Dangers of a Biden Administration

Trump is terrible, okay we got that out of the way.

Biden’s attacks on the collapsing Trump "government," despite a few rhetorical bows to Bernie’s platform, is heavy on symbolism in the domestic realm. In foreign policy the Biden-ite discourse is arguably worse than Trump’s, who has been fairly consistent in avoiding new wars and even has taken steps—horror of horrors—to end old ones.

One thing you have to credit Democrats for: they know how to sniff the winds for the aroma of shifting zeitgeists. They’re all over getting rid of Confederate flags, ending the celebration of slave-owning rebel generals, and sporting kente cloth at their kneeling ceremonies. They will publicly worship the late John Lewis, who was a loyal member of their team, and quote Martin Luther King (except not the antiwar or anti-capitalist parts).

Of course, in another era mainstream Democrat symbolism took a slightly different tack, such as when Bill Clinton staged his 1992 campaign event at Stone Mountain, Georgia, [top] where the new Ku Klux Klan celebrated its revived role during the Jim Crow era. Clinton was making sure no one would Willie Horton him and so arranged a line-up of black prisoners as the backdrop to his speech, flanked by a phalanx of southern Democrat pols hostile to the fading civil rights movement.

And the Clinton flirtation with southern fried racism didn’t end with mere gestures. Sax-playing Bill, the “first black president” according to Toni Morrison, followed up with the hugely successful 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—if you define “success” as putting hundreds of thousands of black guys in prison for long periods. Also if “vote blue, no matter who” is your entire political philosophy: cue today’s Democrats vowing to “fight for” reductions in these Draconian mandatory minimum prison terms that they were so instrumental in establishing. If they fail, of course, it will be the meanie Republicans’ fault now that the damage is done. Few will want to dredge up Senate majority leader George Mitchell’s statement that “This is a Democratic bill. The author of the bill is a Democrat. The principal supporter for this bill is a Democratic president.”

I rehash this old news to remind those eager to go back to bed—once Joe Biden is at the White House podium and putting everyone, including himself, to sleep with his recitation of bland nothingburgers—that the nation faces a series of deeply threatening crises that will not go away once Trump is dispatched to the dustbin. Simply removing the killer clowns from outer space who have leered at us for 3 ½ years won’t do a thing—we need radical policy changes and a fighting spirit equivalent to that of the white supremacists and neo-feudal minions of billionaires who now populate our mis-leadership class. We need someone who will jettison the Obama legacy of buckling to the felonious plutocrats, roll back both Bush’s and Trump’s obscene tax giveaways, resuscitate the long-dead antitrust function of government (targeting especially the internet mega-monopolists who mouth woke platitudes while ripping us off), immediately restore some emergency environmental protections, break with neoliberal orthodoxy to refashion an industrial policy that serves workers rather than corporate grifters, and come to the rescue of a populace caught between the Scylla of coronavirus and the Charybdis of debt peonage.

Bernie Sanders seems to think Biden is up to this, and while I find Bernie painfully credulous, he may be right about one thing: the pressure from below is going to be immense. Whether that pushes the corrupt Democrat machinery into first gear or not remains to be seen or, more exactly, forced to occur, by us. But there are possibilities not glimpsed in a long time.

That said, we should take note of a likely diversionary tactic emanating from the permanent war party frustrated by Trump’s unwillingness fully to indulge their belligerent fantasies: Democrat-led war scares. Biden has already said he has no interest in restoring the treaty with Iran (even if the U.S. were to be suddenly deemed agreement-capable), has attacked Trump from the right on Venezuela, and of course echoes the Putin Derangement Syndrome that has occupied Democrat hearts and minds since the first week of Trump’s presidency and the framing of Michael Flynn. His team is comprised of the usual gaggle of war-industry shills who think Trump leads a White House 5th column because he thinks nuclear war would ruin his business opportunities.

