Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Tim Nickerson]

Under Donald Trump’s reign, America is a country run by a crime family. Trump and his Republicans have no moral authority. They are removing any oversight by firing inspectors general within the federal government, which has allowed Trump and his allies to loot coronavirus relief funds for billions of dollars. Trump and his cronies rage about “law and order” and locking up people who were looting during the George Floyd uprising — when in reality the plutocrats are looting an entire country and have been doing so for decades.

It’s a mafia state. There’s no control. There’s no regulation. The system is full of legalized bribery. The electoral process is corrupt as well. The courts are stacked with right-wing ideologues. The press has been bought off and corporatized. Many of our constitutional rights as Americans have been revoked by judicial fiat, including the right to privacy. Corporate money floods political campaigns in the name of “free speech.” The United States is a failed democracy and a mafia state, the natural result of what happens when capitalism is deregulated.

Trump, Mitch McConnell, the other Republicans and their gangster capitalist allies are telling the public that $1,200 in coronavirus relief money is adequate. But the billionaires and millionaires are the ones who received the majority of the “relief” funds. America’s billionaires are now $500 billion richer because of the coronavirus disaster. The average American is closer to homelessness. Neoliberal capitalism amounts to socialism for the rich and “free markets” for everyone else.

Mitch McConnell and the other elites really have not figured out what is happening in this moment of great crisis and upheaval. What we are seeing now in America is about so much more than people just being sick of the police murdering innocent people. It is a generational and class revolt. Yes, COVID certainly exacerbated it. But all of the kindling was already there. Chronic underemployment, massive consumer and student debt, being priced out of the for-profit health care system and the expansion of militarized police and the prison system.

This movement is multiracial. It is led by people of color, but certainly, there are a lot of young white people out there too, and my sense is that they are no longer buying into being gaslit by the elites anymore.

The empire always strikes back. What will that look like?

We have to acknowledge that the empire is tottering towards its collapse. So what is empire? Empire is the expression of white supremacy beyond our borders. The whole nature of empire is to go into the Middle East — previously into Vietnam, Latin America, the Philippines and elsewhere — and steal natural resources and exploit cheap labor in the name of white supremacy. And of course, we have an American society built on chattel slavery and genocide against indigenous peoples. What empires traditionally do at the end is they engage in what historians call “micro-militarism”.

At the end, as they slip into an irrevocable decline, empires engage in military adventurism in a desperate bid to bring back lost power, lost wealth and lost glory. America has done this in the Middle East. The result is that America has been hollowed out from the inside.

At the end stage, the elites need the tools that the empire perfected on people of color abroad. That is why we see the drones and militarized police and heavy weapons such as armored personnel carriers being used here in America against the country’s own citizens.

White supremacy hurts white folks. There are so many examples of this, from the way that federal and state resources are spent putting Black and brown people in prison in disproportionate numbers to how white racism hurts the overall economy. The police in Buffalo intentionally knocking down that older white man, who lay there bleeding from the head while the police walked over him like he was human garbage, was such a profound metaphor for how racism hurts white people. With the George Floyd protests and people’s uprising, white folks are seeing, again, that what Black and brown folks have been saying about police thuggery is true. Now the police are brutalizing white people.

People of color always, throughout American history, suffer first. They are the first to suffer — and they suffer disproportionately. But de-industrialization has now hit the white working class. The tools of control are now being used against them. Overall, I don’t so much fault the white racists. They are what they are. I fault the white liberals who really did not pay attention to what was happening to primarily poor people of color in urban areas.

Everything that is now enraging white progressives is not new — it goes back decades. But it was never really covered by the mainstream American news media. The liberal elites busied themselves with the boutique activism of “diversity” and “tolerance,” “multiculturalism” and the like. Sure, that is well and good, but not when such approaches are divorced from economic justice.

When you look at these multiracial, intergenerational protests, what do you see?

There has been mass economic disenfranchisement. There is a leadership crisis too among the Democrats and the so-called liberals.

