Posts Tagged ‘corruption’
watching Trump’s downfall – a new civil war?
Putain and Frump chat about the best Russian hidey-holes cum 2018
Canto: So maybe I’m getting a bit over-excited about the Trump mess. I’m already getting nervous about my prediction that he’ll have fled to exile in Russia by next year.
Jacinta: That was your prediction?
Canto: Well, no I just thought of that one, but he’ll be out of office. The thing is, it’s the Mueller probe that’s most likely to nail him, and I’m being forced to defer to lawyers who predict that Mueller’s team won’t be completed until 2019 or beyond.
Jacinta: Hope deferred makes the heart sick.
Canto: Still, there are other possibilities. His popularity is the lowest of any Prez after a year in office since polling began, by a long way. It’s a slow, steady decline, and if it continues that way it’ll be well down in the twenties by late next year, and that may mirror his fall, slow and steady.
Jacinta: Though hopefully with no soft landing.
Canto: Well if he’s out of power it couldn’t possibly be soft. And I don’t mean weakened by the mid-term elections, I mean out the door.
Jacinta: Well the Republicans have just passed what many are calling a truly terrible tax bill, and people are already taking to the streets. And considering that Trump himself is going to benefit massively from it, while the have-nots and have-littles, many of whom voted for Trump, have been screwed, it may be that this time his base will shrink more than he ever thought it could.
Canto: Yes, there might be fighting in the streets. And here’s where Trump’s over-confident arrogance might just kill him off. He’s made a dangerous promise to campaign heavily towards the mid-terms next year, because he thinks he alone can fix it, that’s to say he can bring his ratings up with the same bullshit that he used last year. The same aggression, the same fake promises, the same conspiracy theories, the same hate speech. But his base, or maybe his ex-base, won’t have seen any improvement in their lives, the circus will have lost a lot of its glitz and the opposition will be mobilised to protest, to drown him out. It could turn ugly, and as fewer people buy into his shite…
Jacinta: The shrinking base will get tougher and angrier, and it’ll be the confederates and the union all over again. Or something.
Canto: Well, war of a kind is brewing, because the rhetoric, especially from the far right, is getting apocalyptic. Mueller and the FBI and the DoJ are in the process of launching a coup, they should be marched out of their lawyerly hidey-holes in cuffs, we have to act now to stop this show trial, that sort of thing.
Jacinta: And some say this is getting orchestrated, or at least egged on, by the White House. Trump junior even got in on the act the other day. He apparently likes to talk about rigged systems and a sinister Deep State…
Canto: The one responsible for September 11?
Jacinta: Yes, and contrails and the fake moon landings and the assassination of JFK and AIDS. The one running the USA and the world from bunkers deep beneath the Rocky Mountains. Anyway the Deep State is now a kind of anti-Trump, similar to the Anti-Christ, out to destroy the Prez.
Canto: Though he’s doing a pretty good job of that himself. And all the adults are saying that Mueller’s a consummate professional and his team won’t be fazed by the baying hounds, but I’m just wondering whether things might get out of control if they don’t produce something positive soon, like an indictment of Kushner, or a summons to Trump himself.
Jacinta: But wouldn’t that just set the Trumpets blaring?
Canto: Not if it was a solid indictment, or a well-worded summons. Of course plenty of Trumpets would blare, and Fox News would howl…
Jacinta: Do foxes howl?
Canto: Yes and they bark and scream and gekker and it’s all pretty hair-raising, but the Trumpets are definitely more dangerous. But anyway I think the drama that would follow the next big Mueller move would be nothing compared to the drama that would follow a move against Mueller, by the White House or a GOP faction.
Jacinta: A number of prominent Dems consider that the holiday break would be an ideal time for Trump to make a move, and they’re issuing warnings. What do you think?
Canto: I think these warnings are tactically sound, though they’re also heartfelt. They really feel this is a fight for democracy. I don’t think Trump would have done anything, but these Democrats speaking up helps to assure that.
Jacinta: Well if Trump does act the civil war may begin with the ‘nobody is above the law‘ rallies. Heard of them?
Canto: Yes a bipartisan organisation that’s set to mobilise protesters around the nation from the moment that Mueller is sacked. So they’ve learned from the past, but the Trumpets should’ve learned too. I don’t think there will be another Saturday night massacre.