One need not sympathize with anyone in the sleazocracy to see that many shadowy forces did their damnedest to undermine Trump’s prerogatives as civilian head of state. They couldn’t tolerate any independence on that front despite Trump’s willingness to shovel ever higher mountains of public cash into the coffers of the arms makers and the uniformed services. He gave them vast opportunities for corruption and endless gifts like the destruction of nuclear weapons treaties, but it was never enough. Any attempt by Trump to pull back from Iraq or Afghanistan or not plunge further into the Syrian quagmire was instantly countered with lurid headlines of Russkie perfidy in our elections, our cyberspace, and no doubt tomorrow our underpants. All these howler propaganda campaigns based on “intelligence sources” whispering to stenographers at the Times and the Post got the full backing of the Democrat “resistance,” such as Adam Schiff (D-Raytheon).

And don’t expect any let-up in the relentless campaign to criminalize dissent on these and other fronts, such as the attempt to railroad Julian Assange for exposing U.S. war crimes. Biden’s Justice Department isn’t likely to be any less enthusiastic about dragging the much-abused Assange to a U.S. prison for “espionage” and drumming up long discredited theories about his links to the Russians (again). Nor should we expect self-appointed defenders of press freedom to endanger their access by dissenting from that shameful display.

Speaking of dissent, Trump’s experiment with disappearance squads via the deployment of Border Patrol kidnapper goons in Portland, Oregon, may give the Biden Administration creative new policing ideas. We shouldn’t succumb to any naïve fantasies about how Biden, a driving force behind the federal crime laws, will react to sustained challenges to his rule any more than we doubted Obama’s willingness to pull out the militarized police to crush Occupy.

We have our work cut out for us, and oh yes, Trump is terrible, I nearly forgot.

July Celebrates Genocide Month

[By Lionel Royer - Musée CROZATIER du Puy-en-Velay, Auvergne, France]

As we’re reexamining our history (both American and bipedal) and deciding what we want to memorialize and honor, July is a good time to reflect upon the fact that the entire month commemorates a guy who carried out genocidal slaughter in the heart of Europe. Not referring to Hitler here, but rather Julius Caesar.

There’s a new translation out of Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul, called this time The War for Gaul, so it’s a good occasion to get past those Latin 101 lessons about how Gallia is omnis divisa in partes tres and recall that JC was a bloodthirsty imperialist who marauded through the forests of what we now call France to make himself a fortune and please the homies back in Rome with some new provinces. Some of the tribes tried to avoid or slip out of the Roman yoke while others bowed to the inevitable, but Caesar still found ways to dispatch somewhere around 700,000 to a million “barbarians” in his pursuit of glory. And he didn’t even need to discover America to achieve it.

In a sane world, this behavior would be considered deeply pathological, but instead we have no problem marveling at Caesar’s accomplishments, which also included another million Gallic civilians sent south into slavery. Plutarch in one passage reports that after a battle “the destruction was such that lakes and deep rivers were filled up with dead bodies and became passable to the Romans.” Imagine if they had had nuclear weapons or even gunpowder.

Caesar didn’t rule as dictator for very long (49-44 BCE), but he did manage to revamp the old Roman calendar into what became known as the Julian version, in which Quintilis posthumously turned into Iulius (July). Therefore, we still blithely mark our mid-summer frolics with the name of a man so notorious for mass slaughter and the slave trade that Robert E. Lee looks positively benign by comparison.

The point is not to morally relativize the Confederate slave-drivers and -traders but to revisit how easily we swallow the heroics of male bipeds whose behavior in its modern form is driving us quickly to species eradication. There is a statue of JC overlooking the Naples coast, and I gather it would occur to few Italians to remove it while plenty would be scandalized at the thought of one celebrating Mussolini. But Caesar helped Rome build its mighty empire, so Dante put his turncoat assassins Brutus and Cassius in the deepest circle of Hell, stuffed feet first into two of the three mouths of Satan himself. (Judas Iscariot got the third socket).

Human populations think it’s cool if their particular team (ethnicity, city-state, nation, empire) rules the roost, and they evidently experience little moral disquiet about how that control is maintained. Just to pick on the Romans a bit more, here’s one set of estimates of how many people died in their various campaigns to broaden and sustain the Empire: First Punic War (264-241 BCE) 400 thousand; Second Punic War (218-202 BCE) 770 thousand; Genocide of Carthage (146 BCE) population reduced from 500 to 55 thousand; Social (internal Italian) Wars (91-88 BCE) 300 thousand; Mithridatic Wars 400 thousand; Servile Wars (slave revolts) (134-71 BCE) 1 million; Gaul 700 thousand; British revolt 150 thousand; Jewish Wars 350 thousand; and so on. This doesn’t count the considerable numbers of Romans who died after falling into disfavor nor the estimated 3.5 million gladiators who died over seven centuries of games at the rate of 8,000 per arena-year. Boys will be boys.

