What will incoming Dems do to reverse the damage?

Like cosmic background radiation reminding our universe of the Big Bang, Trumpism will spew its component parts in all directions at astronomical speeds once it implodes as a supernova. We can see this process gathering hyper-velocity now, his strange, white-dwarf universe shrinking and collapsing around the tiny point of its unstable star.

The Trumpoid ejecta will contain valuable clues as to precisely which properties of modern political physics came together to blow up governance in the United States as the world looked on in appalled amusement. These elements predate Trump; he did not invent them, and their poisonous effects will survive him. What remedies will be applied? By whom?

Those who have turned Nov. 3 into a fetish object, insisting that All Will Be Well once a (D) replaces the (R) on our national throne, will take little interest in the repair work. These are the Facebook faces turning purple with rage at any suggestion that Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are not a three-person godhead poised to batter our nation’s sinful heart and redeem us from Trumpian evil. They refuse to acknowledge that when Trump is thoroughly discredited (and the repudiation will reach world-historic heights), the forces that brought him into being remain intact. The Democrat hierarchy has no track record of truly opposing these tendencies and in fact is complicit with many of them. We should be thinking hard now about how to address the damage in 2021 and beyond.

It’s hard to recall now, given the budding love affair between mainstream Dems and George W. Bush, but once upon a time Bush’s term in office was also considered a disgrace, so much so that he, a sitting president, wasn’t invited to his own party’s convention in 2008. (Neither was Cheney.) The economy was in the toilet thanks to years of corrupt non-regulation of the banking and mortgage sector, and the illegal conquest of Iraq, sold to us with a pack of lies, was turning into the criminal quagmire that it remains today.

Obama sailed into office and promptly turned the page on all that in the spirit of bipartisan kissy-face, which he claims to have thought would lead to a technocratic, kumbaya consensus with the reprobate Republicans grateful at the second chance he was giving them. It didn’t.

The Bush-era actions that Obama et al. decided to consign to unexplored history included: the destruction of habeas corpus by the creation of dungeons at Guantánamo where people are (still) held without trial; a regime of systematic torture of prisoners using secret drop-off sites in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and elsewhere; destruction of the evidence of same, including videotapes, by the CIA; illegal wiretapping and electronic surveillance of citizens in violation of the 4th Amendment as exposed by Edward Snowden (Senator Obama voted to grant retroactive immunity to the telecom partners); rampant bank fraud leading to the 2008 financial collapse and loss of home equity by 8 million households (many African-American); grotesque tax cuts for the hyper-wealthy. None of these profoundly destructive patterns of criminal and/or immoral behavior led to investigation, a public airing of what occurred, prosecution, or reversal. At best, there were squishy attempts at “reform,” most of which could be ignored, watered down later, or reversed.

Obama then deepened the rot by: persecuting journalists like James Risen and Julian Assange, paving the way for Trump’s more demagogic attack on Fake News; crushing the Occupy movement with an 18-city coordinated paramilitary attack; suppressing evidence of bankster crimes while reassuring the financier oligarchs that he was “standing between you and the pitchforks”; undermining the historic opportunity for truly universal health care with the insurance-friendly Obamacare mess (handing Congress back to the Republicans in the process); leaving intact the crushing student debt that is bankrupting entire generations; and so on.

In short, Obama and the Democrats became partners in much of the worst of the W era, pushing the window of what is now possible, both in terms of overt crimes and the ongoing looting of the nation by the rentier elite, sharply in the wrong direction. Obama himself, the quintessential centrist, chided critics with paternalistic admonishments about the limits of what was possible, limits which he had done little to expand.

All of which led directly to Trump’s election.

Many found Obama’s discourse as president measured, lofty, and statesmanlike; I thought he was a pompous ass. But there’s no arguing with success. He left office with considerable popularity and while in office convinced a goodly part of the masses that someone was on their side, despite the evidence of their own gradually sinking attempts at maintaining a livelihood. Now we are at a similar juncture as the slash-and-burn Republicans prepare to leave a trashed and looted nation to the next series of Democrat stand-ins.

But we are not in 2009. Twelve years have passed in which the rich have become richer, the yachts huger, the prisons fuller, the debts heavier, the racists scarier, the cops bloodier, and the planet hotter—all before the breakdown of everything brought on by COVID-19. And we have, to lead us out of this thicket of simultaneous social crises: Joe Biden! Mr More-of-the-Same running a Hidden Basement Campaign, which is set to succeed by default. A figure built on yesterday’s vaguest ideas wrapped in contentless word salad that the poor fellow can’t even spit out in full sentences.