Jacinta: No, and I think Trump’s trickier than you might think – he seems to slime his way out of a lot of situations that would see others in prison, and I think he’ll manage somehow to slime his way out of having to swear to anything on oath. But I don’t think he’ll ever manage to slime his way back into popularity again. I would love it if the people got him.
Canto: Like Mussolini?
Jacinta: A pleasant fantasy but let’s be civilised. An uprising so relentless as to make his administration completely unworkable.
Canto: So a night-flight to Russia mightn’t be out of the question then?
Jacinta: Well I can only think of two things that would undo him, a popular uprising or a situation in which he’s forced, personally, to tell the truth.
Canto: But there’s a third. Being forced to reveal his finances.
Jacinta: Well I include that in the second. Being forced to tell the truth about his finances.
Canto: I’m getting impatient, waiting for the DoJ’s next move. I heard they were going to interview Trump’s lawyers, who keep trying to calm him down, like with this idea that he’s about to be exonerated.
Jacinta: Which is silly. I’m pretty sure the investigation will get to Trump, but not until they’ve built up a really solid case. And they won’t be asking him to sit down to a friendly interview, as was reported on somewhat speculatively back in October. Anyway, a few days ago the press were all over this story about the Mueller team interviewing Trump’s lawyers, but I’ve heard nothing since.
Canto: The DoJ won’t be leaking anything about it if it takes place. The White House leaks like the Titanic, but it’s all bullshit.
Jacinta: I think obfuscation’s a better word. Yes you won’t be able to trust anything they say, but Trump’s mood might be revealing.
Canto: Not necessarily. You’re assuming the lawyers will relay to Trump the truth about their meeting. Better to assume the opposite.
Jacinta: What a tangled web they weave. Maybe a public uprising will cut the Gordon knot.
Canto: Most obscurantly put Jacinta. Most obscurantly.
why Obama’s warnings about dictatorship are more than justified
Watching one of the cable news networks, either CNN or MSNBC – I’ve become interested in the USA’s parlous political situation as a diversion from my own probs – I listened not so attentively to two opposing views on a recent speech given by Barak Obama in which he warned against complacency with regard to creeping dictatorship. This speech has apparently inflamed Republicans, or members of the alt-right, whatever, I’m not too keen on knowing all the distinctions within that country’s disturbing polity. I got a sample of this ‘indignation’ when a right-wing pundit on the show launched into Obama for his example of Germany in the thirties – all those millions of Jews and Enemies of the State gassed, all that racist ideology and disgusting craziness, how incredibly offensive to make such a comparison, right? Obama really showed himself to be the most shameful opportunist, who’d stoop to anything, and how can you possibly compare this Trump administration with such a maniacal mass-murderer and his henchmen, etc etc.
Then the leftist speaker got to respond and it quickly degenerated into a shoutfest. Of course I felt like shouting too, but then I thought of a more dignified response.
Obama spoke calmly and thoughtfully, and yes certainly he was referring to the Trump administration without naming it. And his comparison with the rise of Hitler might have been controversial but what other choice did he have, seriously? What other dictator would’ve meant anything to most Americans? Obama had a choice of dictatorships subverting democracy. In other words, recent dictatorships. He also would’ve known, consciously or unconsciously, that your average American knows less than zero about the history of any country other than their own. So is he going to talk about Franco’s Spain, or Tito’s Yugoslavia, or Suharto’s Indonesia? Not bloody likely, that would be like talking Swahili to an American audience. Hitler was the obvious, really the only choice. And I have to say, I’ve long been pissed off by the ‘never mention Hitler’ taboo in political discourse. He should be mentioned regularly and often, and then again.
