The Skinny: Impeachment Politics, Targeting and Anti-Climate Flak

 

Impeachment Politics, Targeting and Anti-Climate Flak

 

Resistible Force vs Movable Object: Trump Impeachment Inquiry Political Machinations

“The day news of Pelosi going forward with an impeachment inquiry I wrote an op-ed that expressed both why I thought it was a good idea to impeach Trump and also why I was very worried the flag-humping McCarthyist wing of the Dem Party would f*ck this up – you can check it out by clicking on the link below:

Opinion: Why I Support Impeachment but Fear Incompetent Democrat Hubris

After yesterday’s hearing and the publication of the whistleblower’s complaint, I’d like to revisit the subjects covered in this op-ed for a moment. While truthfully a lot of that televised dog and pony show hearing was pure political theater, there were still some interesting tidbits of information to be gleaned from the proceedings.

First I’d like to start with the obvious, so that having disposed of it we can move on to the more interesting political ripples this impeachment is creating.

Yeah, I’m almost a hundred percent certain Donald Trump did it and quite frankly I didn’t need CIA mystery guy to tell me.

For starters the fact that everything the Trump administration is talking about to defend this is almost invariably side topic bullsh*t is a pretty big tip off. I don’t want to waste a lot of time and energy on it here but let’s just take a couple of them apart to demonstrate:

“You can’t prove quid pro quo!”

This is not only absurd because Ukraine is a US client state and is thus understood to be dependent on American support, but it’s also completely off topic too. You don’t need to prove explicit quid pro quo here because not only is this an impeachment, not a legal trial, but also the President (whoever he might be) cannot even ask U.S. allies to target his political opponents in the lead up to a coming election – that’s literally tin pot dictator bullsh*t and it must be stopped.

You can argue till you’re blue in the face that this isn’t what he’s done but in the real world people actually remember the things Trump, Giuliani and his own administration say – I don’t even need the CIA guy’s report that other people made it clear the U.S. aid was at risk.

Now if the whistleblower’s report turns out to be true (lying about that would be pretty dumb but you never know) and the Trump administration has been moving records of Trump’s legally incriminating calls to a secure server to hide them, then you do indeed have a cover-up. A cover-up which would of course demonstrate that Trump and his flunkies knew that what they were doing at a very minimum looked illegal, unconstitutional or politically damaging enough to hide them, That helps the case along, but none of it is necessary or core to the accusation or the process of impeachment.

If the Democrats don’t impeach right there for that blatant abuse of power alone, then they are allowing Trump to set a precedent and any future POTUS to claim the power to use U.S. foreign policy (which is almost completely under the President’s purview) to force allies to persecute his political opponents. I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out why that would be a catastrophically bad idea for American democracy, or at least what’s left of it. Again this isn’t a legal trial, impeachment is an inherently political process & politically, the people cannot grant the office that power – full stop.

“But Joe Biden is guilty and even if he’s not, Hunter Biden is definitely guilty!”

As we’ll discuss below – to some significant degree I do agree that the Bidens are clearly guilty of influence trading. It just doesn’t matter at f*cking all because of everything I just told you above. If Downmarket Mussolini was doing this to fight corruption he would have opened an investigation through the U.S. Department of Justice; this has got nothing to do with fighting crime and everything to do with political strong-arm nonsense as Trump’s own actions demonstrate.

The guy literally mentioned Joe Biden by name, while asking the Ukrainian President to investigate Hunter Biden for corruption; if this actually were a court of law and not a political procedure, Trump’s lawyer would be talking about cutting a deal right now. This is obvious. So factually I think it’s more than fair to say, even weighing the whistleblower’s complaint very lightly against the Trump administration’s own statements and actions, that I’m pretty damn sure Trump actually did all of this.

The question now is does the threat justify impeaching a sitting President; once again you see above I agree it does – indeed, to not impeach would be like kicking out the last leg under the American political process in the middle of our collective (and bipartisan) ongoing tumble into an elected fascist police dictatorship.