This was obviously a polity whose elite was quite comfortable with the mind-boggling level of destruction required to sustain its dominance. But before we succumb to pride, let’s consider if there’s any reason to think that humanity or our benighted slice of it has advanced beyond such indifference—though the immediate motivations among those at the top may well have changed. For example, on the presumably incoming Biden team we find not war heroes hungry for triumphal processions to parade the captured enemy chieftains and stolen loot but Beltway sleaze merchants angling for a fat government contract for their buds in the armament industries, to which end they are determined to keep all the wars going and, better yet, to start new ones. The essential bloody-mindedness hasn’t changed, just its form.

Another variation is the sophistication of modern propaganda, but that turns out to be nothing so novel either. Romans were aghast at their unruly subjects getting a swelled head or forgetting to pay tribute and regularly sent out generals to slap down the provincials by skewering a few hundred thousand, that is, when they weren’t busy crucifying backtalking household servants. In modern times, we rely on our own interpreters of sheep entrails at the Temple of Jupiter, i.e. “intelligence sources” who whisper gnomic phrases about Russians paying off treacherous subjects to slip a dagger into a few centurions here and there. We display no greater skepticism at these oracular pronouncements from our pontifex maximus on the Potomac than the Romans did when massing their legions for a campaign against Carthage or the rebellious Helvetii.

At a less dire historical moment, one could be resigned to the incorrigible failings our of hyper-developed species and retreat to one’s garden. But when the preservation of our habitat hangs in the balance facing multiple threats, looking away from our cruel record is not an affordable luxury. We must question far more deeply, refuse easy answers, and demand nothing less than the reordering of the human spirit. Or die.

[To receive alerts of these posts, email tfrasca@yahoo.com]

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.

To receive alerts of future posts, email me at tfrasca@yahoo.com

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.

[To receive alerts of these posts, message me at tfrasca@yahoo.com ]

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.

[ To receive alerts of new posts here, email me tfrasca@yahoo.com ]

You’ll Just Die: I Can Walk and Chew Gum at the Same Time!

A friend whom I’ll call Larry was first chastised, then denounced, then told “I want nothing more to do with you” on Facebook for the crime of posting a critical fact about Joe Biden last week.

Here’s why some of us are not going along with the curiously widespread notion that we must suspend our use of reason for the next six months. Believe it or not, tying ourselves to chairs with muzzles placed over our mouths is actually not necessary. Even more shocking news flash: it won’t help defeat Trump in the next election.

Ordering us to do so is not only offensive, but also says tons about the politics of these Democrat-worshiping bullies. In the counter-factual world of Bernie as the nominee, would any of these self-righteous hall monitors restrain themselves about his shortcomings or adopt a monkish silence? On the contrary, they would be screaming from the rooftops about how Sanders MUST move to the right to capture all those wary voters who want to keep paying their health insurance premiums and think Israeli annexation of other people’s land is just the thing.

No, they would never accept an imposed vow of silence for themselves but now puff up in holiness to remind us unruly schoolchildren that there is ONE GOAL that must occupy our collective mind and spirit, which is to send the Evil One packing. Suggesting that Biden is not the ideal standard-bearer to lead us into battle is thus both sacrilege and sedition.

I suspect that a very ample majority, close to 100 percent in fact, of people who post political news of a leftish tendency will pull the lever for stumbling and incoherent Joe, unless they live in a state like mine where it won’t matter, in which case WTF are you talking about? I’m pretty sure Larry is aware of the dangers to peace, the planet, and our polity represented by the raging nut job in the White House.

However, neither Larry nor I plan to go into hibernation for the rest of 2020 and in fact have a few ideas about how to contribute to reversing the dangerous trends accelerated—but hardly invented—by DJT. Oddly, or not, what Mr Biden will actually do after January 2021 never seems to enter the conversation. Why not?