Trump has clear and obvious dictatorial tendencies. He rarely if ever has anything positive to say about democratically elected leaders, but he’s passionately in love with Putin, a petty dictator who’s turned his country into an economic basket case, with a GDP almost exactly the same as Australia’s in spite of a population six or seven times the size. Putin tortures and murders his opponents, or steals their money and sends them into exile, where they live in constant fear for their lives. He has likely destroyed any possibility of democracy in Russia for decades, though I try to still be optimistic about that. I have no doubt that Trump is only curbed by the institutions he lashes out at – the media, the courts, the FBI, the Department of Justice, etc, and would love nothing more than to be monarch of all he surveys, with statues and banners devoted to him everywhere. Then he wouldn’t be reduced to empty threats of suing the many women he’s abused, he could simply eliminate them – a much more permanent, and cheap, solution. He wouldn’t have to humiliate himself by begging support for the Roy Moores of the world, he could simply appoint them, as does his great love Putin.
So the point is that today’s joke can become tomorrow’s reality. Recently, Trump has expressed his ‘disappointment’ about not being able to control the Department of Justice, clearly referring to the Mueller investigation. Privately, we hear, he’s apoplectic with rage about it. We hear also about his ‘administration’ trying to set up an alternative CIA, and his lawyers suggesting he can’t obstruct justice by virtue of his position. You want to laugh, but how many of us were laughing at the very idea of Trump’s candidacy?
All of this, it seems to me, results from a political system in which way too much power is invested in one man (hopefully there will be a female Prez some time soon). In this respect, the USA appears to have far less checks and balances than other western political systems. For example, it appears that the US Prez has veto rights over decisions made by the US congress or senate. This would be unthinkable in any other western nation that I know of. There’s also the apparent fact that the Prez is seen as the representative of justice in the country, which is why past Presidents such as Nixon have seemed confused about their relationship to the law – whether they’re above, below or adjacent to it. It’s a farcical but disturbing situation which just doesn’t occur in other western democracies, in which roles and power are more diversified and the leader is very much first among equals. The fact that legal experts are actually debating whether the American President can be accused of obstructing justice is a perfect example of the craziness at the summit of US politics. If the Prime Minister of Australia, or Great Britain, or the Chancellor of Germany tried to argue that they were above the law, they wouldn’t be just thrown out of office, they’d be laughed out of office. They say that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; the US President’s power isn’t absolute, but it’s certainly too far on that side of the spectrum.
So Trump is currently pushing an envelope that’s already too large – the envelope of Presidential power. But there are positive signs. Certainly there’s no chance of him being re-elected, with his popularity waning and no real chance of it rising again, with a profoundly serious criminal investigation moving inexorably closer to Trump and his family, and with local elections moving against the Republicans. The tragedy is – and this is yet another problem for the US political system – that when Trump is pushed out of office, which I predict will happen next year, his administration won’t be dumped at the same time, as would happen in just every other democratic country, with fresh elections held. Instead you’d have an entirely discredited administration, led by the super-imbecilic bible-basher Mike Pence or the generally supine Paul Ryan, limping along for another two or three desolate years.
I may have made some mistakes about how the political system works in the USA, as I don’t like to get too close to it (I don’t find the odour appealing), but I do find it tiresome if not laughable when I hear American pundits talking about theirs as the greatest democracy, or their country as the cradle of democracy, etc. I am finding it entertaining at the moment though, with due deference to the poor and the struggling who are truly being done over by their absurd President and his horrendous policies.
towards the ousting of Trump and his confederacy of dunces
Before all this shite came up I was writing something completely different. In order to alleviate myself of my own existence for a while, I should get back to it, and update it.
We’re living in interesting times, and I can’t help but put my weird and less than minuscule shoulder to the wheel in trying to bring down Trump and his cowboy cronies. I’ve been trying to ignore this stuff but it’s just getting too exciting. There’s been the Paradise Papers, the Facebook revelations, sex scandals and of course the Mueller inquiry. The pundits of the cable news network MSNBC are almost peeing their pants on camera as they gleefully rake through the revelations of Russian links to the Trump administration. It’s a great time for the media, with an obvious charlatan in the White House, whose buffoonery provides endless talking points, while ordinary folks and elephants get shafted big-time.