Which of course brings me to the tragic second act of my earlier op-ed – namely the staggering hubris and incompetence of double-dipping Democratic Party elites and apparatchiks looking for a single chess move that will flip the entire board and wash all their crooked bullsh*t clean.

Over the past few days we have all watched some combination of Democrat politicians, pro-Democratic party “liberal” media influencers and online party-affiliated mercenaries literally sh*t all over themselves to use Trump’s obvious guilt as a sponge for all the party’s failures. Once again I’m just going to look at a limited number of examples here to save space and energy, tracking down every bit of propaganda nonsense is exhausting:

Let’s start with the aggressive and absurd campaign to protect the Bidens at all costs being waged in the media right now. If you want to acknowledge Trump’s guilt, the liberal media and key influencers (Josh Marshall comes to mind) are out here insisting that you must also believe both of the Bidens are completely innocent – if not you are literally spreading a vaguely fascist but at a minimum pro-Trump conspiracy theory.

Okay well the obvious problem with that is Hunter Biden (a coke head lawyer with no energy sector experience at all) clearly only got the job on the board of Burisma Holdings because his father is Joe Biden, was Vice President at the time and Ukraine is a U.S. client state. In other words the same obvious realities that demonstrate Trump’s guilt, namely America’s relationship with the government of Ukraine, demonstrate that at least some minor influence trading was going on here – bog standard corruption? Sure, but it’s still corruption none the less and believing so isn’t fascist.

This is all even without discussing the prosecutor Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire by the way, but on that subject I also have some issues to address.

Look – you will probably never prove this in a court of law, but everything about Joe’s explanation stinks. Factually, the guy Biden pressured the Ukraine to fire *was* investigating the company his son worked for and I’m supposed to buy “uhhh, he was very corrupt and everyone in the world said so” and just leave it at that? How stupid do rich liberals think we are here? The United States deals with corrupt governments all the time and there is no way in hell I’m buying that Joe Biden was a warrior for “justice in general” here – that just doesn’t compute and it’s naive as hell.

You can choose to believe Palooka Joe if you like, but I don’t and I don’t think a reasonable examination of Biden’s excuses should lead anyone else to believe him either.

So right away you see the Dem Party turning a slam dunk argument – Trump is seizing dictatorial powers to persecute his political enemies for the office of POTUS and must be stopped – and turning it into “thinking the Bidens are crooks makes you a Trumpist little freak nutjob.”

And I wish that were the only example. In the past four or five days we’ve been told that this means the Russia part of Russiagate was right, Hillary Clinton’s email server was not a problem, Nancy Pelosi is not a fascist enabler but instead a master chess player and so forth. Suddenly the CIA is good again, Adam Schiff is good again, Ted Liu isn’t a babbling moron trying to hump the American flag into a national political following for the benefit of his career, Hillary should run for president again, Trump is Putin’s puppet again and on it goes.

The worst part is that even with all this double-dipping, hubris and greed the Democratic Party is still full of a bunch of incompetent chuckle-f*cks who make such poor arguments it damages their credibility and thus their cause – even when for example, Trump is clearly guilty. Right now the Democratic Party elites are screaming about protecting the rights of whistleblowers to defend some clearly bougie-ass CIA guy with dirt on the Klepto Kaiser, while simultaneously trying to pretend nobody remembers how they turned on Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and even their own girl Reality Winner.

We are talking about the same party and political operation that had Trump on Obstruction of Justice by the Summer of 2017; he’d fired three different people investigating him for three separate things and admitted on TV that one of them was *because* of that investigation. In their infinite wisdom the neoliberal machine and its political party decided to blow that golden opportunity to depose a fascist by, um, literally trying to wash the CIA and FBI clean in the eyes of liberal voters because “DRUMPF” and “PATRIOTISM” and “NORMS” – I kid you not.

The hubris, arrogance and incompetence of the mainstream liberal juggernaut is utterly incomprehensible to me in light of our current political reality. These are people who will look you in the face and say up is down and then call you “just like” a whackjob nazi if you don’t agree with them and thank them for this brilliant analysis.