It would take the pen of a Trotsky to describe to what profound depths our political culture has sunk for it to present to us these two caricature candidacies at a moment of such gravity for all humanity. Obama arrived during an acute crisis of late capitalism and served it well; he cobbled together some salvage measures so the plutocrats could dump the costs on the most vulnerable and bounce back untouched. Meanwhile, he soothed the populace with fine phrases. The crisis was not solved, but merely kicked forward, and is now upon us again. But the complete absence of credible leadership from any quarter suggests that the system has no idea how to save itself this time around.

It is particularly curious that in this all-important election year, the usual dynamics of a presidential campaign have mostly disappeared, and not just because of the lock-down measures taken to try to save our immune systems. After the mad scramble of the early primaries, with endless debates and literally dozens of potential leaders to choose from, it now seems as if all that talk of putting someone in charge is an afterthought. Even Bernie Sanders sounds like a lost anachronism as he pounds away at his 50-year-old discourse about serving working people instead of the billionaires.

Have we accepted that no one is in charge? And that no one is riding to the rescue? Into the vacuum will surge new social forces—how healthy they are depends upon us.

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Would a transgender police chief solve our problems?

What if a major city facing a crippling upheaval against police abuses were to hire a transgender woman to take over law enforcement? It’s not a crazy idea, notwithstanding the Almodovarian implications, given the budding panic setting in at city halls around the country. What better gesture to the relentless crowds hitting the streets daily to demand radical change than to elevate the maximum symbol of wokeness and gender-bending, identitarian emancipation?

I knew a lot of transgender ladies during the time I ran an AIDS education and support group physically located at the main corner of transgender sex work in Santiago, Chile, and I can attest to the fact that they knew a great deal about how to handle violent men. I would gladly have accepted the services of many of them if I ever needed a bodyguard, and I don’t think that finding a credible candidate from among their ranks to buckle on some enforcement gear and manage the notoriously macho ranks of uniformed officers is a far-fetched notion.

But would it work to neutralize the deep perception of police departments as free-lance armies of occupation? It depends on what you think policing is about in our society as presently constituted. The mainstream view is that their job is peacekeeping, chasing down criminals, and protecting property. Residents of New York’s minority neighborhoods often don’t see it that way because their experience of the cops is permanent petty harassment combined with a surprising lack of competence in actually rooting out the crime that plagues their neighborhoods. A cynical wag might even conclude that eliminating crime isn’t really in a PD’s interest given that a steady stream of offenses keeps the arrest and prosecution numbers high, thus justifying more gear, more personnel, and more public deference.

Then there’s the opposite notion, that police exist to protect the assets and profits of the owner class, and on that score a moment of truth is about to arrive. Our three-month moratorium on evictions here in the city is about to end in a few days, at which time we will see a flood of cases in housing court by landlords seeking to oust non-payers, many of whom are now destitute and have no chance of coughing up $3000, $4000, or $5000 they owe in arrears. Police will be assigned the task of getting these people out of their now illegally occupied homes, and the BLM marchers may well be inspired to show up to express their opinions about what is taking place. At that point, anything could happen.

The marches are now surprisingly popular and draw broad support because they are mostly polite and well-behaved. The TV newscasters here express a fetishistic obsession with their peaceable nature, but when push literally comes to shove, these pious observers may find the tenor and consequences of the debate over what the police should do, when, and toward whom, to be more than a philosophical consideration.

A more immediate question, given that New York City is finalizing its annual spending plan, is how loud will the explosion be when Mayor De Blasio’s cop-worshipping budget proposal gets blasted into outer space. De Blasio originally tried to zero out all summer youth employment funding while not cutting a dime from the NYPD, despite the pandemic-induced plummet in revenues. In a bold attempt to get out in front of the rebellion and call it a parade, he pivoted to a $400 million cut. The latest figure bandied about is a reduction of $1 billion, or 1/6 of the police budget—which would put it back to roughly the spending level of 2013 when De Blasio took office after getting elected as a reformist progressive.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court this week ruled that LGBT persons are included as a protected population under the terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so police departments no longer have any grounds to refuse a TG applicant who then could move quickly up the ranks to a supervisory role, perhaps just in time to send out her riot squads to evict one of the black families who cheered our BLM demo last weekend.

