“At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium — the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat — all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.”
Excerpt from Fascism: What it is and how to fight it (1944) Trotsky, Leon
I’ve been thinking about “all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy” and my mind went back to the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. Obama’s America.
What did Trump have to say about that at the time?
And what did Mr Hope and Change Obama have to say about them? He said some words. But he tried to play both sides.
“I understand the frustrations that are being expressed in those protests,” Obama said in an interview with ABC News on Tuesday. “The most important thing we can do right now,” he added, is “letting people know that … we are on their side.” When he first expressed sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement two weeks ago, Obama added a characteristically cautious qualification: “We have to have a strong, effective financial sector in order for us to grow.”
When the Occupy Wall Street movement was forcibly dismantled by police in late 2011 and into 2012, Obama did not directly intervene to stop the crackdowns. Cities across the country saw coordinated efforts to remove protesters from public spaces, often using riot gear, tear gas, and mass arrests. The Obama administration did nothing. He also did nothing to stop the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizen United, which allowed for unlimited corporate spending in U.S. elections, from becoming law a year earlier.
There was a hunger for someone to provide a message like what Trump is offering—that the cozy Wall Street-Washington nexus cares nothing about them and it is time to take matters into their own hands and reject the blandishments of those who have put them in the state they are in. It was Trump’s genius to be able to understand and articulate that message, and to articulate a message that obliterates the traditional liberal-conservative ideological cleavages.
I don’t think people in the United States are taking the warnings about Trump’s inherent fascist tendencies seriously enough. Why would you hand over power to someone you believe is a fascist? Democracy? They don’t have a democracy over there. They have a plutocracy. And that was true even before Elon Musk bought Trump the election.
I’m reading Michael Mann’s book “Fascists“. That’s Michael Mann the sociologist, not the director of HEAT. One of the defining characteristics of fascism in the twentieth century was their use of a paramilitary.
Since fascists did offer plausible solutions to modern social problems, they got mass electoral support and intense emotional commitment from militants. Of course, like most political activists, fascists were diverse and opportunistic.
Michael Mann – Fascists
So I’m keeping an eye on news stories about American militias, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Earlier this year, they seemed to be recruiting again, according to WIRED.
I’m amused that people who support Trump seem to be convinced that everyone who criticises him suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome“, when I think they are the ones who are obviously delusional (if not deranged). His supporters claim that people from his first administration that have since tried to warn everyone about his fascist tendencies have an axe to grind.
What axe did Mark Milley, the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have, apart from being disgusted with Trump?
After federal officers and police had used tear gas and other riot control tactics to disperse protestors, during the protests in Washington, D.C., following the murder of George Floyd, saying that he felt “sick” and was “fucking done with this shit” to Esper. Then after Jan 6, he became concerned Trump was preparing to stage a coup, said “this is a Reichstag moment”, and told his associates “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns”, referring to Trump’s false statements about electoral fraud as “the gospel of the Führer”. Milley called Trump a “fascist to the core”.
John Kelly, former Chief of Staff, called Trump a “fascist” and criticized his authoritarian tendencies.
James Mattis, former Secretary of Defense, said Trump makes a “mockery of our constitution”.
John Bolton, former National Security Adviser, labeled Trump “unfit to be president”.
Some quotes from Bob Woodward, “Fear – Trump in the White House”:
Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs and the president’s top economic adviser in the White House. Cohn and Porter worked together to derail what they believed were Trump’s most impulsive and dangerous orders. “It’s not what we did for the country, ” Cohn said privately. “It’s what we saved him from doing.”
The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.
A senior White House official who spoke contemporaneously with participants in the meeting recorded this summary: “The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views.”
As Staff Secretary, Rob Porter briefed Trump on decision memos and other important presidential documents. In alliance with Gary Cohn, he attempted to block Trump’ s most dangerous economic and foreign policy impulses. Porter told an associate, “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.”
Let’s not forget the Trump / Epstein relationship:
Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier who was friends with Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew, committed suicide in prison under mysterious circumstances. Until 2019, he had managed to avoid much time in jail despite multiple charges of sex trafficking of underage girls going back to 2005 and even a guilty plea in 2008. U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta approved a lenient plea deal for Epstein regarding a case involving prostitution with a fourteen-year-old girl. A decade later, when Acosta was interviewing with Donald Trump’s transition team, he allegedly said he had been told to “back off” Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence.” Acosta went on to become Trump’s Labor Secretary — but resigned when the story about his 2008 deal with Epstein became public.