Why are rich liberals and mainstream Democrats like this?

It’s because they still really can’t accept that they lost 2016 to a reality TV show assclown nazi rapist because Hillary sucked and they still can’t believe the labor class left won’t bow down to them and just roll over for 2020. Deep down inside, you and I both know, or at least suspect that “Nancy and the Neoliberals” are going to f*ck this whole thing up somehow under a wave of “patriotic” Bircher bullsh*t and crass elitist arrogance – because they’re still looking for that one tile that flips the whole board to “back when we was bad” and restores the remnants of transactional liberal “Clintonism” to power and glory.

And in the end that bizarro-world, front row kid revanchism might let Trump get away even though he’s absolutely cocked this up, can’t do a cover up to save his life and is going to damage his own re-election chances by the way he responds to this crisis.

In summation; Donald Trump is abso-f*cking-lutely guilty and I’m now more than ever sure the Democratic Party is going to ultimately blow this because somehow, someway they’re too greedy and selfish to outwit a delusional fascist running the White House like he’s Junior Soprano. The Dems will continue to overplay this, make everyone hate them as a political entity just a little more and force most people to associate this otherwise legitimate impeachment of Trump with neoliberal bullcrap spewed out in search of that board flipping master stroke.

It’s just what they do – always.

 

An Open Reply to a Reader Question about Political Ideology in My Writing

So today I thought I might change things up a bit by I’m using this Mastodon thread to answer a reader question that I’m almost certain wasn’t uttered in good faith – but I’d like to talk about it anyway.

The question was, simply enough “why do you write so much more about Democrats than Republicans” and it’s a question I’ve gotten a lot, but rarely from regular readers.

First of all and as a point of clarification, I write about Republicans all the time; I just usually call them fascists and the focus of my articles about them will typically revolve around the ever-growing fascist creep in America.

Most people who ask this question don’t notice how much of my work is explicitly antifascist because they don’t read my work at all and they’ve simply stumbled across something I wrote criticizing their favorite liberal or vaguely left of center political celebrity – in this case, I suspect it was Nancy Pelosi but it might have been Joe Biden or even Josh Marshall, the Dem Party mercenary blogger dude at TPM.

Furthermore, if you don’t read the articles, you don’t know that the GOP, “conservatives” and Trump minions come up roughly as often in my articles about liberal malfeasance as liberal failures to fight the fascist creep come up in my articles about Downmarket Mussolini and his administration.

I just prioritize fighting the GOP’s open fascism over scoring political points on behalf of rich liberals and Democratic Party elites in a way that our mainstream corporate media and snarky liberal bloggers simply do not. It’s a question of tone, not volume of work or even political ideology.

With that rebuttal on record however, I’d still like to address what I believe the reader likely meant to ask about when she wrote me that question – why am I so angry at liberals and why don’t I spend all that anger yelling at conservatives, especially since I know they’re fascist?.

This I think is a more reasonable or at least good faith question and I believe many folks who argue I have an “anti-liberal bias” just mean that I hate liberals and want to know why. And I do actually hate liberals, so at least that’s a fair question this time.

First and foremost it must be understood that I am not a liberal, I am not advantaged by the typical behavior of liberals and there is nothing weird at all about a working class leftist hating all rich people, regardless of political affiliation – historically that describes the entire real left and the only reason you don’t know that is because America is better at exterminating or marginalizing left wing politics than Europe or say, Canada is.

Secondly is must be understood that just because I’m not a liberal, doesn’t mean I’m a conservative. Indeed I actually find the term conservative to be a bit of an insulting joke; there’s nothing conservative about the billionaire fascists and “patriotic” corpse merchants who control the GOP – these folks are dangerous right wing reactionaries and it is not an accident that the Republican Party is now openly embracing fascism. I am not a Republican or a right wing reactionary, I do not and I will not ever vote GOP and that’s because I’m not a fascist and I don’t support fascists politically – I fight them.