I’m not always a huge US watcher, and I’m of course pretty ignorant on the details, but it’s been a circus that’s been difficult to ignore lately, and the pickings are getting richer and richer. I’m garbling up metaphors here, so let me calm down and look at the now distinct possibility of removing Trump from office. First, the Mueller inquiry. NBC news is reporting, with apparently impeccable sources, that Trump’s former, albeit brief, national security adviser Michael Flynn is close to being charged with money laundering and perjury by the Mueller team. Of course, Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his aide Rick Gates have already been indicted and it looks like a junior but big-talking foreign policy adviser to the administration, George Papadopoulos, is assisting the team with their inquiries after pleading guilty to perjury about Russian connections. I’ve been listening to a number of legal and political experts being interviewed, mostly on NBC, and it looks as though the case against Manafort, the biggest fish, is extremely strong, and it seems like a matter of days before Flynn is indicted, but what would I know? On top of that, there’s Jefferson Sessions, the US Attorney-General and apparently an arch-racist, who has perjured himself under oath, and others who are key figures in the Trump admission, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
It does seem as if Trump’s hold on power is crumbling, unless I’m falling prey to the manic glee of American liberal pundits. Certainly there are polls and election results that suggest maybe I’m not getting ahead of myself. There has just been an election victory for the Democrats in Virginia, and the (extremely unpopular) Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, has been swept out of office. The Virginia result in particular is being treated by some as a watershed event (where does that odd term come from?) but maybe not. Certainly though it’s bad for Trump, who heavily supported the Republican candidate (then threw him to the dogs when he lost). The apparently reliable Reuters/Ipsos poll measuring Trump’s approval/disapproval rating has him currently at about 36%, with 59% disapproval, figures which have remained more or less steady for the last two months. I don’t see a huge dip in the polls – his numbers have always been quite low, it seems, but unless they pick up he’s going to be very vulnerable, and may become more extreme under pressure. His lack of success in pushing his agenda, his gaffes, his tweets, the Russian mess and the inquiry, they’re all converging to ensure that he won’t be elected again, but what are the chances for those who want him out before the next election. Surely almost all hopes lie with the Mueller inquiry.
Robert Mueller was the Director of the FBI from 2001 to 2013, its longest serving director since the thuggish J Edgar Hoover. Appointed by George W Bush, he was given a two-year extension to his term by Barack Obama, and was eventually replaced by James Comey, who was controversially sacked by Trump earlier this year, a decision which may prove disastrous for the man with One of the Great Memories of All Time (a memory which may well be tested under oath soon, according to former US solicitor-general Ken Starr). It was Comey’s slightly controversial dismissal that led directly to the 2017 Special Counsel Inquiry headed by Mueller, since Comey alleged that Trump had essentially tried to obstruct justice by asking him to drop an FBI inquiry into Flynn and his connection with Russia. Mueller and his team’s brief is to investigate “any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation”, to quote from assistant Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller in the position. That’s a pretty wide brief, it seems to me. Mueller has a fearsome reputation and he’s gathered together a team of 16 lawyers, some of them highly reputed, and if Flynn is indicted, which appears a near-certainty, things may well reach crisis-point for the administration.
So it all appears to be going along nicely, if painfully slowly for those who want Trump and his confederacy of dunces removed. The thing is, Mueller and his team will be thorough. They won’t go charging in and arresting people unless the evidence is clear, and even then they may try to use the guilty as hell to gain more information about other parties, in exchange for a degree of immunity. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would love to be a fly on the wall of Mueller’s Justice Department offices over the coming weeks.
Flynn seems to be a particularly revolting reptile. Apparently he tried to arrange a deal, which would have earned him oodles of money, to smuggle the moderate Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen out of the USA to Turkey, where he would’ve faced certain death under the thuggish macho dictator Erdogan, who constantly accused Gulen of organising the failed coup against him. If this is true, and provable, hopefully Flynn will live inside a cell for a long time. But there’s also a possibility that Flynn discussed this plan with the morally cretinous Trump, who would undoubtedly have approved. If there’s evidence of such discussions, that would be fantastic for us all.
Flynn’s a weak link for many other reasons, it seems. According to the Washington Post, he lied to the FBI – a felony offence – about discussions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak regarding sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration due to its meddling in the US election. It was because of this dishonesty that he was sacked by Trump – with great reluctance. Flynn also seems to have been involved in a strange plan to build US-Russian nuclear power plants in the Middle East, about which, again, he has been less than honest. The Russians who were part of the deal are under US sanctions. Flynn has an obvious penchant for the anti-democratic Russian kleptocracy, something of a liability for a National Security Advisor.
