All that is true and he was put into power by the far left who attacked his
only real opponent while at the same time getting rich off of the same Russian
tax shelters that the Trump gang lavishes in.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2019 12:26 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Trump's Removal Can't Wait for Impeachment
Trump's Removal Can't Wait for Impeachment
Trump's Removal Can't Wait for Impeachment Mike Vucci / AP
The most powerful position in the world's most powerful nation is occupied by a
demented fascist oligarch.
He demonizes and scapegoats minorities and immigrants. He provides dog-whistle
cover for white supremacists. He sparks racist hate crimes with his vicious
nativist words. He speaks with disdain about inner-city black communities. He
tells police officers not to "be too nice" with suspects.
He packs the courts with hard-right racists, classists, sexists and
eco-exterminists, toxically reshaping the federal judiciary for a generation.
He has cultivated and rewarded Christian fascists, one of whom (Mike Pence) is
his vice president
He calls African nations shithole countries. He told four nonwhite progressive
U.S. Congresswomen to "go back to . the crime infested places from which they
came."
He has absurdly threatened to "end birthright citizenship" (the granting of
U.S. citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil under the Constitution's 14th
Amendment) with an executive order.
Trump violates international asylum law and separates migrant children from
their parents. He indefinitely detains tens of thousands of migrant children
and families in for-profit concentration camps.
He declared a fake national emergency to criminally divert taxpayer dollars to
the construction of a nativist border wall that most of the citizenry hates and
Congress refused to fund.
Believing his dotard self "the world's greatest person," he promotes an absurd
cult of personality, proclaiming himself a "stable genius." He regularly
praises dictators and despots the world over. He absurdly claims that Article 2
of the U.S. Constitution means that "I have the power to do whatever I want as
president."
Donald Trump attacks basic press freedoms. He demonizes and falsely conflates
liberals and leftists. He mocks and disrespects intellectuals and science.
He absurdly denies climate science and arch-criminally ramps up the
eco-exterminist war on livable ecology. He refused to adequately prepare for
and respond to the epic climate change-fueled Hurricanes Harvey and Maria.
He absurdly blames California's deadly climate change-driven wildfires on the
state's failure to "sweep the forest floors."
He threatened North Korea and Iran with nuclear annihilation. He provided cover
for the absolutist Saudi Arabian regime's murderous vivisection of a dissident
journalist. He funds and equips the Saudis' criminal and catastrophic war on
Yemen over Congressional opposition. Last Friday he pardoned three murderous
U.S. military war criminals.
He has turned the U.S. Attorney General into his own personal attorney. He has
conducted a corrupt foreign policy on behalf of his own economic and political
self-interest. He brazenly violates the Constitution's emoluments clause while
preposterously calling that clause "phony." He denies and obstructs Congress'
constitutional right and duty to investigate his conduct. He criminally
intimidates witnesses and whistleblowers, calling them "traitors." He describes
a constitutionally appropriate inquiry into his immoral and illegal behavior as
a "lynching" and a "coup."
His far right-wing attorney general, William Barr, argues that his executive
powers are essentially unlimited and seeks to undermine the constitutional
separation of church and state.
He wages a relentless Orwellian war on Truth, replete with more than 10,000
documentable false statements since his inauguration.
He openly flirts with calling for the use of extra-legal political violence on
his behalf by his heavily armed backers, suggesting that impeachment could
spark "Civil War." He is the first president in American history to pose a
serious threat of refusing to honor a re-election count that doesn't go his way.
This is a national, and indeed global, emergency. We need Donald Trump out of
the White House. How do we make that happen?
There's no great mystery about how citizens humble and even overthrow corrupt
and tyrannical governments. They take to the streets in significant numbers,
engaging in mass disruption for as long as it takes. Look at Algeria, Hong
Kong, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Ecuador and Chile, to mention six places where mass
protest and popular resistance have recently proven highly effective. Look now
to Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have marched against corruption, even in
the face of lethal live ammunition, and to Bolivia, where workers and peasants
are facing bloody repression to resist a neofascist coup that was immediately
applauded as a victory for "freedom"
and "democracy" by Trump.