Seemingly perversely, this collection of truths means that I definitely write more articles designed to be read by liberals, than articles designed to be read by conservatives and thus I suppose the perception can be that I’m lecturing liberals but letting conservatives off the hook. This is however incorrect; I’m simply not speaking *to* conservatives because they’re nazis. I don’t write to them or for them, but I do certainly write about them – often, and with absolutely no sympathy or good will at all.

Frankly I don’t think I’ve ever written an article where I have said Democrats are worse than or “just as bad” as the GOP, and I’m absolutely certain I’ve never written an article where I said liberals were “as bad as” fascists. What I have done at times is point out that from a labor class left wing perspective, the political ideology of the rich people screwing me over is often secondary to the fact that they’re well, screwing me over. But I have always made these ideological distinctions explicitly clear – sometimes even at the cost of article focus and the strength of my writing.

Logically then of course I *do* encounter a lot more liberals who want to argue about my writing online, than I encounter reactionary right wing fascists who want to have those same arguments. This is because while the liberal reader can argue that I’m wrong about Democrat incompetence, collaboration and corruption, the fascist observer pretty much has nowhere to go in terms of starting a conversation after I’ve said “f*ck off, nazi swine.”

This quickly becomes something of a self-enforcing cycle too because while I might argue with a liberal about my work in the (typically vain) hopes I can change their mind, I’m not going to bother arguing with a fascist – I’m just going to tell him to tongue my hoop and block him or delete his typically moronic and bigoted comment. So naturally I argue more with liberals than I do with fascists because who the hell wants to talk to fascist about *anything* frankly?

This phenomenon is also repeated in a staggeringly large number of situations in my life; I read more liberal news, so I criticize liberal news organizations more and when companies like Fox or fascist disinformation sites like Breitbart come across my news feed, I simply ignore them. Occasionally my work requires me to dissect the fascist argument so I’ll read a specific article before I take it apart but I’m certainly not reading lies by nazis for fun or to “stay informed.”

Look, I don’t know how you can get the impression that a woman who has written that Donald Trump is a fascist, a rapist, a crook, a liar, a white supremacist, a colonialist, a moron and should be impeached immediately, is somehow letting “the right” off easy but I don’t think any rational person whose read my work would agree with that characterization.

What actually seems to make Democrats and their largely centrist “liberal” supporters angry is that I do not spend all of my time writing about right wing malfeasance and that every article I write criticizing elite liberalism, corporate media or the Democratic party is an article I could have written about the infinite number of awful things Trump, the GOP and American “conservatism” has done at large. To which I simply say “I’m a leftist, not a liberal – go back and read this thread again.”

Which then brings me to my second but equally important point; which is that whether I write about liberal cowardice or conservative hypocrisy in American politics is at least somewhat influenced by the concept of market saturation.

This may surprise you to learn but there is actually no real shortage of online analysis about Republican criminality, conservative hypocrisy and impassioned essays about why the “Red Elephant Team” should burn in hellfire. Y’all effectively have that niche covered pretty well.

Whenever some anti-gay GOP congressman turns up with an 18 year old male prostitute in a Motel 6, the liberal, Democratic Party-aligned liberal blogoshpere is on the case. Every time the Klepto Kaiser unleashes another deranged tweet on Twitter there are twenty-two mocking analysis articles posted within roughly a half hour, spanning the gamut from “independent” liberal blogs all the way up to The Hill, Salon, Splinter and sometimes Slate.

Believe me my friends, I’ve tried writing about these things in the past because they are very easy and I am very lazy sometimes. Unfortunately, I not only did not particularly enjoy my work, but it’s not like liberal Trump-hating readers were flocking to check out my version of the “what made Trump type the covfefe tweet” article either. There is absolutely no shortage of liberal snark on the internet, just like there’s no shortage of unhinged right wing conspiracies about Greta Thunberg on the internet. In other words, I’m not needed here.