Why is all this finger-wagging about what we must, haveta, gotta do when voting occurs 161 days from now so annoyingly short-sighted? Because it implies and sometimes explicitly states that All Will Be Well once we effect a change of occupancy in a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. It accuses skeptics of the heretical belief that something deeper than one individual’s strange sociopathology is bringing us woe. It demands the right to go back to sleep.

Most importantly of all, it demands passivity from now until November.

To take just one example: those of us who actively campaigned for an end to the insurance company death panels standing between us and medical care have a major problem with Joe B. While an ample majority of the country agrees that Wall Street has no business in the provision of healthcare, Biden is beholden to his greedy backers in the rentier class who don’t want to give up their gold-bearing goose. He’s quite explicit about it, assuring one and all that nothing will change, despite the new, pandemic-stimulated attention to the dysfunctional current system. Biden, like Trump, has no interest in a radical overhaul, and Biden, like Trump, lines up with the 1 percenters who are profiting handily while people die and go bankrupt.

Does that make Biden just as bad as Trump? Does that mean it’s irrelevant who wins in November? Actually, some of us are capable of holding two thoughts in our minds simultaneously: Trump is awful, and healthcare delivery has to be changed. Imagine that. And no, we should most definitely NOT keep quiet about it.

But pointing out the alignment of the Democrat mainstream with corporate greed will dissuade low-information voters from hoofing it over to the polls later this year, right? If so, those who decided that Biden was our guy better do something about it other than demanding that the rest of us STFU. Sounds like you have some persuading to do, so perhaps start by communicating with the Biden campaign that he’d better start making more attractive promises instead of announcing that his goal is to turn back the clock to the Obama-normal era.

And incidentally, telling Larry and me to clam up isn’t likely to inhibit the Trump campaign from saying a lot of nasty things about Biden, like for example, how closely tied he is to the Wall Street elite that’s ruining people’s lives. Is that hypocritical gaslighting? Yes. And? Trump ran to the left against Hillary in many policy areas, and Biden has the same vulnerability. Why not repeat a winning strategy?

Biden is a disastrous choice, but the Dem machine made it and now has to live with it. Those who went with the more-of-the-same wing are saddled with a glaringly weak figure who may well win by default because the other guy’s Oz curtain finally has been shredded. A government led by a President Biden will face grave crises on multiple fronts, and he’d better improve on his past record if he doesn’t plan to pave the way for the next Trump, an equally reactionary post-Trumpian figure who will be less deranged and thus more dangerous, knowing as he/she/they will, just how far the American people will line up behind a demagogue.

[to receive alerts of new posts here, send an email to tfrasca@yahoo.com

Yes, Trump is a wannabe tyrant, but Flynn was set up

The FBI, the CIA, and officials in the Obama White House engaged in serious misconduct in the run-up to and the carrying out of the Russiagate investigation. Neither Trump’s demented tweets nor his open disdain for legality change that.

Media outlets that trumpeted Russiagate for three years and still have not engaged in self-criticism over it are now in a tizzy over Attorney General Barr’s instruction to withdraw the charges against Flynn for lying to the FBI. That’s probably judicial overreach, but it pales in comparison with the overreach involved in targeting Flynn in the first place.

Flynn copped to lying to the FBI about his discussions with the Russian ambassador in the days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Flynn was to be Trump’s top security official, so the conversation itself was unremarkable. The FBI made a big deal out of it because of other suggestions that the Trump campaign was engaged in a quid pro quo collusion with Vladimir Putin to get himself elected since obviously actually getting Americans to vote for Trump voluntarily was inconceivable, right? Except that a lot of them did, even people who don’t watch broadcasts on RT.

Before exploring what Flynn said that was deemed untruthful, let’s recall that the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in 1974 started as an attempt by one party in a presidential election to spy on the other side. As Trump complains in his usual calm and restrained fashion, that’s exactly what the Obama-led intelligence agencies did to him. Now for several years, we’ve been told that the FBI had reasonable grounds to suspect something fishy was occurring in Trumpworld. That’s pretty easy to believe because everything about Trumpworld is fishy. But to justify a counterintelligence operation targeting Trump campaign officials, even former ones, in the midst of an election, the FBI had to have pretty solid evidence. Did they?

