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The Failed State Effort Of Indicting Trump
The effort Biden's Justice Department puts into preventing the leader of its opposition from gaining another presidency has reached an insane level.
As Inquiries Compound, Justice System Pours Resources Into Scrutinizing Trump – NY Times – Jul 23, 2023
Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing criminal investigations into former President Donald J. Trump, employs 40 to 60 career prosecutors, paralegals and support staff, augmented by a rotating cast of F.B.I. agents and technical specialists, according to people familiar with the situation.
In his first four months on the job, starting in November, Mr. Smith’s investigation incurred expenses of $9.2 million. That included $1.9 million to pay the U.S. Marshals Service to protect Mr. Smith, his family and other investigators who have faced threats after the former president and his allies singled them out on social media.
At this rate, the special counsel is on track to spend about $25 million a year.
With that budget and the brainpower of such a large staff one could find fault with anyone and indict any person for whatever without much problems.
If this would happen in a foreign democracy that is not friendly with the U.S. the State Department and various think tanks would be outraged about such anti-democratic behavior. It would be explained as a sign that the state in question is falling apart.
The main driver of all these efforts and their concurrent expenses is Mr. Trump’s own behavior — his unwillingness to accept the results of an election as every one of his predecessors has done, his refusal to heed his own lawyers’ advice and a grand jury’s order to return government documents and his lashing out at prosecutors in personal terms.
That all might be a bit outrageous but what is actual criminal with it? The government documents are back to where they are supposed to be and none were reportedly of any great significance. So why still make such a fuzz about them?
Seen from the outside U.S. internal politics now look like a bad reality show. This is not the self confident behavior of an elite of the sole superpower the U.S. still pretends to be.
There is a theory that the U.S. is undergoing some form of sovietization with a similar accumulation of defects and inefficiencies as occurred in the U.S.S.R. before it fell apart.
I am not sure that it is the case, but many significant factors – transportation, public service, health, education, industry, policies – now look worse to me than I remember them to be.
Posted by: karlof1 | Jul 24 2023 22:43 utc | 156
Thank you, kind Sir. Yes, indeed, all genuine history is revisionist, partly to correct errors or deliberate distortions, and partly to adjust understanding in the light of new ways of looking at things. We cannot see through the eyes of people centuries ago although we can try, and therefore must keep adjusting as we do so. So it is also bottomless and endless, like any authentic discipline.
Anyway, now I have two or more books on the ‘really want to read soon’ list which is already so long that at best the last word is redundant!
Re:
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bailyn analyzed pre-Revolutionary political pamphlets to show that colonists believed the British intended to establish a tyrannical state that would abridge the historical British rights. He thus argued that the Revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and freedom was not simply propagandistic but rather central to their understanding of the situation.
Well, that’s interesting. From this POV, the revolutionaries were championing fundamental Common Law liberties and rights which the British Crown (aka Oligarch class of the time) was trying to end-run around in less regulated, wilder Territories.
I am not well read on that time, though some of my forebears blood was spilt therein, but suspect that the idea of leaving their familiar domain in which ‘King and Country’ was paramount might have induced panic or heart attacks in some, so radical a break it might have felt from the established perception of bedrock reality. The sense of the individual was far different in those days, given that ties to family, local area and nation were so much stronger that self and other were experienced as being joined together in a shared, lucid dream in a vivid, visceral way that we modern people no longer experience except occasionally perhaps in time of great crisis or drama – like JFK being shot, or 9/11 or in very tight-knit rural communities or religious cults.
Perhaps the alien nature of the indigenous cultures and landscapes gave them the impetus to press forward into freedom whilst retaining what they felt were core values and elements of what they regarded as their own superior, more enlightened culture, whilst also restraining the wilder elements within their population who would welcome lawless plunder.
(After Napoleon was defeated he asked to be allowed to move to North America, Louisiana I believe, but they locked him up instead. What might have been America’s fate had The Emperor been invited to contribute?)