I impressed myself this week by writing a couple of Python scripts that will create custom news reports for me every day. I used Claude to write them. They will take a list of stocks, either from the weekly buy list that I generate for QAV, or from my portfolios, create RSS feeds for them in Google News Alerts, then download the news items in those feeds. Once it’s downloaded the latest news, it parses it through OpenAI’s API, which removes duplicate stories from different news outlets, then prioritises the news articles based on a list of criteria I’ve given it, ranking the stories from 10/10 (very high importance) to 1/10 (very low importance), then give me a report which I can post to QAV. Here’s an example from today. I wrote this because I’d missed a couple of important events for stocks in my portfolios in recent weeks. I hold over 100 stocks and it’s hard to trawl through all of the news every day.
The key here is that it took me a while to even conceive of the idea of writing a script to do all this for me. The “roll your own” mentality isn’t fully installed in my head yet. But I think within a few years we’ll all get used to having AI just build custom “apps” for us, although we probably won’t even think of them as apps, just “functions”. “Do this for me”. That’ll happen when AI Agents are integrated with our devices and our personal information.
1. My basic policy is that most people in power are possibly psychopaths (see my new book The Psychopath Economy) and therefore we should investigate them as often as we can. Trump especially falls into this category, as do many of the people around him.
2. I had no problem with the Mueller investigation. Ever.
3. My main issue with it has always been that some people on the left seemed to treating collusion as a fact, despite there being no (or not enough, if you prefer) evidence to conclude that. As I’ve always maintained – meeting with Russians, in and of itself, was neither illegal nor evidence of collusion. Neither was hoping Russians would release hacked emails.
4. The media hype around collusion for the last two years, in my opinion, was not justified by the evidence.
5. The Mueller Report, rightly or wrongly, declared there (and I quote): The investigation did not establish that the contacts described in Volume I, Section IV, supra, amounted to an agreement to commit any substantive violation of federal criminal law-including foreign-influence and campaign-finance laws, both of which are discussed further below.”
6. Therefore Mueller seems to agree that there wasn’t enough evidence to conclude a conspiracy / collusion – and so why all of the hype about it for the last two years? Why were people so convinced it was a fact?
7. As for Russian interference, the FBI already investigates that, so there’s no need for a separate investigation, as far as I can tell. That does seem like a waste of money, but hey, the US has money to burn, so why not.
8. As for who hacked the DNC, I acknowledge that Mueller concurs with the intelligence agencies – which isn’t surprising, seeing as he’s a former Director of the FBI. I, of course, don’t trust the FBI or the CIA, because they have been caught out lying continually in the past. That doesn’t mean they are wrong in this instance, but they have a shitty track record at telling the truth, especially when it involves Russia. Does that mean you should or shouldn’t trust his findings on collusion? I don’t care. Trust or don’t trust. Up to you.
9. Assange, on the other hand, has an excellent track record of exposing lies and telling the truth, at least as far as we know. That said, he might be lying in this instance, or just plain wrong. I have no evidence either way. So I’m neutral on the issue.
10. If Russia *did* hack the DNC and leak it to Assange, I don’t really care. Good on them both. The leak exposed the Clinton / DNC corruption, and a lot more, including France’s motivations for destroying Libya, so the leak was in the public interest and I applaud whoever was behind it.
11. Was all of the hype around collusion justified? Apparently not, if Mueller couldn’t find enough evidence to charge anyone with conspiracy. So why did the hype exist? Maybe the media, supposedly made up of professional and highly trained journalists and editors who are good at being objective, just got carried away? Like they did when they told us Saddam had WMD. But Cicero told us to always ask “cui bono” (who benefits)? Who benefited from two years of collusion delusion? The media sold a ton of papers and tv advertising, which boosted their revenues. The DNC got to distract people away from their own corruption (as revealed by the leaks) and how they screwed the Sanders campaign during the primaries – and eventually lost the election to a buffoon who didn’t even want, or expect, to win. Did these parties deliberately distract the American population with the collusion delusion? I don’t know. I have no evidence to support those theories. But I would love to know.
