A few weeks later in his State of the Union address, Trump reiterated his call for "a great wall along the southern border," while once again taking no action on the silly proposal. The usual accusation of "nativist" was quickly heard, but commentators neglected to point out that if anything like a Trump Wall ever does get built it will be to hold back the rising ocean, not Latin American peasants, who will benefit from the massive increase in construction jobs the mammoth barrier will create. Like so much else in the Trump political arsenal, the Wall is a distraction.
In February, Julian Assange unsuccessfully attempted to have his UK arrest warrant dropped, and once again the corporate media silence was deafening. Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for practicing journalism without a license, was doing the investigative work reporters are supposed to do but rarely manage to, especially on U.S. national security policy, which Assange has relentlessly exposed. Professional journalists did nothing to help him as he defended our freedom, human rights, and civil liberties, which was not exactly surprising since he was exposing the kind of lies they get paid to tell - like about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, about Qaddafi being on the verge of committing genocide, about Assad gassing his own people outside Damascus.
In March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was sent packing after rather undiplomatically referring to President Trump as a "moron," soon to be replaced by Mike Pompeo, who moved over from his post as CIA director. Pompeo quickly demanded "complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization of North Korea," tactfully avoiding mention of massive and growing nuclear stockpiles in U.S. hands, as well as any reference to the fact that the U.S. scorched and blasted North Korea to a barren ruin with napalm and "conventional" bombs (over three million Koreans died in the "police action"), an achievement that would have been quite impossible if North Korea had possessed even one deliverable atomic bomb. Meanwhile, Gina Haspel shattered the glass ceiling at the CIA, replacing Pompeo as director of the agency, the first woman to fill that post. Prior to this victory for women everywhere Haspel ran the agency's torture unit. Will the feminist triumph lead to more or fewer testicles hooked up to car batteries? Stay tuned.
In April, the FBI raided the New York offices of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. Cohen is alleged to have organized the payment of "hush money" to women Trump had affairs with, including porn star Stormy Daniels. The stunning violation of Cohen's privacy rights proved to be of no concern to liberals, who allegedly care about civil liberties. With Cohen's personal banking transactions dominating the airwaves, they affected shock that Cohen was trading on his relationship with Trump, influence peddling being such a rarity in Washington. Conservative author Ann Coulter eagerly bashed liberals over the head for their hypocritical failure to criticize the raid: "If, instead of being 'Michael Cohen, personal lawyer to Donald Trump,' he had been 'Mohammed Kahani, personal lawyer to Osama bin Laden,' liberals would be having die-ins across the country to protest the raid."
In May, Trump sent a U.S. delegation to dedicate a new American embassy in Jerusalem, the culmination of half a century of Jewish colonization of Arab land in the city, all supported with a nod and a wink by U.S. administrations going back to LBJ. Liberals, deeply affected by the separation of children from their parents at the U.S. border later in the year, didn't even deign to notice thousands of Palestinian children bombed and shot with U.S. weapons (often modified and "improved" by Israel) while going about their daily activities in their own country.
In June, the Supreme Court upheld Trump's travel ban limiting entry to the U.S. by travelers from Libya, Syria, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Venezuela, and North Korea. Not coincidentally, all of these countries had been seriously damaged or destroyed by U.S. imperial policies largely opposed by Republican and Democratic bases, but supported by both parties' elites. Immigration debate raged about who should be let in and who shut out, but little attention was given to the fact that those in desperate flight from Washington's brutal economic austerity and region-ravaging wars would have no motive to come in the first place if the American people were allowed to reject these unpopular policies at the ballot box. But thanks to corporate administered elections, policy is insulated from politics, and voters cast ballots based on the perceived personality differences of the candidates, not vital policy matters.
In July, President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, touching off yet another round of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Kavanaugh sailed through the nomination proceedings until polling data showed the Democratic Party was within range of re-capturing the Senate in the rapidly approaching November elections. In a flash, Democrats brought forth Palo Alto university psychology professor Christine Blasey-Ford, who accused Kavanaugh of having tried to rape her at a high school party in the 1980s. But Ford proved unable to even place herself at the scene of the alleged crime, much less Kavanaugh, and none of the four alleged witnesses she cited could remember the party in question. Her allegations were left uncorroborated, and the Senate hearings quickly degenerated into a reality TV farce about sex, beer, and fart references (allegedly) in Kavanaugh's high school yearbook. With screaming mobs of always-believe-the-woman protesters swarming over the capitol, Kavanaugh was confirmed 50-48, giving Republicans a long-sought right-wing "libertarian" majority on the court. (Note: the Kavanaugh appointment was made in July, but his confirmation hearings didn't end until October.)
In August, Arizona Senator John McCain died. The best eulogy was delivered decades prematurely by Spanish psychiatrist Fernando Barral, who evaluated McCain during his captivity in North Vietnam in the 1960s: “From the moral and ideological point of view he (McCain) showed us he is an insensitive individual without human depth, who does not show the slightest concern, who does not appear to have thought about the criminal acts he committed against a population from the absolute impunity of his airplane, and that nevertheless those people saved his life, fed him, and looked after his health and he is now healthy and strong. I believe that he has bombed densely populated places for sport. I noted that he was hardened, that he spoke of banal things as if he were at a cocktail party.”
A rabid war-monger, McCain unaccountably won the admiration of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who joined war criminals Barack Obama and George W. Bush in praising McCain after his death, tweeting nonsensically that he "represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service."