The blurb to The Idea of America by Gordon Wood (which has been digitized):
The preeminent historian of the American Revolution explains why it remains the most significant event in our history.
More than almost any other nation in the world, the United States began as an idea. For this reason, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood believes that the American Revolution is the most important event in our history, bar none. Since American identity is so fluid and not based on any universally shared heritage, we have had to continually return to our nation’s founding to understand who we are. In The Idea of America, Wood reflects on the birth of American nationhood and explains why the revolution remains so essential.
In a series of elegant and illuminating essays, Wood explores the ideological origins of the revolution-from ancient Rome to the European Enlightenment-and the founders’ attempts to forge an American democracy. As Wood reveals, while the founders hoped to create a virtuous republic of yeoman farmers and uninterested leaders, they instead gave birth to a sprawling, licentious, and materialistic popular democracy.
Wood also traces the origins of American exceptionalism to this period, revealing how the revolutionary generation, despite living in a distant, sparsely populated country, believed itself to be the most enlightened people on earth. The revolution gave Americans their messianic sense of purpose-and perhaps our continued propensity to promote democracy around the world-because the founders believed their colonial rebellion had universal significance for oppressed peoples everywhere. Yet what may seem like audacity in retrospect reflected the fact that in the eighteenth century republicanism was a truly radical ideology-as radical as Marxism would be in the nineteenth-and one that indeed inspired revolutionaries the world over.
Today there exists what Wood calls a terrifying gap between us and the founders, such that it requires almost an act of imagination to fully recapture their era. Because we now take our democracy for granted, it is nearly impossible for us to appreciate how deeply the founders feared their grand experiment in liberty could evolve into monarchy or dissolve into licentiousness. Gracefully written and filled with insight, The Idea of America helps us to recapture the fears and hopes of the revolutionary generation and its attempts to translate those ideals into a working democracy.
Posted by: Scorpion | Jul 24 2023 23:49 utc | 162
I finally found time to read today’s Crooke that was linked to at the outset of this thread and believe that his observations deserve a major place in this thread, for the topic is about the Outlaw US Empire’s upcoming political implosion moment: the 2024 POTUS election.
Crooke’s title reveals the topic’s focus, “Counter-Revolution – ‘Do You Know What Time It Is?’” Here’s one of several key excerpts:
In the U.S., the run-up to momentous elections is underway. The Democrats are in a fix: The party has long since turned its back on its old blue-collar constituency, engaging instead with an urban ‘creative class’ in an exalted, world-shaping ‘social engineering’ project of moral redress, in alliance with Silicon Valley and the Permanent Nomenklatura. But that experiment has run off into the weeds, becoming ever more extreme and absurd. Push-back is building.
Predictably enough, the Democratic campaign is not gaining traction. Team Biden has low, low approval ratings. But Biden family pressure insists that Biden must persevere with his candidature, and not yield to another. Either way – Biden staying or going – there is no ready solution to the Party’s conundrum of a non-performing, non-platform.
The electoral landscape is a mess. Heavy ‘lawfare’ artillery is intended to break the Trump defences and drive him off the field, whilst an attrition of disclosures of Biden family malfeasance are intended wear down and implode the Biden bubble. The Democratic Establishment is spooked too by the flanking manoeuvre of the R. F. Kennedy candidature, which is snowballing rapidly.
Put simply, the Democratic wokish ideology of historical redress is separating the U.S. into two nations living in one land. Divided not so much by ‘Red or Blue’, or class, but defined by irreconcilable ‘ways of being’. The old categories: Left, Right, Democrat or GOP are being dissolved by a Cultural War that respects no categories, crossing the boundaries of class and party affiliation. Indeed, even ethnic minorities have been alienated by the zealots wanting to sexualise children at age 5 years, and by the pushing of the trans agenda on to school children.