We now know that the notorious Steele dossier including the discredited pee-tape tale, none of which the FBI could independently verify, was used to obtain warrants to snoop on the Trump campaign. Steele himself peddled its contents to a variety of journalists, most of whom wouldn’t go near it. Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, however, did publish a story that the FBI was looking into its allegations. Remember that name.

Eli Lake at Commentary explains:

In the wake of the Republican National Convention in July 2016, the FBI launched “Crossfire Hurricane,” a probe of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. Over the course of a few months, the bureau sent informants and undercover agents to record five of Trump’s campaign advisers surreptitiously through conversations those informants and undercover agents set up on the FBI’s behalf.

Most significant, at the FBI’s request, was the behavior of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The FISC granted four successive warrants to eavesdrop electronically on the communications of a low-level Trump foreign-policy adviser named Carter Page. This was a highly unusual step in a matter involving a U.S. citizen because Page was working for the presidential campaign of the party out of power.

To get those warrants approved, the FBI submitted uncorroborated opposition research [the Steele dossier] that had been paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign without fully informing the court about the origins of the information.

. . . In its application for the FISA warrant against Page, the FBI used Isikoff’s Yahoo story as verification of Steele’s reporting. “Which means that the cloud over Trump’s presidency was the product of journalists and G-men using themselves to confirm a falsehood.

This is exactly how Dick Cheney used Judith Miller to get his phony tales of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction on the front page of the New York Times. That led to the debacle of war. Russiagate threatens to engulf us once again in a new way.

Back to Flynn’s FBI interview: we learned last week through FBI internal emails that the agents sent to talk to him—which he naively thought was a friendly call—pondered whether they should “get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.” Using a time-honored police tactic, they pretended that the conversation was just a routine chat and did not suggest to Flynn that he was suspected of any crime. Anyone who watches police shows knows that this is a really good way to get yourself charged with one. (N.B. Never talk to the cops without a lawyer, especially if you are innocent.)

Flynn wasn’t in office yet, so he should have been more cautious in discussing Trump’s desires with the Russians, and perhaps he thought the FBI shouldn’t know exactly how much he ventured into policy details on the call while another Administration was still in power. Apparently, he forgot that the FBI guys would be sitting on the transcripts of exactly what he said to the Russian ambassador, which, as a former high-ranking snoop himself, he had to assume. But Flynn never suspected he was being set up.

It’s remarkable how eager erstwhile liberals are to applaud the FBI’s sneaky entrapment tactics given that agency’s long history of repression of social movements. For example, the agency loves to find developmentally challenged immigrants or hapless Muslim believers and manipulate them into thinking they’re staging a terrorist attack. They get to blow open the “plot” and attract lots of great coverage about how they’re protecting America while ignoring the white-collar crime wave that is bankrupting us.

If there is ever a serious mass movement against the direction the country is taking, we can rest assured that the FBI will be front and center infiltrating it, populating it with agents provocateurs to promote violent acts and snare militants, compiling dossiers on supposedly protected political activities, and generally doing the ruling elite’s dirty work. We should not defend them now as one of their dirty tricks comes apart, even if the victim was a reactionary nutcase from Trumpville.

Meanwhile, the potential damage of the Russiagate fantasy and gross bending of the laws by official actors is as yet incalculable. An FBI lawyer stands accused of altering a document used to renew the FISA warrants and is now himself facing the possibility of criminal charges. More investigations are ongoing, one of which has subpoena power to dig around inside the CIA as well as the FBI, both arenas where Trump would love to find dirt.

The Providence Journal in blue-state Rhode Island called the Flynn prosecution a “frame-up” and said Barr was right to drop the charges. Those winds may be shifting. In fact, we may face the prospect of high-profile indictments of elements of the “Deep State” coming out right about the time Americans have to decide between Trump and Biden. Good luck focusing the voters’ minds on Trumps shortcomings then. Instead of railing about Russiagate, Trump may discover it was the best thing that ever happened to him.