The Paul Street Report, 11.17.2022
Dear Readers: I have made numerous small corrections to last Thursday’s post. It appears that I put up a second draft when I needed to post a third one. Please see the corrected version here.
Here, as a follow up to last Tuesday’s Paul Street Report (“Purple Haze: Seventeen Takes on the Mid-Terms”) are eight additional takes on the 2022 mid-term elections:
18. F*#k Biden and the Dismal Dems’ Sick and Cynical Game on Abortion. Shame on Joe “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Biden, who used the Republicans’ likely takeover of the House to say last Monday that that he and his fellow Democrats won’t be able to act on his pre-election “promise” to sign legislation codifying Roe v. Wade as national law. “We don’t have the votes,” he said. Geez Louise, what a bunch of malarky! Just how F’ng gullible does this corporatist octogenarian think we are? Octo-Joe (thanks, Obama) made this statement just like he made his pre-election promise: on the transparently idiotic and disingenuous premise that the post-election would have the 60 Senate votes required to get such a bill past the nation’s deeply reactionary upper chamber. Look, folks, Biden and the Dems cynically used the abortion issue to limit their damage in the 2022 mid-terms but continue, as before the election, to do nothing to act on their very real executive branch power to make things right for tens of millions of women and girls. How contemptible. Here is something that hasn’t fundamentally changed: Biden still has but refuses to use his power to issue executive orders proclaiming the war on abortion a national public health emergency and mandating the provision of free, safe, and legal abortions on federal lands and military bases across the entire nation, Christian fascist “red” states included.
+19. The Cynical Dems May Want to Give the Orange Fascist Malignancy a Stay Out of Jail Card. The widely celebrated terrible performance of Trump-backed candidates in the 2022 mid-terms suggest that the Democrats will be pleased to see the House January 6th Committee disbanded and Trump kept out of jail and the felony record databases to enhance his chances of being the Republicans’ 2024 presidential candidate. The Dems may well want to run against him again, like they did in 2015-16 (Google up “Hillary Clinton, Wikileaks and Pied Piper”). Perhaps they will even help fund his next presidential campaign. What could go wrong? Never forget that the Dems demonstrated their deep commitment to democratic values by pouring millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of the “semi-fascist MAGA Republicans” (Biden’s language) running in the 2022 mid-terms. It was reckless and (like the Dems’ advance surrender on abortion rights in absurd pursuit of “Roevember”) cynical as Hell
20. Moore v. Harper Lives. Liberal and progressive folks might want to tone down their partying over the defeat of Republi-fascist election deniers vying for key state-level executive branch offices that manage and oversee elections in contested states. Yes, it’s good that these fascists (e.g., the Oath Keeper Mark Finchem who ran for Secretary of State in Arizona) lost but let’s keep in mind that the Moore v. Harper case currently in front of the Christian Fascist Supreme Court is about whether or not state legislatures and not state executive branches can cancel the popular presidential vote in a given state. The Court is likely to rule for right-wing election nullification power. If the absurdly powerful and far-right Gorsuch-Thomas-Coney-Barrett Handmaid Supremes line up on the side of the chilling far-right “independent state legislature theory,” state-level Republi-fascists holding legislative majorities in key contested states like Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania (some state vote counts are admittedly incomplete as I write this) won’t need their states’ governors, attorney generals, and/or secretaries of states on board to constitutionally monkey-wrench Electoral College slates when and if popular presidential votes go Democratic in their jurisdictions. Sorry.
21. The Dismal Dems Lost the House Popular Vote. Someone should tell Michael “Blue Tsunami” Moore that the Republi-fascists out-performed “us” – by which Mike means the capitalist-imperialist Democrats – not just in the US House apportionment but also in the total popular House vote. And not just by a tiny margin. As of last Monday, the rightmost major capitalist party had scored 51.5% of House votes to the not-so leftmost major capitalist party’s 47% – a significant gap of 4.5%. (Only a small part of this margin is due to the fact that more Republicans than Democrats ran unopposed.) The Dems failed to win more total House votes even though they were running against a demented neofascist party that is mostly supportive of the mass physical assault on Congress (including the US House) that occurred on January 6, 2021 – an attack meant to nullify a presidential election the Dems won “fair and square” (under the admittedly absurd but right-tilted US Electoral College).
22. Magical Mike. Something’s not right with Mike and his faith-based attachment to the bourgeois ballot. Even after it was abundantly clear that the mid-terms were a purple haze election with neither a “red wave” nor a blue one, Moore continued with his bizarre “blue tsunami” narrative to the bizarre point of daring Substack readers to believe that “we” (the corporate-imperial Democrats) would somehow win the House once all the ballots were counted. This is magical thinking. Mike needs less time with the Electoral Politics Fairy and more time with the class struggle model that did so much to make his beloved hometown of Flint. Michigan on the historical map in 1936-37. I am reminded of the late Marxist historian Alan Dawley’s onetime reference to the US-American voting booth as “the coffin of class consciousness.” Please review the long Howard Zinn quote I pasted from his 2008 “Election Madness” essay into my last Paul Street Report. Also useful is this formulation from Zinn’s good friend Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading left intellectual, in October of 2004:
“Americans may be encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is a method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’ But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics…The urgency is for popular progressive groups to grow and become strong enough so that centers of power can’t ignore them. Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its core include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work at all levels, every day, not just once every four years… In the election, sensible choices have to be made. But they are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome.”
