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Supreme Court Puts States Into Their Place
This is a good decision:
States can’t remove Trump from ballot, Supreme Court says – Politico, Mar 4 2024
States have no authority to remove Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday, short-circuiting efforts by his detractors to declare him disqualified over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The justices did not weigh in on the fraught question of whether Trump engaged in an insurrection by attempting to subvert the 2020 election results or stoking the violence on Jan. 6. But the high court ruled in an unsigned opinion that only Congress, not the states, can disqualify a presidential candidate under the Constitution’s “insurrection clause.”
Having the states judge over the legitimacy of a candidate would create a chaos in which federal elections would become a states against states court race, not a way to find some common representative.
It is good to see that librul and conservative judges agreed on that.
The judgment will hopefully help to tone down the shrill voices of the democratic commentators about Donald Trump.
One may not like him, ore even despise him, but he is a legitimate choice on the ballot.
Lurk @156: “Dig deep enough and you’ll find that DJT has long been very cozy with the deepest and dirtiest parts of the deep state.”
Trump is an American oligarch who dabbles in media and politics. Of course he will have had contact with the shadowy, off-budget side of the CIA. That goes without saying.
Your problem with understanding how all of this fits together is the assumption that the oligarchy running the Empire is monolithic. As well, implicit in your argument is the notion the oligarchy has everything under control, and events unfold as the oligarchy pleases. This is the same assumption underlying the posts of the Jackass poster who used to be as prolific as the shadowspammer is now. It is a false assumption.
In fact, the oligarchy is composed of factions, none of which know what is really going on, but each is certain they see solutions to the problems the Empire is facing, and they disagree with each other. The faction currently in power is headed mostly by big finance capitalists. The role of big finance in the economy allows the consciousness of those whose livelihood is immersed in it to stray from physical reality. This in turn is why many of the Empire’s projects lately result in disaster for the Empire. While the current ruling faction can remain somewhat oblivious to these disasters thanks to their disassociation from reality, the other factions can definitely see problems, and they want to change course to address some of these problems.
Furthermore, oligarchs’ business interests often put them at odds. For example, transactions between oligarchs whose wealth is based in tangible property and those whose wealth is based in finance are typically zero-sum. The transaction will be biased in favor of one or the other, and since the finance capitalists currently rule it should be obvious which way the game is slanted. Equally obvious is that the capitalists getting the short end of the transaction would be keen to reverse that power arrangement, particularly when they see the guys on top making bad decisions.
Even though oligarchs basically belong to the same club, they will happily cut each other’s throats if they can make a profit from it, and they can profit when successful at throat-cutting. While the oligarchy seems from the outside to be all chummy, they are actually out for each other’s blood/wealth.
How does this relate to Trump being selected in 2015 to be HRC’s opponent?
Normally in bourgeois democracy elections, the candidates are selected from a kennel of the oligarchy’s loyal dogs. These dogs are well trained to not make promises the oligarchs don’t want honored, and not to say things that get expectations up too high among the plebes. The point here is that typically it makes no difference to the oligarchy which dog wins… they are both functionally identical where the oligarchy is concerned. But with that said, these dogs are trained to fight and they really don’t want to lose – life for loser politicians is not so glamorous unless they are being saved by the oligarchy for later use.
Unfortunately, the 2016 elections were not exactly typical bourgeois democracy elections. In this case it mattered a great deal that one specific candidate be the winner in order to mesh with a cycle of larger plans which will be discussed later in this post. It was critically important that Clinton not face a credible candidate soas to guarantee her win. Again, it is critical to remain focused on the fact that this is not because Romney wouldn’t serve the oligarchy faithfully. This was because it was imperative for the success of a larger plan (yes, larger than the Presidency) for Clinton to win. To assure this, a politically inexperienced member of the oligarchy itself (rather than a political dog fighter) was chosen as the opponent; an opponent whose livelihood wasn’t tied to the election and who would happily throw the fight.
But Trump did win.
Not only was that supposed to be impossible, it upended those bigger plans (yes, bigger than the Presidency) that I mentioned earlier. A whole network of narrative that had been in production for decades and was supposed to be tied up with a Clinton win began to unravel.
While Trump is buddies with many of the key players in the drama, is a member of the oligarchs’ club, and clearly had no intention or expectation of winning (no transition team, no cabinet members lined up, etc), the ruling clique in the oligarchy assumed betrayal and felt Trump had not tried hard enough to lose, so the knives came out.
Again, it may be difficult for some to understand, but this doesn’t mean Trump ended up opposed to the oligarchy. Rather, Trump ended up in a power struggle with a faction in the oligarchy. A faction that happened to be dominant. That dominant faction (big finance oligarchs, remember?) took their frustration at having their “Big Plans” wrecked out on Trump, hitting him with the most over-the-top lawfare, character assassination, and mass media attacks in living memory. That probably hurt Trump’s feelings, so now he probably wants revenge.
But keep in mind I am not saying it is Trump vs The Oligarchy! It is Trump vs a faction in the oligarchy. That is tough to understand, I know, but it makes a big difference.
So what is this “Big Plan” that the ruling clique in the oligarchy has that was scrambled by Trump’s win? That relates to what Scorpion @155 said: “The US main narrative right now has two sides in a cultural-political war to prevent the other from ‘destroying Democracy’.” Caitlin Johnstone, normally a very incisive and accurate commentator, made the same mistake by asserting a false equivalency between the “woke” and the “deplorables”. “Woke” is the name applied after the 2016 elections to the mutated offspring of decades worth of progressive movements that had been coopted by the oligarchy and diverted into harmless-to-capitalism and harmful-to-workers adjuncts to the Democrat party. On top of this “wokeness” is layered lots of WEF-ish fantasy, like global population reduction (that’s why they want your kids to become trannies), eating bugs, and turning cats vegetarian. Most of all, “wokeness” is an artificial movement (forced meme; megatrend) sincerely manufactured by the ruling clique of the oligarchy to “perfect” capitalism and correct its inherent and built-in contradictions. They wish to create a kinder and gentler capitalism where a few select negroes are allowed into the inner courtyard of their “garden”. Remember the current ruling clique of the oligarchy are the most delusional of the oligarchs, so they imagine they can really pull this off, and they are OK with it if it costs seven billion human lives.
That’s the “woke”. “Deplorables”, on the other hand, are just working class people in general. It is just normal workers, some of whom are pushing back against the delusion of “wokeness”. The pushback against “woke” is purely organic. Trump and other are not creating that pushback, they are just riding it. You know this is the case because if you ask who in power is driving the anti-woke resistance, all anyone can come up with is laughable nonsense like Alex Jones. You ask who is pushing “woke”, on the other hand, and you end up with a list of almost all Fortune 500 corporations including almost all of the traditional mass media, 100% of Hollywood, recording studios, publishing companies, all the Ivy League schools, and of course everyone associated with WEF.
Don’t piss on my head and call it rain by telling me those two “sides” are equal.
“Woke” is an artificial movement deliberately crafted by the ruling class to attack the working class “deplorables”. In this regard it serves the precise same function as fascist movements do in other times and places.
Once again, Trump riding the anti-woke pushback wave doesn’t mean he is battling the oligarchy itself, but rather the faction within the oligarchy that has been dumping on him (same faction that is cultivating “woke”).
In the long view, whatever faction of the oligarchy is backing Trump will be little better than the current ruling (Big Finance) faction; nevertheless, I’d certainly like to see the gang at the top of the Empire getting mauled for a while, and they are getting mauled even as we correspond on this forum. It is delightful.
Posted by: William Gruff | Mar 5 2024 18:42 utc | 177
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