It doesn't take the whole population to change history from the bottom up.
Five days of insurrection by 200,000 people forced the French government to
back down on its regressive gas tax last year. Extinction Rebellion leader
Roger Hallam notes that it requires dedicated resistance by just 3% of the
population to overthrow a regime. If Hallam is right, then ten days of
rebellion by a quantity of Americans roughly equivalent to the population of
the Chicago metropwolitan area could force the U.S. ruling class to get rid of
Trump.
It is unthinkable that any but a few marginal voices in the mainstream
"liberal" Democrats and their media (CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, Politico, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, et al.) would call for
peoples' power in the streets to bring down the Trump tyranny. The "liberal"
elite is fiercely committed to Fake Resistance. It may be obsessed with Trump
to the exclusion of practically everything else that ought to matter in
national and world events (popular rebellions from France to Chile, Beirut,
Quito and Hong Kong included) but they will not embrace the most effective
method of collapsing the Trump-Pence regime collapse: mass mobilization and
protest. Embracing an authentic people's resistance movement would open a
popular-democratic door that the Democratic establishment prefers to keep shut.
That establishment is instead advancing two tepid, deeply conservative
strategies that will likely fail to get Trump out and will come with dreadful
downsides-even if they succeed. Both of these strategies are designed keep the
U.S. working-class majority functioning not as engaged historical agents, but
as passive, system-trusting spectators who accede to a narrow definition of
"politics" as little more than the occasional, strictly time-staggered marking
of ballots next to the names of candidates selected in advance by the nation's
unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire.
The first of these power-serving strategies is the standard quadrennial
get-out-the-vote effort to rally citizens behind yet another corporate-centrist
billionaire-pleasing and militaristic "national security"
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Democratic presidential candidate like Jimmy
Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama,
Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or the newly minted Iowa Caucus front-runner Pete
Buttigieg-a silver-tongued right-winger (see Nathan Robinson's brilliant
take-down in Current Affairs last spring) wearing fake-progressive identity
cloaking (like a certain technically black Wall Street-serving drone
bomber-to-be in 2007). This is the same depressing neoliberal track that has so
badly betrayed, divided and demobilized the nation's working-class majority so
as to grease the skids for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich's
Contract on America, George Bush Jr, the racist Tea Party and the malignant
white nationalist Trump.
With the usual help from the anti-democratic Electoral College and racist voter
suppression in battleground states, Trump will likely prevail over yet another
dismal, dollar-drenched capitalist Democrat in November 2020. But even if the
Democrats are able to win the Electoral College count and induce Trump to leave
(with some help perhaps from constitutionalists in the U.S.
military command), putting another Wall Street Democrat in the White House will
just open door the for another neofascist white-nationalist Republican
president in 2024-possibly someone more ideologically dedicated, less obviously
corrupt and thus more dangerous than Trump.
(Yes, the Democrats could prevail if they run the self-declared democratic
socialist Bernie Sanders. But the Democrats' big money bankrollers and media
won't let that happen. The Democratic establishment's dirty little secret is
that it would rather lose to the right, even to a hard-right nationalist
right-wing party, than lose to the mildly left wing of its own party. Even the
avowedly "capitalist to her bones" Elizabeth Warren is considered "too far
left" by top Democratic Wall Street funders).
The second flawed "liberal" strategy is, of course, impeachment, likely by the
end of the year. It requires just a majority in the U.S. House of
Representatives, where the Democrats hold sway. But (as a remarkable number of
U.S.-Americans I encounter seem not to know) removal requires a two-thirds vote
in the U.S. Senate, where the nation's most racist and right-wing regions are
absurdly over-represented and the Trumpified Republican Party holds sway. The
Republican-run Senate is not going to remove the demented fascist oligarch from
office just because he tried to trade New Cold War arms for political dirt on
Joe Biden in Ukraine-not when a super-majority of Republicans "strongly
approve" of Trump's performance no matter what he does or says. And Trump may
well use "exoneration" by the Senate to his electoral advantage next November.