For example, look at what the Congressional Black Caucus is doing. They are repeating the same kind of tired clichés about police reform we have heard for years. Most people participating in the George Floyd protests know that such reforms are useless. Empty symbolism. The mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, paints “Black Lives Matter” in 35-foot-tall letters on a street near the White House. But at the same time, she’s pushing for a $45 million increase in the police budget and the construction of a $500 million new jail. I don’t think people are buying such a performance. I also don’t believe that people are buying Pelosi’s little kente-cloth, “take a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter” trick either.

In part, such actions have no credibility because younger white people no longer buy into the policies of the oligarchs which produced all of this extreme social inequality in the first place. People of color have long known this truth. Now younger white people are being forced into a new type of awareness and consciousness. That is a good thing.

I worry that the Democrats are setting themselves up for great failure and a crushing defeat with all this celebration of how Biden is leading Trump in these early polls. Polls are a snapshot in time. They are not predictive of the outcome on Election Day. Hillary Clinton and Mike Dukakis had double digit leads at various times, and they both lost to Republicans.

As embarrassing and awful as Trump is, he serves corporate power just like Joe Biden. The big corporate Democratic Party donors made it clear that if Bernie Sanders became the presidential nominee, they would support Trump. The donor class has created a system where they cannot fail. If it’s Trump or Biden, Goldman Sachs doesn’t lose, ExxonMobil doesn’t lose, Raytheon doesn’t lose, Citibank doesn’t lose. There is no way that they can lose. They have rigged the system so that their interests are always served.

Donald Trump tried to order the United States military to attack the American people several weeks ago because they dared to participate in massive protests against police brutality and social inequality. These protests continue and social movement scholars are now saying that the George Floyd protests may be the largest such mobilizations in American history. Trump tried to order martial law and the senior leaders of the United States military basically told him no. On one hand I am glad the military defied Trump. On the other hand, I am deeply concerned about such power in a democracy being normalized. Either way, America is not a healthy democracy.

The military does not want to be deployed in the streets. At present they are the most respected social and political institution in the country. The military gets even more money than they ask for from the Democrats and the Republicans. The military, quite correctly, saw that it would be disastrous for them to follow Trump’s commands to crack down and enact martial law.

As a practical matter, the military does not need to intervene against the George Floyd protesters and others who have taken to the streets because the American police are so highly militarized. In America there are SWAT teams who don’t look much different than Army Rangers knocking down doors in Afghanistan.

In many ways, the most potent anti-democratic force in the United States is the military. They are untouchable. The U.S. military cannot even be audited. Such power and influence are a classic symptom of the end of an empire. The Praetorian Guard can no longer be controlled by the supposed political leaders.

There have been incidents across the country in which white mobs attack Black Lives Matter protesters, anti-fascists and other Americans of conscience. These thugs are yelling Trump slogans, wearing his regalia and attacking with baseball bats and other weapons. The Trump street enforcers also have guns. Where do we go from here?

The more beleaguered Donald Trump becomes, the more he and the other racists and nativists will incite violence. America right now reminds me of Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

Donald Trump’s supporters are willing to kill and die for him. This is just the beginning of what is going to happen as Election Day approaches. You have been in war zones and countries torn apart by ethnic cleansing and genocide. What is the model for how a people turn on each other?

It begins with economic dysfunction, which is what happened in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia went into de facto bankruptcy. The huge state factories closed, just like they did here in the United States. There was massive unemployment, the social bonds in the country were ruptured. There were bread lines. People lost everything, including a sense of identity. As a result, they retreated into these mythical narratives about themselves as Serbs, Croats and Muslims. In such a moment shared public discourse is impossible. These other identities and their myths have now superseded verifiable historical fact. That’s what happened in Yugoslavia, and that is very much part of what is happening in the United States.

Then there is the rise of demagogues who demonize a segment of the population and target them as the Other. Then the eliminationist rhetoric and violent rhetoric begins. After four years, people started shooting each other in Yugoslavia. The United States is approaching that point.

We spoke with each other several months ago during the first few weeks of the national coronavirus lockdown and economic collapse. You told me that as horrible as things were then, it was in fact “the good times.” Several months have gone by. Is the United States still experiencing “good times” as compared to what will happen in the future?

