June 16, 2023
Special federal Trump
prosecutor Jack Smith looks stern, anxious, and less than happy as he goes
about his duties of indicting the United States’ forty-fifth president, the
first actual fascist (see my book This Happened Here on the Trump presidency
and world view) to sit in the White House.
It makes sense. His job
comes in a nation where tens of millions of demented and disproportionately armed Amerikaners believe
anything their orange-hued Fuhrer says, no matter how preposterous and vile
(see this soul-chilling “P”BS segment on two recent focus groups with Iowa
Trump voters). Donald “Take Down the
Metal Detectors” Trump could very well become president again in 2025,
whereupon Smith might be well advised to take up residence in another country,
as would many others, including the present writer.
The Malignant One has
called Smith a “maniac,” a “lunatic,” a “Soviet-style thug” and other choice
names. It has even called out Smith’s wife by name, putting her life in danger.
A Gentlemen’s Agreement
It’s hard to imagine that
the milquetoast centrist Merrick Garland relishes his new role as the first US
Attorney General to oversee the prosecution of a former US president. He is a member of the US ruling class and
there’s long been a ruling class gentleman’s agreement about prosecuting US
presidents and former presidents: you don’t do it since the “commander in
chief” of the giant and mass murderous US Empire regularly commits grave crimes
– and must always feel free to commit such crimes – in the execution of his
duties. The agreement has been honored
again and again, as when Gerald Ford infamously pardoned Richard Nixon for his
deranged Watergate skullduggery (which only scratched the surface of Nixon’s
crimes against humanity at home and abroad) and when Barack “Look Forward Not
Backwards” Obama (himself a blood-soaked war criminal) deigned to investigate
his wife’s good buddy George W. Bush for epic war crimes and crimes against
humanity, including the epically fraudulent, truth-negating, mass-homicidal,
and illegal invasion of Iraq – still the biggest crime of the century.
Fascist Dictatorships are
One Thing Abroad and a Different Thing at Home
The problem for Jack Smith
and Garland and the state-level prosecutor Fanni Willis (Fulton County,
Georgia) is that Herr Donald has left them with no choice but to make novel
exceptions to the gentleman’s agreement. Trump tried to criminally overthrow previously
normative bourgeois electoral democracy and constitutional rule of law,
establishing himself as a de facto fascist strongman and “president for life”
within the imperial homeland itself. US
-backed Third World Fascist dictatorships abroad are one thing; trying to set
up a fascist tyranny in the self-described homeland and headquarters of global
freedom and democracy – “the beacon to the world of the way life should” (then
Republican US Senator Kay Bay Hutchinson in the fall of 2002[1]) – is quite something
else.
Capital Punishment?
After his fascistic and
unhinged presidency, Trump arch-criminally took off with numerous highly
classified “national security” and imperial documents and sloppily stashed them
in various exposed parts of his vast resort empire. He illegally obstructed the
federal government’s efforts to retrieve these highly sensitive documents and
lied to the government and even to his own lawyers about his theft and
obstruction. Nuclear and spying secrets and documents about the military
capacities of the US and other states sat for months in absurdly unsecure
locations while Trump blocked imperial retrieval and deceived the US Empire’s
agents about their contents and whereabouts. Among the reasons behind this
bizarre conduct, which this week earned Trump 37 counts of felony indictment,
the most likely appears to be the literally treasonous desire to, in the words
of Fintan O’Toole: “keep hold of secrets that could be traded at some point for
his personal gain. Trump sees himself above all as a deal-maker: ‘The nation’s
classified information’ is a potentially lucrative part of one or many deals.
This intent would be treasonous. Trump may not have actually committed treason,
but he was consciously putting himself in a position to be able to do so.”
It’s totally off the table,
of course, but how come nobody ever at least half-seriously brings up capital
punishment for Trump? He reactivated the
federal death penalty and may well have been planning to ungratefully commit
treason against the very capitalist-imperialist state that shat his sorry
narci-fascist ass up to the world’s most powerful and dangerous job!
To Show That Their System
“Works”
What on Earth are Smith,
Garland, and Fanni Willis and their grand juries supposed to do? The only thing
crazier than indicting the Trumpenstein is not doing so. Failing to investigate, indict, and prosecute
Trump for Mar-a-Docs (Smith and his first grand jury to act), for January 6
(Smith and his other grand jury), and for Trump’s attempted subversion of the
2020 presidential election in Georgia (Willis and her grand jury) would be
saying in essence that the United States’ claim to embody, represent, and
advance (unmentionably bourgeois) “democracy” and “rule of law” is an open
farce since it can’t punish an openly arch-narcissistic authoritarian who waged
brazen war on no small part of what the USA upholds as its claim to national
greatness and global leadership. It would be a cringingly open admission to the
world and the US populace that the rule of law doesn’t really apply to the rich
and powerful in the “world’s greatest country” and that that nation’s
much-ballyhooed “free and democratic elections” can be savagely attacked, and
their outcomes procedurally and even physically assaulted without the top
assailants being prosecuted.