Additionally because the difference between “leftism” and “liberalism” is fundamentally informed by class, I find myself with neither the ability nor the desire to “break into” the liberal snark blogging game on behalf of pinhead boogies who think calling Trump’s vapid wife an “illegal” is the height of comedy. I don’t know the right people and even if I did and they thought my snark was the cat’s ass, they sure wouldn’t like my friends or my community. Don’t worry, the feeling is very mutual.

Frankly the question of why I don’t write about Republicans or conservatives more often feels to me like I’m being asked “why aren’t you publishing Talking Points Memo” and the answer is that there is already a Talking Points Memo (with more than twenty clone sites) and I sincerely f*cking hate it because I don’t like bourgeoisie liars regardless of their political affiliations.

Finally I would like to conclude by noting that I write about issues that focus on the labor class left because I myself am a labor class leftist and I have long since noted a shortage of writing or analysis about issues that affect the labor class left, let alone articles written from the *perspective* of a labor class leftist. It’s not a lucrative business, but I do it because I love it – I do not love bougie liberals and I don’t give a damn if that offends you or anyone else for that matter.

When I say “Que Se Vayan Todos” I mean precisely that they must *all* go – and that certainly includes your bougie liberal faves. I recognize fascism and corporate greed as the two greatest dangers of our time and while the GOP has its whole fists crammed up into both pies at once, there are plenty of liberal Democrat fingers in those pies as well.

You don’t own us and we know bougie liberals aren’t our friends. One way or another, the future is left; and that means they must indeed all go.

 

Article Analysis: On Greta, Right Wing Propaganda and “Conspiracies”

In today’s article analysis piece I’d like to take a look at a very important expose that was recently picked up in America by Teen Vogue – I’m sharing the original here out of solidarity for indie and activist media and because DesmogUK has a great graphic that shows all the companies and think tanks they’re talking about in the article.

I happened to run across this important piece by Mat Hope while I was writing about the U.S. media’s obscenely obtuse coverage of Greta Thunberg’s visit to the UN myself and I’m including it today so we can discuss it in a much broader perspective than just “stories about Greta.”

In regards to Thunberg, I really don’t see much point in debating the effectiveness of her activism and I frankly don’t care whether or not you “trust her” because I can’t really see why it matters.

You can tell me that she’s just giving all those corrupt planet-murdering politicians a free photo-op and I’ll agree with you readily enough. I will however also counter by asking you precisely what she was supposed to do – stay home? You can say that screaming at politicians on TV isn’t going to solve the problem and that’s absolutely correct, but I’ll say at least she got to scream at them. I’d like to scream at them, wouldn’t you? I think at the point that you were expecting a sixteen year old climate activist from Sweden to start the green socialist energy revolution we’re going to need to actually save our species; you kind of already jumped the shark.

What I’d like to talk about instead is the network of oil-soaked think tanks, reactionary media organizations and talking head right wing pundits this piece exposes and what you can extrapolate about the larger western media environment from its re-posting on Teen Vogue.

At this point I don’t really think it’s “breaking news” to most observers on the left that there is a massive, billionaire and corporate funded climate catastrophe disinformation network operating on the right (and even in the center) of the American political class – including donors, politicians and the various corporate media factions. This is now an established fact even in milquetoast mainstream liberal circles – although not necessarily among the “liberal” elite who have a vested interest in climate science denial no matter how much they pretend otherwise.

Okay so why is that? After all, when independent media first exposed the Koch Industries connection to the anti-climate science wing of the larger American “Tea Party” (also a Koch funded astroturf operation, with lots of help from Wall Street oddly enough) it was immediately derided as a “conspiracy theory” by all the usual suspects.

So what’s different about this “conspiracy theory” and say the Bernie Sanders media blackout; what makes this now widely-accepted story a proven “conspiracy” while the American left’s direct quotation of Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” to explain the Washington Post’s bias against grassroots organizing and the larger (and diverse) labor class is merely a “conspiracy theory?” It certainly can’t be a question of sources or proof – roughly seventy-five percent of Manufacturing Consent is raw data that demonstrates corporate media really does have an implicit and inescapable bias towards establishment power.