23. Trump: The Poisonous Shit That Never Stops Oozing. Donald Trump was undeterred by his chosen mid-term candidates’ underwhelming performance from announcing his 2024 candidacy. Trump is the malignant shit that never stops oozing out of the reigning capitalist US- American media-politics culture. The ruling classes in charge of “our” politics and media by virtue of literal ownership love it. They’ll keep spewing this hot, orange-tinted liquid excrement into our faces for as long as the orange fascist reptile slithers and breathes. There’s a reason it still lives, despite everything.
I caught a snippet of Malignant Orange’s announcement speech two nights ago. It lied its ass off about one thing after another as usual but the part that caught my attention was when it said that its campaign wasn’t about Trump but was about a “movement” – yes, a movement. Insofar as that’s true, and it’s not totally false, the name of that movement starts with the letter F. The movement is called fascism, as I have argued and indeed documented in countless articles and one full length, richly annotated academic monograph: This Happened Here: Amerkianers, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (please buy multiple copies of this brilliant volume for all your friends and relatives this Christmas season!)
An anonymous social media commentator asked Facebookers this yesterday: “What is the defect in the minds of the people who manage to believe that 45 [Trump] cares about anyone but himself?” My incomplete answer: “there’s a vast shared space of malignant narcissism tied to stupidity and a false sense of endless white and male victimization tied to a palingenetic nationalist desire to create a ‘great again’ white supremacist, fundamentalist, and sexist nation masquerading as a meaningful human community.” Quite a digital mouthful that was but you get the point, I hope.
24. Revanchist Billionaires Turning Away Trump but NOT from Neo-Fascism
None of this is to deny that the tangerine-tinted tyrant of Mar a Lago has lost some of his former ruling-class backing for now. Currently gone from the Trump column is the Rupert Murdoch Empire, whose assets include no less of a Republi-fascist propaganda arm than FOX News (the television home of noted jackboot-licker Glenn Greenwald). Murdoch’s New York Post announced the following at the bottom of its front page the morning after Trump threw his hat back into the presidential ring: “FLORIDA MAN MAKES ANNOUNCEMENT.” The Post published a short column titled “Been There, Don That.” The column mockingly described Trump as “a Florida retiree” and “avid golfer” with a “classified documents library” at his Mar-a-Lago home. It said that Trump is famous for “gold-plated lobbies and for firing people on reality television” and that his qualifications for office included “being a ‘stable genius.’” It concluded by mocking Trump’s diet, noting that “his cholesterol levels are unknown, but his favorite food is a charred steak smothered in ketchup.”
CNBC reports that the MAGA king no longer has the financial backing of Estee Lauder heir Ronald Lauder, who has “known Trump since college” and been “close” with him “for years…Lauder joins Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and wealthy businessman Andy Sabin, who have said they won’t back Trump’s new campaign for president.”
This hardly means that these revanchist oligarchs have dropped their attachment to neo-fascism. Lauder is a big buck backer of Ron DeSantis, who may well be a more dangerous Republi-fascist than Trump
We’ll see how long the intra-right ruling class war lasts. The single biggest asshole in human history, Donald Trump, was widely derided across the spectrum when he announced in 2015. The mockery helped feed his street cred with his demented, Amerikaner base of deranged white haters. My crystal ball on Trump’s chances going forward is very hazy at the present moment.
25. Merrick Garland is No Mario Andretti
What is not hazy to me is the simple and obvious fact that Trump has committed numerous felonies, some of which ought to make him eligible not just for lifetime incarceration but also for the fate that befell Julius and Ethel Rosenburg on June 19, 1953. The notion of Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt me” Trump being executed is of course utterly fantastic but such an event (which I would not personally oppose) would carry a delicious irony. Consistent with his sadistic and racist fascism, Trump re-started the execution of prisoners on federal death row after a 16-year hiatus in the summer of 2019. Through his insane pandemicide alone, Trump killed vastly far more US Americans – disproportionately members of his sick party – than did any of the disproportionately Black (seven of thirteen) people the federal government executed in 2020 and 2021.
Well in advance of the now-concluded US House January 6th committee’s first hearing, it was abundantly clear that Trump had committed at least nine federal felonies in connection with his attempted coup: Willful destruction of government property (18 U.S.C. § 1361 and 18 U.S.C. § 2071); Conspiracy against rights (18 U.S.C. § 241); Depriving state residents of a fair and impartial election process (52 U.S.C. § 20511[2][B]); Conspiracy to defraud (18 U.S.C. § 371); Obstruction of an Official Proceeding (18 U.S.C. § 1512); Conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging any duties (18 U.S.C. § 372); Seditious conspiracy (18 U.S.C.§ 2384); Coercion of political activity (18 U.S.C. § 610); Interference in Election by Employees of Federal or State Governments (18 U.S.C. § 595)
Trump also committed a bevy of election-related state felonies, many the subject of criminal investigation and potential indictment in Fulton County, Georgia.
Last late summer, the Department of Justice would seem to have had Trump dead to rights, you’d think, for feloniously absconding to Mar-a-Lago with top secret classified documents and feloniously obstructing government efforts to get them back. Trump may be guilty here of espionage and treason, both potentially capital crimes.
When does US Attorney General Merrick Garland start the indictments and get Trump into federal trials? The mid-term elections are over; it’s time for a self-respecting bourgeois-democratic rule of law of state to roll on the most notorious fascist (Ron DeSantis is no.2) in Florida.
To quote the guy with the mic at the beginning of The Indianapolis 500, “Gentlemen [and gentlewomen of the Justice Department], Start Your Engines!”
I’m not holding my breath for Garland to go Mario Andretti on Trump. Like I said above, I think the Dems may want The Reptile around for 2024 and may therefore be among the forces DeSantis’ backers have to fight against to try to get past the Orange Thing’s crazy and sick base in the 2024 primaries.
Who knows?
US-American politics are a hot mess. By design.