In September, the New York Times published an anonymous op-ed by a "senior official in the Trump administration," who assured the American people "there are adults in the room" working closely to "frustrate parts of his (Trump's) agenda" and his "anti-democratic impulses." Nevertheless, the author confessed to seeing some "bright spots" in Trump's policies, such as:
(1) deregulation - (rolling back regulations against air, water, and soil pollution; cutting consumer protections; weakening labor law and job safety standards; and freeing banks of burdensome regulations that prevent runaway speculation leading to economic collapse). These were good moves, according to the author.
(2) tax cuts - (overwhelmingly to benefit the rich, which produce a stock market boom that makes already grotesque poverty and income inequality even worse).
(3) a "more robust" military - (that is, one even more glutted with the technology of mass murder that produces bitter anti-Washington hatred, often culminating in retaliatory terror attacks against Americans).
The anonymous author also expressed alarm about Trump seeking friendly relations with Vladimir Putin, as opposed to the establishment policy of insult, demonization, and nuclear brinksmanship that carries a high risk of WWIII.
If the foregoing are the views of "the adults in the room," maybe having a childish lunatic as president isn't so bad. On the other hand. . .
In October, the United Nations issued a dire report on climate change, warning that humanity has just 12 years left to drastically limit carbon emissions in order to avoid catastrophic consequences by the end of the century. While applying to the government of Ireland for a permit to build a huge wall to protect a golf course he owns from climate-induced rise in sea levels, Trump in the U.S. had his National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommend an end to regulations on auto emissions on the grounds that by the end of the century (extrapolating from current trends and doing nothing to stop them) we'll have reached irretrievable environmental catastrophe anyway, so what's the point of not burning as much carbon as we want in the interim?
In November, voters flocked to the polls in record numbers for a mid-term election which was widely seen as a referendum on Donald Trump. Turnout, while unusually high, still only reached 49%. In other words, even with the polarizing figure of Trump drawing record attention to politics, a majority of U.S. citizens did not see a vote worth casting. Though this attitude is customarily dismissed as reflecting lack of civic concern (by Democrats) or tacit satisfaction with the status quo (by Republicans), the attitude coincides with this fundamental reality: non-voters are not a cross-section of Americans but the lower half of the wealth pyramid, which has no champion in an electoral system dominated by large corporations. In short, poor people won't vote for the politics of the rich.
In December, establishment media and politicians extravagantly praised recently deceased president George Herbert Walker Bush for decency, civility, and commitment to causes larger than himself, values deliberately cited to highlight a perceived contrast with Donald Trump, who witnessed the eulogies delivered at Bush's funeral in sullen silence. Among the causes "larger than himself" that Bush participated in was Indonesia's extermination of two hundred thousand simple mountain people in East Timor when he was CIA director (Bush gave the go-ahead), admiringly toasting Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in Manila for an imaginary "adherence to democratic principle," when in fact he was guilty of "widespread and systematic" torture according to Amnesty International, and launching the 1991 Gulf War after refusing to consider any diplomatic resolution of the Kuwait crisis, killing two hundred thousand Iraqis (by Pentagon estimates) and leaving the bombed-out country in a "pre-industrial age" suffering "apocalyptic results" according to a UN mission. As for his "decency and civility," the best illustration of the absence of these qualities in Bush was his response to the U.S.S. Vincennes shooting down an Iranian civilian plane in 1988. The plane was in an ascending flight path and its transponder was clearly identifying it as a civilian plane when it was deliberately shot down, killing 290 people. Said Bush: "I don't care what the facts are. I'll never apologize for the United States of America."
How decent, how civil.
Out with the old, in with the new. If the interests of over half the population cannot be represented in the electoral system, let's face the fact that we have to produce a revolutionary democratic movement outside that system to challenge and overcome it. With extinction hanging over the human race, there's no time better than now to make it happen.
Happy New Year.
Sources:
"The year in review," The Week - The Best of the U.S. and International Media, December 21/ December 28, 2018
John Hogan, "Noam Chomsky Calls Trump and Republican Allies 'Criminally Insane'" Scientific American, November 3, 2018 - for information on Trump and climate change
Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, "The Horrors of John McCain: War Hero or War Criminal," Counterpunch, June 20, 2015
Gary Leupp, "Why Adulate This War-Monger?" Counterpunch, September 3, 2018
ZeroHedge.com, "Famed War Reporter Robert Fisk Reaches Syrian 'Chemical Attack' Site, Concludes "They Were Not Gassed," April 17, 2018
Robert Fantina, "Bad to Worse: Tillerson, Pompeo and Haspel," Counterpunch, March 16, 2018
The Impact of the (Israel-Palestine) Conflict on Children, https://ifamericaknew.org/stat/children.html
Jeremy R. Hammond, "The 'Forgotten' U.S. Shootdown of Iranian Airliner Flight 655," Foreign Policy Journal, July 3, 2017
Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, "Korea - The Unknown War," (Pantheon, 1988)
Ann Coulter, "Resistance Is Futile: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind" (Random House, 2018)- for information on Michael Cohen
Michael Parenti, "Democracy For The Few," (Thomson-Wadsworth, 2002) - for Pentagon estimate of deaths in the 1991 Gulf War
Michael K. Smith, "Portraits of Empire," (Common Courage, 2003) - for information on George Herbert Walker Bush.
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