, that established Jim
Crow, that even after a Civil War which tore this nation apart, it re-enslaved
African Americans, and it invited the voter suppression we are still fighting
today.”
Perhaps well intentioned, Durbin, a Democrat, got some of his facts wrong. The
1876 election between Republican Rutherford Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden
saw Tilden win the popular vote. But Republican Hayes negotiated an Electoral
College win based on his agreement to withdraw the occupying Northern federal
troops from the Southern States.
The North’s troops were permanently stationed there at the end of the Civil War
to prevent the defeated slavocracy plantation owners, founders of the
Democratic Party, White Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan, from regaining
power and effectively nullifying the newly-enacted constitutional amendments
that guaranteed equal rights to former slaves.
In short, in return for the presidency the Republicans placed the former
slavocracy Democrats back in power, where their heirs, including those who
joined the Republicans in the Nixon era, remain today. In any case, today’s
Republicans had no such booty to offer or inclination to entice Democrats to
part with Biden. Indeed, the ruling class as a whole understands quite well
that a Biden presidency, minus Trump’s moronic bluster, will not differ in its
fundamentals from the decisive bipartisan polices adopted over the past four
years.
Jan. 6 was no insurrection or coup attempt
“What happened at the U.S. Capitol yesterday was an insurrection against the
United States, incited by the president,” said Democratic Party’s now Senate
Majority leader Chuck Schumer of New York. Republican Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell from Kentucky called the attack a “failed insurrection.”
[Editor’s note: With the recent election of Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and
Reverend Raphael Warnock the Democrats captured the Senate majority.] Contrary
to the multiple assertions of insurrection or an attempted coup, what took
place on Jan. 6 was the product of the delusions of an egomaniac narcissist
accidental president, Donald Trump, who believed that he could game the
capitalist system and bypass its fundamental ruling class power brokers, not to
mention its beholden national security state apparatus and military
establishment. All of the above largely deserted Trump either during the
pre-election period or immediately after.
Today’s class polarization
The Jan. 6 DC Trump mobilization was matched by much smaller mobilizations in
other cities, including in Los Angeles, where a Black woman observing the event
was brutally attacked. The fact that some 74 million voted for Trump in 2020
informs us that in increasingly desperate times, wherein millions of workers
and small business owners have seen their lives fundamentally undermined by
massive plant closures, pension and health care losses and a generalized
bipartisan attack on their standard of living and quality of life, significant
numbers have turned to reactionary “anti-establishment” demagogues like Trump.
We have seen similar phenomenon around the world from, England to Eastern
Europe to Brazil in Latin America. In the U.S. many supporters of these
reactionary currents, but far from all, have been imbued with virulent
scapegoating racist and anti-immigrant prejudice. In these increasingly
difficult times they are susceptible to Trump’s hatemongering and even more so
to high-powered tirades against the corporate “Washington, D.C. swamp
dwellers.” But these currents have far from coalesced into fascist-type
formations that in times of great stress and when powerful working class
mobilizations threaten capitalist prerogatives are called on to use force and
violence to defend capitalist rule. No such fascist force exists today. Indeed,
of the tens of thousands of Trumpists in Washington on Jan. 6 only a relative
handful of posturing bigots and individuals associated with Proud Boy neo-Nazis
stormed the Capitol, believing with zero foundation that they could alter the
Nov. 3 election result, not to mention the nature of ”democratic” capitalist
rule.
Humanity’s future
In glaring contrast, an estimated 20 million youth and working people in
2,000 U.S, cities joined the summer Black Lives Matter mobilizations that
exceeded in sheer numbers any other working class mobilizations in U.S.
history. Today, neither the reactionary Trumpists or the fighters for Black
freedom, liberation and social equality have established definitive forms of
organization, the former tied to an increasingly discredited ranting demagogue
incapable of dealing with an out-of-control deadly pandemic and a debilitating
economic crisis and the latter momentarily detoured into the graveyard of
social movements, the Democratic Party.
Today, humanity’s future rests more than ever in the capacity of working people
to build new and independent fighting formations to defend their interests and
meet the challenge posed by capitalist barbarism. This will in time focus on
the building of a qualitatively expanded, militant and democratically organized
trade union movement in alliance with all the oppressed and exploited. Such a
movement will champion workers’
interests in communities across the country, at the point of production and in
the political arena via the formation of a mass fighting labor party.
Humanity’s future also rests on the emergence and consolidation of a new and
independent Black, Latinx and Native American leadership to champion the
struggles of the most oppressed and exploited and establish democratic control
of their communities while opening the way to the formation of independent
Black and Brown parties in the political arena.
To help organize and unify the diverse social struggles ahead requires the
construction of a deeply rooted mass revolutionary socialist party.
Socialist Action aspires to be that party. Join us!
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