Yes, as compared to what is coming. The elites are not responding rationally to the coronavirus pandemic, the economic devastation and the myriad of other problems facing the United States right now. America’s ruling class is doing just what they did in 2008, which is to line their own pockets at the public’s expense and to cast the rest of the country — the working poor and the working class — aside as if they were human refuse. That is all very shortsighted, of course, because of the blowback. The ramifications are catastrophic. One would think that America’s elites would respond in a smarter way, if even for their own self-preservation. If elected president, Joe Biden certainly isn’t going to respond properly.

The George Floyd protests are more accurately described as a generational class revolt. I hope that the protesters and their allies win, because if we do not take power back from this American mafia state then there will be a very ugly type of tyranny in the country.

As Aristotle said, once you have oligarchic rule, there are only two choices. It is revolution or tyranny, and that’s it. I’m not naive enough to tell you the revolution is going to win, but I’m going to tell you that if it doesn’t win then there will be a very ugly corporate tyranny in the United States.

The American elites, the ruling class, has already rewritten all the laws.They already have the prison cells. They’ve already militarized the forces of internal security. They’ve already legitimized the revoking of basic rights like habeas corpus and due process. Americans are already the most watched, monitored, surveilled, photographed population in human history. The forces of tyranny are ready to go.

I’m more optimistic because I see the resistance in the streets, which wasn’t there a few weeks and months ago. That’s where hope lies. It lies in the streets. And I have got to acknowledge these people. They’re mostly young, incredibly courageous, they are out there braving economic misery, arrests, indiscriminate, brutal and often lethal police violence and COVID-19, and they’re fighting against injustice and the elites anyway. They’re all heroes in my book.

You forgot to post a link to where you copied it from.

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/16/chris-hedges-america-faces-a-historic-choice--ugly-corporate-tyranny-or-revolution/

[Rick Plant]

Donald Trump wants you to hurt your own child for his re-election. Join the fight and say #NotMyChild.

[Rick Plant]

LEAKED DOCUMENTS SHOW POLICE KNEW FAR-RIGHT EXTREMISTS WERE THE REAL THREAT AT PROTESTS, NOT “ANTIFA”

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/15/george-floyd-protests-police-far-right-antifa/

[Tom Scully]

Donald Trump wants you to hurt your own child for his re-election. Join the fight and say #NotMyChild.

youtube https://www.youtubeDOTcom/watch?v=E88JVaxsCro /youtube

Some observations, and warnings. States, county, and city governments find themselves in dire financial straits due to the interruption in revenue streams resulting from covid-19 effects on economic activity. They will all reduce services and seek innovative methods never widely resorted to previously to collect revenue to literally attempt to continue to function.

At this link, below the U.S. states map (duplicated at the bottom this post)
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions-interactive-map/
....read of the detailed lunacy, state by state, of the republican/Trump party state legislatures and governors in their nine years effort to deny legislative accomplishment to "the negro in the White House", first by relabeling the ACA as "Obamacare" in an effort to disparage this vital and prescient health care reform resulting in elimination of pre-existing medical conditions as disqualifying affordability by private health insurance issuers to all but the wealthiest.

Just three states, combine population of 58 million, Texas, Florida, and Georgia, "enjoy" at least 5 million residents without affordable healthcare coverage during covid-19 pandemic.

VS in California, a state of 40 million with almost all qualified under ACA medicaid expansion are protected with affordable healthcare coverage and have the ability, economically, to seek timely treatment for symptoms of illness instead of dragging themselves to their jobs until their illness feels acute enough to seek much more expensive ER diagnosis and care, the cost unreimbursed  to states still refusing to accept ACA medicaid expansion.

Why would any of the primarily working poor parents in states denying ACA medicaid expansion coverage to them, risk sending their kids into schools without adequate access to testing or followup tracing, while risking their kids bringing covid-19 home from schools, raising the risk of parents with no affordable healthcare coverage and the risk of needing medical care resulting in economic ruin?