Crooke’s focus this time is what’s happening on the right, although as he states above, the traditional distinctions are all muddled with much boiling down to basics, like the Four Freedoms, and fundamental human rights issues, particularly the rights of children, which Belarus in its recent Human Rights Report smashed upside Uncle Sam’s head. Crooke has linked to and cited this 2+ year-old essay before, which IMO is an essential read, “‘Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough”. Here’s a very important excerpt:
First, we need to set goals. It is not enough just to smash all the bad things. Mindless chaos or anarchy is no way to achieve justice. One of conservatism’s huge errors for the last several decades has been to think big concepts like justice and fairness don’t matter. So we allowed the Left to own these ideas. Big mistake! Authentic Americans are men, not gerbils—or robots.
If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman. Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.
Authentic Americans still want to have decent lives. They want to work, worship, raise a family, and participate in public affairs without being treated as insolent upstarts in their own country. Therefore, we need a conception of a stable political regime that allows for the good life.
The U.S. Constitution no longer works. But that fact raises more questions than answers. Can some parts of the system—especially at the local and state level—be preserved and strengthened? How would that work? How do we distinguish the parts that are salvageable from the parts that are hopeless? How did all this happen, anyway? The answers to these questions are not obvious. Having a coherent plan—thinking through what American citizenship used to mean, what made it noble and made the country worthy of patriotic love, and how to rebuild its best elements—requires input from people, and institutions, who have given these matters a lot of thought.
The essay’s failure is to examine why America has failed its people–there’s not one word about money, finance or Wall Street to be found. And if we were to read something written from the Liberal side, it would also likely omit those three items. But as we well know here at MoA, The Money Power is the cause of the failure. As far as I can see via admittedly very shallow investigation, only RFKjr is making Corporate Power the political issue it needs to be, which is why he’s smeared and vilified. Here’s a very interesting possibility:
“Ukraine will be no-longer bi-partisan in terms of support, but rather will become a sword used against the hated Uni-party establishment, and any hint of a major f*ck-up will become centre-piece in this counter revolutionary war.”
Imagine, Russia has liberated almost all Ukraine by September 2024 sealing NATO’s disaster and that of Outlaw US Empire policy since WW2. Will such a disastrous defeat become an election issue given Uni-party support for decades or will they try to sweep it under the rug? The only nominal Anti-war candidate is RFKjr, and I’m stretching it there.
Posted by: karlof1 | Jul 25 2023 0:47 utc | 167
Posted by: Scorpion | Jul 24 2023 18:18 utc | 87
After decades of deliberate ‘neo-marxist’ programming with feminism and such along with, on the economic front, deliberate de-industrialization, the notion of ‘the workers’ as a class is outmoded. We are in different times now.
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Posted by: pretzelattack | Jul 24 2023 18:28 utc | 92
more word salad, in support of some vague notion about the working class being “obsolete”. tell it to the people working 2 jobs and living in their cars.
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The “outmoded” part of “the notion of ‘the workers’ as a class” to which poster Scorpion refers, I think would be to the class of workers very roughly as structured in the early 20th century, that is, large groups of workers working shifts in factories, often, doing somewhat similar jobs, ie “autoworkers”, “pipefitters”, “mineworkers “. I think the regimentation as well as natural camaraderie that already existed between these fairly significant numbers of workers probably lent itself some extent to being organized into unions. There wasn’t quite impossible amount of organizing that needed to be done, difficult and violent as it sometimes was (from the stories! from the stories!). Shift work in factories makes organizing at least very slightly simple.
Crudely, here, in this rough, quick, completely broad, sitting in my PJ’s analysis, a couple of things happened to the union movement over the latter part of the 20th century and into this one:
1)A: The unions became corrupt. I haven’t any idea how corrupt really, but it was at least somewhat noticable that some union leaders seemed to act as minor kings, mafia kingpins, what have you, wealthy in a minor way, tyrannical in some ways. Meanwhile, in the ranks, some of the higher or luckier nobodies seemed to get away with not doing any work, or at least such was said. The bulk of the membership dutifully paid there dues. Probably, there was at least some griping, probably, somewhat valid.
B: A political faction in the US, anyway, I call it Republican, but I don’t know if it was the whole party, only the ‘Pubs, or what, figured out to systematically disparage unions in general, based around these perceived failings. These people had it in for unions. I think they were for the most part business men at different levels of wealth and influence who mostly disliked having their workers having so much power. I think they were able to appeal not only to there fellow bourgeoisie, but also partly to the portion of the working class who weren’t lucky enough to be unionized. In any case, there developed, by somewhere about the ’80’s, a lot of mixed feelings toward the unions. I think, though, it was fairly systematically driven by the faction mentioned above. This accounts for much of its success.
2)The bulk of the organized, large scale factory work that was often unionized got shipped overseas. The original poster was right about this. The American factory working class cohort is mostly gone, at least for now. At the time, though, that the union work was in the process of disappearing, there wasn’t the dismay there probably should have been amongst the American working class. This was in part due to the disparaging of unions that had successfully made the notion of them partly unfavorable to many Americans.
But… that, as “pretzelattack” points, out, that doesn’t mean that the working class itself is gone. It’s now mostly doing service work, some clerical-type stuff, some other stuff like construction. I really don’t know what. It’s not working shifts in factories, but I don’t know just what my compatriots are doing mostly. This doesn’t mean, though, that they can’t be organized still. It will take a new, and different (yes, times ARE different) kind of movement. On the face of it it does look fairly difficult to accomplish. The work the workers do now, it isn’t already half organized to begin with. There appears, in service work, and in the relatively few secretaries, say, in a given office building, to be much more atomization. But, yeah, the workers are still there. They just aren’t unionized any more. To change that may be possible, but it won’t be too easy.
Posted by: jonboinAR | Jul 25 2023 2:04 utc | 175
Posted by: jonboinAR | Jul 25 2023 2:04 utc | 175
First, and this is purely from the top of my head/tip of my tongue, so forgive the lack of granular detail and footnotes, it’s important to acknowledge just how difficult it was and how much blood was literally spilled in the USA when workers (at first miners, in my family history anyway, then in the steel mills) initially stood up for their “right” to unionize and bargain collectively with the various robber barons and coal/steel magnates along the now Rust Belt, Appalachia and in the big cities like Chicago and New York. For a “quick” history lesson, watch the film “Matewan.” The men who owned “company towns” did not take fondly to paying a decent wage, allowing the workforce to buy and rent property as they pleased, and fought tooth and nail to keep workers of various ethnic extractions from forming common bonds so as to negotiate for better conditions. People were beaten and murdered, not just by “company men” but with help from local law enforcement, the feds, and private security firms like Brinks (IIRC). Union organizers were violently intimidated and would be union members blackmailed/coerced into subverting the formation of unions.
But to jonboinAR’s introductory statements, the answer is yes. For the most part the workforce – that is the working class or “blue collar” workers (many of whom were first and second generation immigrants – a topic into and of itself) toiled together in large factories, in mines, in power plants and on the railroads. And there were often company towns where everyone lived together. This did make it “easier” to form unions in the simple sense of colocation and the ability to quickly assemble and communicate. In addition, workers were drawn together by the harsh, often inhumane conditions they were forced to endure and, as mentioned, the low wages. Often union organizers were traveling men motivated by a sense of justice and brotherhood and they made their way from one company town or factory town to another, in many cases at great personal peril (the same forces violently suppressing unions kept a close eye on these men too). But the point remains, it was more practical for large groups of workers in close proximity to each other, working in bad physical conditions and for low wages to organize.
Now to item 1A. It’s my understanding that – again yes – certain unions were corrupted, including by the local mafia operatives, but also by the types of sabotage I alluded to. America has always been a land of “git rich quick” and personal greed where property ownership and material/financial wealth are viewed as prime life goals unto themselves. So owners and their henchmen could often corrupt union members and leaders with hidden perks. To the mafia, it’s my understanding that they realized the political power of unions and so they decided to infiltrate them and both bend the union’s ability to negotiate with numbers as well as hide within the union to cover their nefarious and illegal dealings. But the company owners also invited this kind of thing intentionally and otherwise. Intentionally when they viewed mafia protection and rackets as good for business and otherwise when the local mob boss had something on the business owner. Again, a topic worthy of a book.
There is another type of corruption, of course, and that’s the natural human desire for power. So many unions were to some degree corrupted by a combination of interior and exterior forces and of course still are. This definitely made it easier for the forces of finance and industrial capital to wage a PR war against all unions in general. I mean, look at them right? They’re corrupt and essentially agents of the mafia. Yet another topic that merits a whole book length discussion. And I didn’t even touch on pure laziness, which manifested famously in certain American automaker plants, to my personal knowledge in California. The unions became so powerful that essentially they did own the plant. Naturally, quality and efficiency suffered. This was the exception rather than the rule, if I understand the history correctly, but it did make for titillating print in the tabloids and other rags owned by the wealthy elite.
In any case, we have item 1B. I’ve already sort of addressed this, and you’re pretty much on the money at least through the 1980s (others more knowledgeable than myself can probably touch on Carter, Bretton Woods, and the Trilateral Commission) that Republicans, on the heels of the Powell Memo and Reagan were openly anti-union and were able to do their best to portray them as veritable extensions of Soviet Russia. So I won’t go into any more detail there.
On item 2, I also think you’re pretty dead-on. I’ll elaborate slightly. Until the Clinton presidency (again, not wanting to get into the flaws of Carter which others are more qualified to do), the Democrats generally stood up for unions, relied on their endorsements and votes, and had yet to fully kowtow to finance capital. As the jobs began leaving overseas (but first to Mexico) unions became naturally weakened due to pure numbers. The Democrats – really starting with Clinton who staffed his cabinet and advisory staff with several DINO Republican servants to the financier class – began to abandon the vanishing and fracturing working class (see: the Culture Wars as well) and started courting Wall Street and Silicon Valley investor money. This was really when “financial services” began to count as perhaps, if not the largest, the fastest growing sector of how American GDP was calculated and when the “service industry” began to take on more career workers (as opposed to teens and ‘between jobs’ adults in semi-temporary roles) and what ultimately led to the “gig economy” we have today. There’s nothing wrong with a professional waiter, bartender or cab driver, but the numbers of such positions began to outpace long-term, union-represented manufacturing and extraction jobs. With the advent of the Internet and social media (and the accompanying ‘quant’ type algo-driven ability to drive people down rabbit holes or into online stores), this workforce was much more easily manipulated, distracted and fractured.
Anyway, UPS, some rail workers, air traffic controllers, stevedores, and several other industries like actors and screenwriters have always been unionized. But a whole cottage industry of “management consultants”, many of whom specialize in (often very subtle forms of) union busting, rose up in the neoliberal ‘new world’ economy and were gladly embraced by the Waltons, Bezos’, Gates’, and other “new money” elites which helped prevent unionization of the modern workforce in the US.
Finally, to both yours and pretzelattack’s comments – exactly right. The “working class” is by no means gone. It’s 100% correct to refer to gig workers or Target employees who have no other choice but to live in their cars as such. What else would you call them? Further, teachers, police, firefighters, janitors and other NECESSARY roles in any functioning society are also part of the “working class” even if some of them are considered “middle class” completely wrongly (given the cost of living in most cities now). And yes, secretaries, even low level web designers, graphic designers, etc. It is more difficult to organize now due not only to there being so much atomization and the fact that company towns/giant mfg. plants are rarer, but also because of geographic separation (even the SAG and other showbiz unions generally had the “Hollywood” and Hollywood proper geography in common), the Culture Wars, censorship, algorithms driving both and outright hostile approaches to new types of unions forming. But I do think it’s the first step in forming class knowledge, solidarity and ultimately change for the better if things aren’t already too far gone. And given the ridiculousness of the basis for warmongering with China (e.g., the off-shoring of crucial chip manufacturing, etc.) it might be a good idea to start bringing certain industry back home even if not necessarily for the “right” reasons.
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Jul 25 2023 4:59 utc | 181
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