The Post-Trump Era?

Why we might just want to keep him in office, as fatally damaged goods.

By Doug Henwood

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/05/18/post-trump-era

How much longer can this go on? As I write this, PredictIt gives 71/29 odds that Trump will last the year, but it’s mighty tempting to buy the “no”—especially after the revelation that he asked Comey to shut down the Flynn investigation. (Disclosure alert: I bought 100 shares of “no” at $0.28.)

What is the endgame of the people, mostly Democrats, pounding the drums most heavily? Do they want to impeach Trump, which seems a long shot given Republican control of Congress? Do they want to bruise his weak ego so badly that he resigns? Clearly the job is much harder than he ever imagined—and, by the way, what reasonably sentient person over the age of 8 ever thought the presidency wasn’t grindingly hard? But he also wants adulation, not the relentless volleys of shit he’s gotten. It’s not impossible to imagine him just walking offstage, especially if his legal situation gets seriously dicey.

What then? President Pence? If Pence were president, the entire Republican dream agenda would sail through Congress in like three weeks. Pence spent a dozen years in Congress (Tea Party branch) and four years as governor of Indiana; he’s an appalling figure but he knows how things work. He might not be able to overcome his party’s internal divisions, but he probably could do a better job than Trump, and every day would not be a circus as it is now.

Pence is a horror—fiscal sadist, misogynist, homophobe, lover of the carceral state. He’s repeatedly described himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” though given today’s modern GOP, it’s not clear there’s much of a difference among these features. (He should have said he’s a reactionary Christian; there are plenty of other kinds.) He’s a creationist who rejects climate change, thinks stem cell research is “obsolete,” and once actually said that “smoking doesn’t kill.” His anti-abortion law was the most extreme in the country. His cuts to Planned Parenthood led to a rural HIV epidemic. Like Sessions, Pence is a maximalist on drugs, including weed. He’s hot to privatize Social Security. He likened the Supreme Court’s upholding of Obamacare to 9/11.

Should Trump get pushed out, the orchestrated campaign of healing would be painful. It’s not far-fetched to imagine leading Democrats channeling Gerald Ford’s “our long national nightmare is over.” There would be something of what Wall Street calls a “relief rally” on the transition, and it would perversely grease the way for Pence to make the U.S. more like the Indiana he left behind. We should be fighting to keep him in office, as fatally damaged goods.

Several things seem to be driving this campaign to squeeze Trump out, aside from the obvious fact he’s an unstable ignoramus. Dems still can’t get over the fact that they lost to the most unpopular candidate in the history of polling, but instead of blaming their own terrible candidate (the second-most unpopular candidate in the history of polling) and the slavers’ legacy, the Electoral College, they want to blame Russia. (Time was they blamed Comey too—remember when Paul Krugman said that “Comey and Putin installed a crazy, vindictive can’t-handle-the-truth person in the White House”? But he’s since been rehabilitated.)

But that’s not all: a large part of the political class (Hillary prominent among them, along with John McCain), the security establishment, and their contract-hungry patrons in the military–industrial complex all want desperately to make Russia the enemy, and are reviving zombie tropes from the Cold War to promote their cause. Trump may well have friends in the Russian mob, but his resistance to elite hostility towards the country is one of the few non-awful things about him.

It’s been stunning to watch liberals cheering on the security state’s war-by-leak against Trump. He’s odious, but he is the legally elected president—under an absurd electoral system, but that’s the one we’ve got. (Makes you wonder what they would have done to Sanders, if by some unimaginable fluke he’d won.) And yet we’ve seen months of praise for the CIA and the FBI as the magic bullets who could deliver us from the short-fingered vulgarian.

The defenses of the CIA began with Trump’s disparaging remarks about the Agency before taking office, which were taken as near-blasphemous. For an amateur like Trump, such attacks were extremely risky. In early January, Chuck Schumer presciently warned (on the Maddow Show, of course): “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community—they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” You’d almost think that he knew what would come next: an endless series of leaks portraying Trump as Putin’s towel boy and, as an extra-special bonus, a pervert (the piss tape)—all applauded by liberals, with little regard for the CIA’s 70-year history of lying, assassination, and coups.