In short, the Democrats
atop the executive branch, members of the ruling class party that retain a
commitment to basic bourgeois parliamentary constitutionalism have to show that
that the system still works the ways they say it does and that that system can
withstand an assault from the rightmost/Reichmost ruling class party, which has
crossed over into Christian white nationalist neofascism.
“This is What Bourgeois
Democracy Looks Like”
Never mind that bourgeois
democracy is a cloak for capitalist rule, that is has never been meant to
embody actual popular sovereignty and merely grants ordinary citizens the right
to periodically choose between capital-vetted representatives who are deeply
allegiant to and commonly enough owned by those who possess and control the
nation’s underlying material base – to a capitalist ruling class that has
always drawn a firm line against “democracy” interfering with profit. Never mind that the not-so impartial rule of
law has long been richly compromised by the ever-increasing concentration of
wealth that lay at the heart of capitalism, giving rise to the venerable
working-class slogan “money talks, bullshit walks.” Never mind that bourgeois democracy,
American-Style – a product of archaic and militant 18th Century
aristo-republican propertarianism and dark slaveowner priorities – translates
today into a right-tilted Minority Rule regime that vastly overrepresents the
most revanchist and authoritarian regions, states, and people in the nation – a
topic that I have addressed here and elsewhere on almost countless prior
occasions (see this, this, this, this, this and this for starters) and a
problem that makes it all too sickeningly possible that Trump (who Noam Chomsky
accurately described in early 2020 as “the most dangerous criminal in human
history”) could return to the White House (along with a fully
Republi-fascist-controlled Congress to complement the current Christian Fascist
Supreme Court) in 2025. Never mind that
there is no rival to the American Empire when it comes to breaking
international law and sponsoring dictatorships abroad when it serves its
interests to do so. Or the giant domestic and racist police state and the
globally unmatched mass incarceration system that bourgeois democracy has
hatched at home – a bipartisan red-blue apparatus of authoritarian mass
repression that recently scored a remarkable victory in Atlanta, site for a
future Trump indictment. As the Revolutionary Communist Party reports:
‘This is what bourgeois democracy
looks like….On June 6, the Atlanta City Council heard 16 hours of passionate
opposition by hundreds of people opposed to the funding of Cop City—a massive
facility planned for just outside Atlanta that will destroy a forest to create
a training center for militarized, brutalizing pigs. Hundreds more, not allowed
in, rallied outside. People called out a vote to fund Cop City as “a public
endorsement of war, of human rights abuse, of militarized streets in our city”
and “a destruction of the Constitutional protections of speech, due process,
representation, and ultimately dissent.” With anger and angst speakers asked
why “our” elected officials were continuing to ignore cries for justice…And
then the City Council, majority Democrats, led by Black Mayor Andre Dickens,
voted 11-4 to approve Cop City as the outrage of hundreds inside City Hall
echoed through the building: “Stop Cop City!” “Cop City will never be built.”
And “Viva! Viva, Tortuguita!”—Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (who went by
“Tortuguita’), the 26-year-old “forest defender” protester who was shot at
least 57 times and killed by police on January 18 during a raid on the site on
which Cop City is to be built… Cop City will feature a compound that simulates
an inner-city community with a convenience store, a nightclub and a home; a
staging area for pigs to train for and rehearse the kind of terror and violence
the U.S. Army carries out around the world, against communities of the
oppressed in this country…The Atlanta City Council is a model of “inclusivity.”
It includes eight Black members, five white members, two Iranian Americans, one
Chinese American, and three openly LGBTQ members. And with all that, the
majority of the Democrats on the Atlanta City Council, the Black mayor, and the
minority Republicans voted 11-4 to approve Cop City. And that is what
“inclusivity” looks like, as defined by and incorporated into this system built
on exploitation and oppression.’
Contemporary blue-zone
bourgeois democracy is a white supremacist class dictatorship cloaked by Woke
“inclusivity.” Think about how nobody is prosecuting the Atlanta gendarmes who
murdered Manuel Teran in a fusillade of no less and certainly more than 57
bullets when the Atlanta prosecutor Fanni Willis unveils her indictment against
Trump, as she very much should.
We have two ruling class
parties, one of which clings to what’s left of bourgeois democracy, American
style, and one of which has basically crossed over to Christian white
nationalist neofascism. The line between these two parties can often seem quite
thin when it comes to the fascist-racist police state that both ruling class
political organizations uphold. Seems like we need a revolution beneath and
beyond the sick mutually reinforcing reign of the “two wings of the same bird of
prey,” Upton Sinclair’s wonderful phrase for describing the Republicans and
Democrats one hundred and nineteen years ago.
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