And there are other members of the confederacy – Trump junior, Kushner and Sessions stand out, but there are so many others in the worst political administration the western world has ever seen – who are being targeted by the Mueller inquiry. The question really is – when will the circus be closed down? Every day’s delay, after all, brings damage. Morans are running the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the EPA and just about every other US department…
All of this calls into question the whole of the US political system, surely. It has often been called the least democratic system in the western world, though that tends to avoid the problem with democracy itself, the problem that uninformed people have the same voting rights as informed people. If you’re going to have a democracy of that kind, you really need to maximise the number of informed people. But another problem, and it’s as clear a problem in Australia as anywhere, is that ignorant, loud-mouthed people can run for political office, with far less vetting than is carried out in protecting our borders. In this respect I’m an unashamed elitist. But America’s presidential system is way too presidential. Australia’s political system, like Britain’s, is much more party-based, with responsibilities, and culpability, more equally shared among government leaders. And this, I think, is a much better, much less dangerous system. In the USA, people generally vote every four years for a person rather than a party and its policy set, and this has so many problems associated with it, it just isn’t funny. Trump, for example, isn’t a Republican, he’s ‘his own man’, a blundering, bullying, bullshitting, bragging, belly-aching buffoon, a man born into and gifted enormous wealth, a laughing-stock as a businessman, a patsy for Russian mafioso oligarchs, who has installed an assorted pile of know-nothings to important political, scientific and cultural posts in the most economically powerful in the world – though by no means a model country for fairness, security or opportunity. I can’t think of any other western country in which this could’ve happened. The checks and balances, but above all the political culture of those countries would never have allowed it.
any day now, any way now, they shall be released….
The New York Times describes the current US Prez as a billionaire, but is he? How can such a bumbling oaf be so super-rich? In the same NYT article, by Alan Rappeport, the Prez was quoted as bragging, when still a candidate, that he understood his country’s tax laws ‘better than anyone who has ever run for President’ – clearly as truthful a remark as everything else he’s ever said. His subsequent remarks on the tax system he promised to fix have been typically vague when not entirely ridiculous. A one-page tax plan of sorts was released in late April, which promised massive tax cuts to businesses and individuals, but it was massively short on details on how such cuts would be targeted and absorbed without a massive blow-out of the deficit. Anyway, it’ll be massive cause the US Prez likes massive. The administration has promised a thoroughly detailed plan by the end of August, but fellow-travellers who’ve been involved in meetings – mostly Republicans – remain thoroughly sceptical.
Meanwhile the Prez hasn’t released his own tax returns in spite of promising to do so. In mid-April some 100,000 citizens demonstrated against this interesting behaviour while high-profile critics such as Sam Harris have wondered why the release hasn’t been forced upon him. Could it be that the Prez is above the law? This is of particular concern because investigative journalists and historians such as Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder, people with solid Russian connections, have cast doubt on the Prez’s fortune and raised questions about his indebtedness to Russian money-makers, and possibly Putin’s mafioso government. And of course tax cuts to the rich might just ease the economic burden on the Prez himself, supposing he has one.
Apparently there’s a 40 year tradition of Prezes releasing their tax returns. When I read this in Rappeport’s NYT article I was immediately disheartened, as it became clear that it was only a tradition, which is far from being a law. And the Prez, as we know, is no traditionalist, with respect to such fakeries as the rule of law, a free press, human rights and the like. But I hatched an idea this morning as I heard about the Prez’s tweets on the London knife attacks, taking the opportunity to shore up his base with dog whistles on crazy immigrants, and attempts to mock the London Mayor by deliberately misconstruing his remarks. My idea is for certain high profile critics to take to Twitter (which I never use myself) or other social media platforms, and to address him directly, on a daily basis, with remarks like ‘have you released your tax returns yet, Herr Prez?’, and to get everyone else to do the same – a sort of global crowd-sourcing project. After all, though the Prez isn’t a traditionalist, he is a populist, and imagine how he would respond to hundreds of thousands, growing to millions, of people tweeting the same request every day, flooding social media platforms around the world… You may say I’m a dreamer, but really, imagine….