At the same time, the Democrats are pursuing impeachment on chillingly narrow
and imperialist grounds that whitewash the crimes of U.S. foreign policy, past
and present. Democratic politicos and talking heads proclaim House impeachment
testifier Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr. a great "national hero" and
all-around "good guy" because Taylor was a rifle company commander "serving" in
the Quang Tri and Thua Tien provinces in the United States' beloved 101st
Airborne during the so-called Vietnam War. Fellow Ukraine-Gate witness Lt. Col.
Alexander Vindman is upheld as another great patriot for "serving" in the U.S.
invasion of Iraq. How depressing: The U.S.
"crucifixion of Southeast Asia" (Noam Chomsky) murdered 2-5 million Vietnamese,
Laotians and Cambodians between 1962 and 1975. The arch-criminal U.S. invasion
and occupation of Iraq killed one million-plus Iraqis.
One need not be a fan of Vladimir Putin's oligarchic regime to wonder what's so
great about Washington's sponsorship of the corrupt U.S.-backed capitalist
Ukraine government, which is the product of a U.S.-backed 2014 coup and
contains neo-Nazis. On what grounds do top Democrats think Washington has the
right to play power politics and help fuel hot wars on Russia's western border?
"The U.S. government," Sheldon Richman tried to remind Americans one year ago,
"has no businesses policing relations between Ukraine and Russia. Even if that
role were appropriate for some party, the U.S. government would not be the one,
because it hardly has clean hands in the matter."
How would U.S.-Americans feel about Russia and/or China sending military
equipment to an anti-U.S. regime in Mexico or Canada? And if Democrats are so
committed to democracy around the world, why have none of them beyond Sanders
and a few other progressives denounced the recent neofascist coup in Bolivia or
voiced support for this year's popular uprisings in Ecuador and Chile?
Trump deserves removal not just for his crooked Ukraine shenanigans and related
obstructions of justice, but for setting up concentration camps, separating
babies and children from their families, inciting violence, interfering with
voting rights, discriminating on the basis of religion, waging criminal war,
criminally threatening nuclear war, abusing his pardon power, violating the
emoluments clause, assaulting press freedoms, backing coups in Venezuela and
Bolivia, unconstitutionally declaring a fake national emergency, violating
campaign finance laws, illegal proliferation of nuclear technology, tax fraud,
instructing Border Patrol to violate the law, stripping environmental and
public lands protections, and doing everything he can to turn the planet into a
giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber as soon as possible.
Even if impeachment leads to removal, Trump's defenestration merely for
interjecting his personal interests into Washington's imperialist policy in
Eastern Europe could constitute both an undeserved validation of that policy
and an exoneration of Trump for his much bigger transgressions. And it would
put the dangerous right-evangelical troglodyte Mike Pence in the Oval Office-a
chilling prospect.
To make matters worse, impeachment threatens to become a great rallying point
for Trump's ugly white-nationalist base while encouraging the nation's
all-too-silent progressive majority to stay seated in front of glowing
Telescreens to watch House Democrats and liberal cable news taking heads
falsely claim to be collapsing the Trump regime from the top down.
If we are serious about getting rid of the demented fascist oligarch and his
insurance policy, Pence, then we are going to have to join and expand an
authentic opposition, a real popular resistance in the streets. The effective
and meaningfully democratic way to remove Trump is not through elite procedures
designed by 18th century slaveholders for whom democracy was the ultimate
nightmare. It is through sustained mass civil disobedience-through rebellion by
and for those whom the American ruling class fears and hates the most: the
working-class majority.
The sooner Trump can be forced out, the better. Curiously enough, impeachment
makes the need to form a grassroots movement to overthrow the Trump-Pence
regime more urgent than ever. Now that he's looking at impeachment and a Senate
trial, there's no telling what Trump and his heavily armed minions might do. He
has enormous means of mass destruction and mass distraction at his neofascistic
fingertips.
We need Trump and Pence out now, not some time next year. The way to make that
happen is with a mass movement that will not only sweep him from power but
challenge the richly bipartisan racist, sexist, imperial and eco-cidal class
rule system that hatched the Trump regime in the first place.
Paul Street