The simple answer is that due to factionalism and divergent interests in the upper classes of American establishment power, this issue was reported on fairly and extensively in the mainstream corporate media; albeit primarily by “liberal” outlets. I could write a whole essay about precisely why the “liberal” media corporations (who are still very much tied into oil, or at least the economy built entirely around it) chose to run with this story instead of all the other stories but the long and short of it is that the Koch network attacks on bog standard center-right Democrats were more painful than losing some fossil fuel executive donors and thus the “liberal” establishment fought back – by letting their in-pocket media lapdogs actually do some journalism for once.

So while the idea that a bunch of right wing nutjob billionaires have brought together political parties, think tanks, media organizations and puppet scientists to lie about murdering the planet for profit is on its face shocking and scandalous – the fact is you can buy books about the subject in mainstream book stores and you’ll read about it in mainstream “left-leaning liberal” publications on a fairly regular basis. That in a nutshell is why everyone knows about this “conspiracy” and nobody except disingenuous right wing propagandists calls you “crazy” for talking about it.

If you take a step back and look at the larger political and class warfare picture however, the exposure of this right wing pro-fossil fuel industry propaganda network lying in plain sight does bring up a number of interesting, if not downright disturbing questions.

If a network of right wing elites can literally up and buy a revolution to protect Wall Street, promote climate science denial and smear left wing activists at will in the public sphere, what else might rich people with ulterior motives be capable of? If the reason the vast majority of people have ever even heard of the Koch Network behind this propaganda machine is pretty much entirely because they broke class solidarity and attacked their “liberal” peers in the media, what happens when the mass murdering billionaire liars *don’t* break class solidarity and both “sides” of the mainstream media agree that the proles don’t need to know?

If this group of right wing billionaires can deploy a whole disinformation campaign to drown Greta’s words out in waves of angry bullsh*t in a matter of days, what might *other* groups of wealthy, powerful and influential people be doing with their time and money that you never, or rarely ever hear about?

Could the Democratic Party, elite donors and dozens of friendly in-pocket media puppets come together to smear the burgeoning American labor class left and rig a nomination contest for a crooked rich white lady? Could the editorial staff at the Washington Post meet and agree they were only going to print stories that portrayed left wing American politicians and activists working against Jeff Bezo’s class interests in a negative light? Could an influential “liberal” think tank bring together a coalition of elite party officials, media figures, wealthy donors and even 2020 Dem Primary candidates to plot how to stop a seemingly imminent Bernie Sanders presidency? Could a secret liberal media Slack channel be used to quickly disseminate a fake Iowa poll and create a narrative of inevitability for Liz Warren? Could that same media Slack channel and preexisting relationships with a variety of liberal “activist” organizations be used to recycle a 2008 smear campaign against Obama supporters and widely promote the idea that working class leftists who won’t vote for neoliberals are secretly racist, sexist Bernie Bro scum who’re really a lot like the fascist right except in some ways worse?

The answer to all of these questions is of course yes and if you’ve been reading independent media or writers who openly support Sanders, you’ve heard about every single one of these real stories – even if the vast majority of liberals and labor class folks who aren’t plugged into politics have not. This is of course a huge part of the problem but the honest truth here is that it’s only the tip of the iceberg because you *can* still read about these demonstrably true, real life plots against left wing, labor class voters *someplace* on the internet.

What should really keep you up at night frankly, is the realization that there are almost certainly thousands if not an infinite number of horrifying and impossible to comprehend plots against the labor class that you have never even heard of – no matter how plugged in you are. After all the only real requirements involved here are money, access to a public megaphone of some type and a seething animus for people who ask you to share some of your ill-gotten wealth with the poorest members of society; and almost every rich person in the western world is all stocked up on those three key ingredients.

In a society where the difference between a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy fact pretty much comes down to whether or not the truth damages the ruling class in some manner, it’s the rich man’s open conspiracies that you *don’t* know about or are never reminded about, that represent the greatest threats to us all.

 

• Nina Illingworth