May 28, 2018

Allan Nairn on America during Trump Admin

Cops' beating, killing, imprisoning and harassing people is a
fact of life getting worse under the rightist Trump
administration. Above is a shot from a video of a cop
beating a black teen caught by a cell phone. The
video elicits equal parts outrage and approval in
Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in May 2018. See Mal Contends.

Rightist Republicans demolish the Republic


Donald Trump's campaign boast about hypothetically killing a man in public and maintaining his core political support is one of the few truisms the lunatic in the White House has emitted.

Trump is a radical rightist leader of a mass base of fascistic Americans—they hate black and brown people and would be happy to see them all warehoused in prisons.

If Trump were to declare the black-and brown problem must be solved with a final solution begun with a declared state of emergency, Trump's white supporters would declare approvingly, 'yep, Trump's doing something, MAGA.'

Republicans in Congress would weasel their way to express their support.

Across America emboldened, politicized municipal police departments target citizens for any or no reason with the assurance their careers are secure. Liberal mayors and municipal officials—in Wisconsin, think Madison's Paul Soglin and Milwaukee's Tom Barrett—go along.

After the recent beating of a NBA player in Milwaukee, Tom Barrett expanded on his tame expression of concern, and offered a public apology to the police victim. Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales had said the assaulting cops acted "inappropriately," as though the vile gang of white cops committed a breach of etiquette and not a human rights violation.

Black and brown people get hit the worst.

The lunatic in the White House routinely boasts about his standing among cops and Evangelicals who flock to police departments to kill, harass and imprison for Christ.

Allan Nairn is interviewed by Jeremy Scahill in The Intercept today.

This is critical reading on the nature of Republican America and the white supremacist Donald Trump administration. They block voters and try to slash any federal expenditures that help people, working at all levels of elected government though no Republican dares campaign on these intentions.

Said Allan Nairn:

Well, Trump dragged a rightist revolution into power. It’s the Paul Ryan agenda which could never have gotten elected in its own right, because it’s anathema to most Americans — slashing Medicare, slashing social security, transferring trillions of dollars from the working people, and even the poor and the middle class to the very rich. Mitt Romney kind of tried to run on that and failed. Ryan, in his own right, could never get elected president. But Trump, with his genius for unleashing the beast in white America, touching these deep chords of racism that succeeded in turning a crucial number of previous white Obama voters into Trump voters, precisely, in large part, because of his racist appeals and his appeals to fear.

He succeeded in dragging the Republican Party into the White House with a minority of the votes. And this is a Republican Party that is one of the most radical mainstream political parties in all of American history, perhaps with the exception of the pro-secessionist Democrats at the time of the Civil War. And they’ve been in there, they’ve been implementing a rightist revolution, doing the massive transfer of wealth in part via the tax bill, but also an important part by systematically, agency by agency, trying to gut the constraints on large corporations and the oligarchs, regarding the environment, their treatment of labor, their ability to discriminate, their ability to commit fraud without fear of being sued by the public, increasing the rights of rich individuals to intervene in politics, decreasing the rights of collectives of working people to intervene in politics, like the Gorsuch-led Supreme Court decision just the other day, inhibiting the ability of workers to file class-action lawsuits against their employers.

It’s a systematic program that’s been in the works since 1980, really. In a sense, it dates back to the old Powell memorandum, where Powell, who later joined the Supreme Court, said we, the representatives of the rich, we’ve got to fight back against this new environmental movement, against this consumer movement, against the labor movement, and also implicitly against the Civil Rights movement. 'These people have been making too many gains, we’ve got to organize ourselves.'

And they did! They created Heritage, and this whole other elaborate apparatus, and later the Koch Brothers came in, and they created ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. They sent people down to the state legislature. And they’ve been working on this program for decades.

And, now, as the Republican Party has evolved to the most radical extreme, Trump dragged them into power again. They happen to have control of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. And they’ve been going around rigging the system so that a diminishing minority of people can hold power and continue to govern. Just as Trump was elected with a minority of the votes, they’re trying to set it up through a long list of tactics, including purging of voter rolls, voter suppression shortly before Election Day, gerrymandering, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, smaller and smaller numbers of people can win elections and retain power.

In Wisconsin, a reformist candidate for the Democratic Party nominee for governor, Matt Flynn, is campaigning on a platform of emptying the jails of those convicted of non-violent crimes. "Stop destroying lives," said Flynn.

Flynn faces a lot of opposition from both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Destroying lives is an objective of the most dangerous political party in American history, the Republican Party, which tries to insulate their rule from the democratic process.

Trump and his movement have not reached the bottom yet.

No comments:

Post a Comment