Then came the Comey firing, and suddenly the FBI was a noble organization as well. It’s far from that, and has always been. As Mark Ames reports in his little history of the Bureau, it has no legal charter; Congress didn’t want to authorize a secret police so Teddy Roosevelt created it by executive fiat. Much of the Bureau’s history was been about persecuting communists—and gay people—and smearing its enemies. It spent the 1960s and early 1970s trying to ruin Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, and and the New Left. In other words, it’s been political from the very first, and all these current worries about “politicizing” the FBI are Grade A bullshit.

Which brings us back to the endgame issue. Democrats look to be extending the strategy of their failed 2016 campaign by being the not-Trump and nothing more—it’s all they’ve got. They are making no visible effort to come up with an appealing agenda as an alternative to the deeply unpopular one the GOP has on offer. In fact, they’re annoyed at Bernie Sanders for trying to get the party to talk about policy, which is somehow seen as an act of narcissism in the Beltway worldview:

But the senator, who’ll be 79 the next time the New Hampshire primary rolls around, is continuing to put himself at the center of the conversation. He’s introduced a Medicare-for-all bill this week that he hopes will force others to sign on.

Imagine that! Pushing a bill to expand health insurance coverage at a moment when Republicans are trying to take it away. The ego of that man.

The party’s strategy can’t be counted a success on conventional measures; Gallup reports that the Dems have lost 5 approval points since November, leaving the two parties with near-identical approval ratings (D: 40%, R: 39%).

During the early days of the Trump administration, it seemed like a serious left opposition might take form. That‘s a hazy memory now that so many liberals and even leftists are taking dictation from the security state and throwing around words like “treason.” We can do better than this, can’t we?

© 2017 Doug Henwood

Doug Henwood edits the  Left Business Observer, a newsletter he founded in 1986, He also hosts Behind the News, a weekly radio show covering economics and politics on KPFA, Berkeley, that is rebroadcast on several other stations across the U.S., and has a worldwide audience via its Internet archive. His book Wall Street is now available for free download here.

What Is a Progressive?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOtbiC0W11A

Maduro is not Chavez

Nicolas Maduro's authoritarianism is destroying the defiant participatory democracy his predecessor set up in Venezuela.

By Santiago Zabala

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/05/maduro-chavez-170513145531916.html

Venezuela, as Noam Chomsky recently pointed out is really in a disaster situation. "The corruption, the robbery and so on, has been extreme … especially after Hugo Chavez's death," Chomsky said. This statement should not be read as an admission of guilt by one of the many leftist activists, economists, and politicians (including Julian Assange, Josep Stiglitz, and Jeremy Corbyn) who praised Chavez's Bolivarian revolution. In this statement Chomsky is simply marking a failed opportunity by Chavez's successor, Nicolas Maduro, to continue his socialist policies.

The fact that Steve Bannon's Breitbart News is using the current crisis in Venezuela to dismiss these leftist intellectuals is a sign that they were on the right track. Nonetheless, Venezuela is now in a disaster situation, and both Maduro's authoritarianism and the opposition's violence are to blame.