Lay offs of state and local government employees are only at the early stages. Moscow Donald & Mitch blocked legislating direct aid to help states and local governments continue to provide services during this crisis while continuing to employ as many as needed to maintain vital services and efficient government while addressing local pandemic response.

The "Moscow Boys" claimed the need was primarily in blue states and there was little political benefit in appropriating financial aid too states in which the majority do not vote Trump party and providing temporary financial support would be rewarding fiscally irresponsible states with large unfunded pension obligations, such as Illinois. It mattered not that Moscow Mitch's state of Kentucky is one of the two poorest states and also has a "top ten" unfunded pension obligation.

In this example, it seems wise to avoid burdening the kids down the road by at least trying to "nip in the bud", the health disorder we've witnessed in a plethora symptoms filled posts. The alternative is to heavily burden the kids down the road. This is not a set up for improvement, if left unevaluated and untreated. The illness, similarly to covid-19, is not going to just disappear.

"Many people don't know" that in 26 states, children can be held financially for the $5,000 monthly cost of long term care each state medicaid program pays for the majority of elderly who require such care.

This state, however, has a narrower requirement for children to pay back medicaid.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws#cite_note-8
......
1.  Arkansas law can only require payment for adult mental care.

Presenting evidence to consider of the zealotry behind the resentment of the poorest by legislatures and governors in Trump party states before the dire need to pursue, under law, the children of parents who exhausted their savings and home equity and then applying for and receiving state medicaid funded long term care routinely costing at least $5,000 per month. This is a mandates medicaid discount rate. Search for monthly privately paid for long term care. You will have great difficulty finding quality in-patient care for less than $7,500 per month!

The Affordable Care Act, derided by Trump supporters as "Obamacare", was passed by a 60 vote senate majority. In an effort to provide healthcare cost of coverage to as many uninsured as possible, it simply offers 90 percent federal reimbursement to all states agreeing to expand each state's medicaid health coverage to everyone with income between 100 and 138 percent of the federal poverty rates.

This ACA provision was intended to solve the gap between those with income of 100 percent or less "FPL", qualifying them to receive medicaid coverage, VS those, many who are working poor, with income above FPL, but unable to afford even a $100 month premium for an income scaled ACA Silver health coverage plan. Those with income less than 139 percent of FPL, but above 100 percent, would be covered for healthcare expenses in all states agreeing to follow the ACA provisions required for 90 percent federal reimbursement.

Consider how low this income level actually is, and the lesson sudden unemployment and the covid-19 itself has given U.S. society, that it is an vital economic and national security interest that all U.S. residents have constant, adequate access to affordable healthcare:.



The map indicates which states embraced the ACA, aka Obamacare, enrolled residents with income between 101 and 138 percent of FPL
back in 2014, received 90 percent federal reimbursement, experienced an increase in healthcare related employment and a healthier overall population at no increase to state expense, given the added employment and reduction in unreimbursed emergency room expense of treating the formerly uninsured using ER medical services as a last resort, often neglecting their symptoms while attempting to continue to work at minimum wage jobs and hoping to "tough it through" their unaffordable to treat, medical disorder.
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions-interactive-map/


Below the map, on the webpage link above the map image, read the state by state effort to resist enrolling their poorer residents in expanded medicaid healthcare coverage as the ACA legislation was written and draw your own conclusions as to the cost vs benefit of the effort these states have expended to scapegoat and harass their poorest residents with income just above FPL (federal poverty level) and consider the consequences these states face during and after pandemic. And this was before these states recently became desperate for money!

[Paul May]

You forgot to post a link to where you copied it from.

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/16/chris-hedges-america-faces-a-historic-choice--ugly-corporate-tyranny-or-revolution/

Thanks Tim. I don’t read Salon. Got this from a friend in my email.

[John Tonkovich]

Thanks Tim. I don’t read Salon. Got this from a friend in my email.

Thanks for posting.
Chris Hedges is a good guy to follow.

[Paul May]

U.S. shatters coronavirus record with over 77,000 cases in a day.

Donald Trump: “I alone can fix it”.

[Royell Storing]

  Well, let's consider their Source Material for starters.  "Salon" & "Twitter"?   HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA !