It is a fitting end to four years of Donald Trump in the White House. On one side, Trump’s endless stoking of political grievances – and claims that November’s presidential election was “stolen” from him – spilled over last week into a mob storming the US Capitol. They did so in the forlorn hope of […]
The post Trump May be on Trial, but the System that Produced Him Will be Acquitted first appeared on Dissident Voice.
The U.S. political scene has been undergoing a facelift in an effort to restore the decreasing legitimacy of the transnationally-oriented capitalist class. This transformation has been characterized by a right wing that has sought to portray itself as economically nationalistic in an attempt to expand support among the working class (primarily, among working class whites) whose economic stability has dwindled during the neoliberal era.
Why is this the case?
The shock election of Donald Trump has thrust Canada into one of the most perilous periods of its existence. Our relationship with the United States, upon which so much of our security and prosperity depends, has never been more uncertain.
In a post on Aotearoa’s The Daily Blog, a supposedly “leftist” blogger, Chris Trotter, took “Bernie’s die-hard supporters” to task for being “ridiculous”. He was endorsing Sarah Silverman’s words, but after some inconsequential waffle, he took it a bit further: “That makes the ‘Bernie or Bust’ crowd something much more than ridiculous, Sarah, it makes them dangerous.”
As suggested by Jane Mayer in Dark Money, never have two members of one American family spent so much time and money to control our democracy, and in their effort, foster economic damage for most Americans. The guilty parties: Charles and David Koch. It is also likely that self-delusion and insularity from the less-fortunate have rendered both impervious to any recognition that their course is detrimental to the well-being of a great majority of Americans.
We all feel the seemingly oppressive impact of the conservative force that has taken over the United States, but feel hard-pressed to identify where it started and the specific entities responsible. Most of us suspect that it was no accident. We can be most certain that it isn’t.
Confusion reigns in the Democratic and Republican primaries. Huffington Post political reporters write, “It’s Time to Admit: Nobody Knows Anything about the 2016 Campaign,” now that “the old ‘rules’ of presidential politics no longer seem to apply.”
American history is replete with acrimony born of political opposition and its emotional heat. Racism has been a weapon, but never such a searing whip of bias and disrespect.
Now deep in the seventh year of the Obama presidency, Michelle Obama is reflecting on her family’s experiences as the first black family to inhabit the White House as First Family. It is instructional for all of us who mostly focus on the racism witnessed across our land – of late, young unarmed black men being shot dead — perhaps not focusing on the continual racist treatment of the first family.
The Republicans and their news outlet, Fox News, are lockstep in calling up all the demons of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. In the New Testament of the Bible, in the Book of Revelations, they are actually the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, most accounts deeming them a divine apocalypse upon the world as harbingers of the Last Judgment – which is the tenor of the Republican response to Obama’s executive action plan.
In perhaps the best mainstream report during the election season, the typically firmly D.C.-based Steve Inskeep went knocking on doors in Colorado and came across a woman, Ili Bennett, who told him she’s felt some excitement from both Elizabeth Warren — and in the past, the Tea Party.