The LONG version:
To avoid having to repeat myself over and over: my point over the last could of years has never been that Trump isn’t dirty or guilty of all sorts of crimes. On the contrary – I assume he is dirty. What I’ve been going on about for the last couple of years has been that the COLLUSION narrative that everyone has been obsessed with was based on zero evidence. Having meetings with Russians was not illegal or evidence of collusion – it was evidence of having meetings with Russians.
As for people saying there was evidence but just “not enough for indictment”, I think that’s heavy spin doctoring. Conspiring is like being pregnant. It’s a binary situation. Saying “but they french kissed” does not mean there is evidence they are pregnant. An agreement to conspire on something is black and white. Either they agreed to conspire or they didn’t. There isn’t any way to have a partial agreement.
Over the last couple of years, a lot of people told me I was insane / naïve / a dupe because I wouldn’t agree with the collusion narrative. They assumed Trump (or his campaign’s) guilt, I gather, because it’s what they wanted to believe. But, of course, it turns out I was right (at least according to the Mueller Report).
And I’m highly amused that those same people are now either: a) denying they ever claimed there was / believed in collusion, b) trying to spin it into “but but but what about cover ups?” or c) saying “but but but he’s a criminal.” Instead of being honest and saying “yeah we sure did jump the gun on that one and maybe we should learn to think before we buy into media narratives.”
I think the questions we should be asking now are:
Who created the narrative?
What did they hope to gain?
Why did the media push it for two years when it was obviously bullshit from the get-go?
And why did you buy into it?
And before you say something about “Russian interference in the democratic process”, a) that isn’t new, b) we didn’t need this investigation to tell us that and c) there’s already ongoing investigations into that, has been constantly for 100 years.
Investigations are fine, have as many as you want. But investigating the foreign interference in domestic politics is something the FBI gets paid to do and has been doing for nearly a century. Russians attempting to interfere in American elections has been going on since 1930. Nothing surprising about it. FBI files are full of it. Pretty much all J. Edgar Hoover ever thought about.
It should be pretty clear to everyone by now that the whole COLLUSION!!! narrative we’ve had for two years was overblown and that *someone* had an agenda behind it. Was it the Obama administration trying to deflect attention from their failure to stop the Russians? Was it the DNC trying to deflect attention from how they fucked Sanders and lost the election? Was it the media just profiting from the chaos? Was it Wall Street who continued to bleed America dry and run their foreign wars while everyone was distracted by nonsense? Was it a little of all of those things? I don’t know the answer – BUT I think those are the right questions to be asking about now because THAT is what is destroying America’s democracy. Not the Russians. Not Trump. It’s the forces that allowed Trump to get elected in the first place.
Amy Goodman interviewed Noam Chomsky recently and asked him to explain the Trump presidency. At the 48 minute mark he nails the move of both major parties to the right since the 1970s, and how the GOP managed to balance their primary constituency – big business and the wealthy – whilst also targeting small but passionate niches – the religious right and gun owners. He also explains why Russiagate was such a bunch of nonsense.
I would have hoped that after the whole “Saddam has WMD!” furor 18 years ago, Americans – especially those on the “left” – would have developed a better bullshit filter when it came to interpreting the US media. Apparently they aren’t ready yet. Here’s a handy guide for what to do the next time you hear something in the news which maps into your confirmation bias.
The way people are doubling down on their commitment to the Russiagate narrative reminds me of how members of a doomsday cult act then the big day doesn’t happen. They don’t acknowledge they were wrong. They are too invested in their beliefs. So they often become more fervent than ever before. American politics has become, more than ever before, a matter of religious fervour – even for the atheists.
One other thing I’ve suspected over the last year or so is that Trump (and his father before him) actually has real connections to Russian mafia via Semion Mogilevich, Bayrock, Felix Sater, etc. We talked about those on BFTN 4 and BFTN 18. I’m quite surprised Mueller didn’t report on that or Trump’s reported tax fraud (as discussed that on BFTN 21).
Trump on Occupy Wall Street 14 Dec 2011, Wed Daily News (New York, New York) Newspapers.com
Obama Occupy Wall Street 20 Oct 2011, Thu The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, California) Newspapers.com