The US intervention

It is important to remember how successful Chavez's policies were during his time in office between 1998 and 2013. "Impressive gains," the historian Greg Grandin recalls, were achieved "in healthcare, life expectancy, education, and social security; radically expanding political participation, bringing the excluded and marginal into the debate and giving diverse social movements access to political power; and charting a foreign policy independent from Washington". But a lot has changed since Chavez passed away almost five years ago. The economic and social crisis that Venezuela is now experiencing under the leadership of Maduro raises questions not only about whether he was the right successor to Chavez but also about how Chavez's death was used as an opportunity to try once again to take over the largest proven oil reserves in the world. While condemning the ongoing authoritarianism (suspension of basic rights), repression (of 13,941 arbitrary detentions, 94 percent occurred during anti-crime operations mainly in poor neighbourhoods), and violence (security forces killed 126 people, 46 in extra-judicial executions, and 28 when they were in police or military custody) it is also necessary to recall the enormous damage Washington caused through its pursuit of "regime change" during the last decades in Venezuela. As Mark Weisbrot, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, pointed out, ignoring the US intervention in Venezuela is like reporting on Ukraine without mentioning Russia. Washington's obsession with Chavez's Bolivarian revolution has to do with his plan to reverse the neoliberal dream of turning petroleum into a pure commodity whose value is set exclusively by the market. Although this was about to take place when Chavez was first elected in 1998, "his oil policy", Grandin says, "was heir to the great vision of the New International Economic Order of the 1970s, which saw high petroleum prices as a way to tax the First World, and then redistribute that revenue through equitable social programs, solidarity, and support for poor energy-importing nations, and an oppositional foreign policy". A negotiated solution is necessary between the opposition and Maduro. But in order for both parties to sit at a negotiating table, the opposition must stop the violent blockades of basic goods, and Maduro must immediately schedule state, local, and presidential elections.

These oil policies, together with the desire to bring about Bolivar's dream of an independent and united Latin America, is what caused Washington to support a coup in 2002 and more recently spend millions of dollars to fund opposition groups. 

The problem with the Venezuelan opposition (most of its leaders are part of the wealthy white elite) is not it's denunciation of Maduro's repressive policies, which should be roundly denounced, but rather that it is designed to achieve regime change in spite of the fact that the Chavistas reached power by legitimate means and continue to enjoy a significant degree of popular support. Furthermore, as Steve Ellner reported in The Nation, "the opposition consistently employs tactics of mass civil disobedience even though these mobilizations are accompanied by the destructive actions of small bands of combatants". These are the combatants who refused in April 2013 to "recognize Maduro's democratic victory, despite zero evidence of fraud" (Jimmy Carter once called Venezuela's electoral system among "the best in the world") and whose protests targeted government-run health clinics and other public institutions, resulting in at least seven civilian casualties.

Predictably, opposition's only goal is not to oust Maduro but also to privatise Venezuela's public services and to bring the social reforms brought forward by Chavez to an end. For example, as soon as they took over the National Assembly in 2015, they immediately tried to put an end to the successful social housing project.

Maduro's authoritarianism

It is necessary to criticise the Western mainstream media for giving the opposition a free pass despite their campaign of terror, but it is also important to recognise and denounce the Maduro government's increasing authoritarianism.

This authoritarianism is more than a response to the fall of oil prices in the international market and the US economic sanctions, which caused the hardship and hyperinflation. It is also the result of Maduro's temperament. Unlike Chavez, who often managed to resolve social tension or make unexpected alliances at key moments, Maduro easily falls for provocations. This is why, as Grandin says, Maduro "responded to extremists in the opposition by assuming everyone in the opposition is an extremist, presiding over an ineffective and incoherent mix of distributivist carrots and repressive sticks, aimed not so much at consolidating his personal power as at digging in a besieged and out-of-touch revolutionary bureaucracy".

It is this temperament that has recently led Maduro to cancel the recall of a referendum (which was constitutionally legal); suspend municipal and regional elections; and inhibit an opposition politician, Henrique Capriles, from standing for office. It also explains his inability to tackle corruption (according to a Chavez administration vice minister, the number of officials involved in corruption is huge).

In this way, as the political sociologist Gabriel Hetland points out, Maduro is "systematically blocking the ability of the Venezuelan people to express themselves through electoral means". Another indication that Maduro has moved away from his predecessor's politics is his decision to open a mineral-rich open-pit mine that Chavez closed in 2009 over ecological concerns. It is understandable that social movements, environmental activists, and indigenous communities are all unsatisfied with Maduro.

Today Venezuela is a polarised country on the verge of a civil war. A negotiated solution is necessary between the opposition and Maduro. But in order for both parties to sit at a negotiating table, the opposition must stop the violent blockades of basic goods, and Maduro must immediately schedule state, local, and presidential elections. Only in this way will the "participatory and protagonist democracy" that Chavez set up survive.

Santiago Zabala is ICREA research professor of philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.