If the fight over policing turns into a real, well, fight over policing, we needn’t waste time wondering how the courts are going to feel about that. That’s where the Supremes long ago set the tone by eagerly crippling unions, opening the floodgates to secretive political slush funds, and generally kowtowing to corporate and elite interests. Once the conflict returns to the realm of haves versus have-nots, our courts will be quick to send rent strikers, the jobless, or the destitute packing, no matter who is sharing the beds indoors with whom.

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Police “reform” is a failure because The Police think they are The State: Part 1

An anecdote from post-dictatorship Chile: a guy I knew slightly in Santiago had a job working for the first civilian president after 17 years of dictatorship and secret police terror. Patricio Aylwin was a Christian Democrat who had supported Pinochet’s coup like many “moderates” (equivalent to the mainstream Democrats of our day) and was elected in 1989 after a negotiated transition process that left Pinochet as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

My friend compiled the news reports of the day and sent a digest in to the president-elect along with the newspapers and magazines. (Aylwin hadn’t yet taken office.) He related to me that the police guards assigned to Aylwin’s home, carabineros (members of the national police who had military rank and whose commander previously sat on the four-man junta along with Pinochet), routinely intercepted the day’s newspapers, casually read whatever they fancied, and thought nothing of leaving the marks of their coffee cups on the president’s personal copies.

It was a minor but telling detail: these low-level police foot soldiers had so little fear of the ire of their ostensible civilian superior that they metaphorically put their feet up on his desk and spat on his carpet. Aylwin didn’t notice (or pretended not to), but the message was clear: our real boss is the guy in uniform, not some wanker politician in a suit.

This made me recall an interview I had with a long-retired military guy who lived around the corner from me in Ñuñoa, Gen. Roberto Viaux, a key figure in two attempted coups before Pinochet’s successful one. Although one of the attempts led to the murder of the Army chief, Viaux’s superior, he was allowed to decamp for exile in Paraguay and later to come back to Chile to live out his retirement.

Viaux was delusional and thought someone was going to come knocking on his door to play a new and heroic role when in fact he had long become a footnote to history. But he explained to me something absolutely central to military thinking: the armed forces and the nation, in the generals’ view, are one and the same. The nation exists if and only if the armed forces exist. In fact, let’s capitalize both: once the Armed Forces are gone, The Nation disappears. The two entities’ essences intermingle in a form of consubstantiality like that of the Three-Person Deity, with citizens relegated to a sort of misty Holy Ghost-ish role.)

Something similar operates in the miasmatic airs of One Police Plaza and not just in New York City. Law enforcement has long abandoned the view that its ranks exist to serve the city—they think they are the city. This was obvious a few years ago during the last “I Can’t Breathe” crisis when Mayor de Blasio made some conciliatory statements about how his own mixed-race son might be viewed by a trigger-happy cop. The police union had a cow over that, and shortly afterward two auxiliary officers were gunned down by a suicidal assailant who may have been angry about police abuses. Hundreds of officers then turned their backs on De Blasio when he spoke at the funeral.

This open act of insubordination made it clear that the ranks of the NYPD respond to their own hierarchy, not to the city that pays their hefty bills (and their overtime and their generous pensions after 20 years of service). It happened again this week when De Blasio’s daughter was arrested at a demonstration and had her bust sheet immediately leaked and circulated on social media by the cops who technically work for her father.

It’s even more obvious when police departments around the country respond to citizen demands for an end to state-sponsored murder by criminalizing their assembly and their speech. (Yeah, yeah, I know, arson and looting—we’re not talking about that.) The idea that someone should attempt to determine the parameters of public life or dare to assert limits on their deployment of the use of force is deeply offensive to their institutional self-concept.

Does this apply to every line officer or beat cop? It doesn’t have to. The belief system flows downward from the top, and the ideological true believers hold sway. I suspect that’s why so few cops of color dare to intervene to stop the white officers who overwhelmingly account for the excessive force abuses. They know who will get back-up from the system and who won’t.

And this is why “reform” of police practices is just a shiny object held out to distract children. Cops don’t need sensitivity training. They need a political revolution that restores them to their true role as public servants with a heavy burden of trust, i.e., the right to use deadly force, and the sanctions that come with misusing it. This change can only come from a restored civilian authority empowered by mass repudiation of the police as army of occupation.

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