Tag: civil war

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America Burns — Trump makes it his own personal fire sale

America Burns

Trump makes it his own personal fire sale

April 16th 2020

We’re at the point where there are some faint glimmers of hope that the first round of the coronavirus pandemic might be cresting. New cases as a percentage of existing cases have dropped from 15% three weeks ago to just 5% now. New York crested, and Cuomo sent 150 ventilators to states that haven’t been overwhelmed yet. Social distancing has had an effect: back in early March, I estimated we would have 1.2 million cases by April 12 (it was just under 600,000) and between 10 and 20 thousand dead. Unfortunately, I was wrong in the bad way on that one: the death toll was actually 21,500.

However, America has been hit harder than any other country, due in part to the utter lack of a safety net, and partly because the Republican party expects every good American worker to risk his life so that no billionaire should ever have to chance the horror of becoming a mere millionaire. As a result, even as places like New York and California can see a light at the end of the epidemiological tunnel, colonies of infection are erupting across the red and mostly rural states. South Dakota, lightly affected until this past week, had 650 new cases erupt at just one meat processing plant which was under no orders to close down and felt little pressure to protect its workers.

Despite that, there’s a growing resistance from people who are tired of being locked down, which is reasonable, and believe that the disease is a hoax, or want to show the Chinese they can’t infect good Americans, or just want to stick it to the libs, none of which is reasonable.

Incoherence plays a major role in this. In Florida, pro wrestling was declared an “essential business” and allowed to continue business as usual. Pro wrestling. Yes, you read that right. But in Florida, and in most of the country, beaches are closed, even though usage of same is light this time of year. The resistance is also pretty incoherent, as you might imagine. Some of them just want to lock up any politicians they find annoying. Some just want to be able to go to the hairdresser again. I saw a video made by a well-coiffed sorority brat type who sobbed through a glittery blonde frenzy about how without decent nails and lots of good make up, she would have to compete with unkempt and possibly smelly farm girls for the attentions of the boyz. Now, good chance she was just taking the piss, but I took no chances; I suggested we help her out by sending her old “L’il Abner” comic strips as a fashion guide.

I suspect the resistance to shelter-in-place will grow, and as a result, so will the contagion. It’s hard to be sympathetic to these people because while they will find out that you can’t gaslight mother nature, the fact is they’ll also infect relatives, co-workers and friends through their foolishness.

But as all this is going on, we have Trump and his cabal of thieves who are exploiting this. They are encouraging people, and the dimmer state governors, to defy social distancing and get back to work. Avery Bundy and his gang of land-thief nuts declared that no phony government was going to stop him from his self-declared right to steal other people’s property. Various churches rebelled, declaring that Jesus would protect them from the virus. About once a week, I see an amusing article about how one of the pastors or leaders of these little cults up and died from—you guessed it—coronavirus. In Wisconsin, republican judges ruled that voters must cast votes and not delay the primary. Both the state Supreme Court and the federal Supreme Court disgraced themselves in this bald-faced ploy to protect a Republican incumbent judge, and in the hundreds of thousands, Wisconsins turned out to kick that fascist strutter off the court. It was perhaps THE bright spot in all of these. Americans are still willing to fight fascism, and to risk their lives to do so.

The worst part is the people who are defying the lockdowns out of simple desperation. The government response has been mostly pure shit, and many people are out of food, facing eviction, and utterly desperate.

It’s in the interest of the federal government to make this even worse. Trump is staging a coup against America. He reluctantly signed the stimulus bill, adding the signing statement that he felt free to disregard the language that forbade him or his pestilential family from profiting from the crisis, or other language that the government must account for where and how that money is spent. To that end, he fired the inspectors-general, administrative cops that oversee disbursements of funding for fraud or waste. He wants lots of fraud and waste, and he wants it kept secret.

He also is demanding that in the next stimulus bill, funding for the Post Office be cut and the Post Office closed. Never mind that the Post Office is vital; Republicans have wanted it shut down for years so profiteers can take over, and Trump wants it eliminated because without the Post Office, there is no mail-in voting, and Trump has openly admitted that if everyone could vote by mail, no Republican would ever win office again. It’s nice to know that even he acknowledges that most Americans hate fascism.

Now he’s threatening to close Congress if they don’t immediately approve all his appointees. He hasn’t read the Constitution; not only does he not have that power, but neither House can adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other House. If Pelosi digs in her heels—and she will—Trump will have to force another Constitutional crisis to get his way.

If he does that, America is only weeks away from widespread revolt and possible civil war.

Between the pandemic and his own lust for power, Trump is hoping, if he can’t simply prevent voting in November, to at least make it so hard and so dangerous to vote that he can get reelected by the surviving members of his cult—the ones out protesting that Americans should bow to no sissy virus whut weighs less than one tenth what a good Amurrkin does.

So even though many other countries have peaked and are containing the virus, America has the wrong government, run by the wrong people, at the wrong time.

It won’t end well.

 

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Election 2018 – And its possible aftermath

November 5th, 2018

It has been brought to my attention that there is some sort of election thingie tomorrow. An unkempt person, disheveled with wild, wide eyes and arms failing in futile violence, screamed at me that the entire future of humanity rested on this election, and that I must implore everyone to vote right away!

I really have to get rid of that mirror. Nobody likes bad-news mirrors, and you don’t even have to be an evil narcissist to have one seriously fuck you up.

There will be no vote imploring from me. If you haven’t decided if you are going to vote or not, you probably aren’t reading this, and are too dumb and apathetic to be reading much of anything more involved than the directions on how to make a grilled cheese sandwich.

For the rest of you, yes, quite a bit rests on this election. However, the rest of the world, should America fall, will simply close ranks and go around the former world leader. Yes, America is mighty militarily, but it still needs to engage and trade with the rest of the world in order to survive.

Trump is not a negotiator. For starters, he announces up front that he plans to screw the people he’s negotiating with, which deincentivizes those people from negotiations. Would you buy a car from a guy who tells you he has the best profit margins from car sales in the state? If you would, call me: have I got a sweet deal for you! Well, a sweet deal for one of us, anyway. You like sweet deals, right?

Trump boasts himself into corners. Take NAFTA. After announcing he was going to shaft Canada, he was dismayed when Canadians turned down his polite offer to be shafted. Having boasted he could swing a great deal by pressuring Canada, he threatened the Canadian auto industry, which consists of such Canadian enterprises as Ford and GM. Turned out he lost the support of the very people he was trying to protect from those evil Canucks, Ford and GM. Cornered by his own bombast, he finally signed a deal with Canada in which America actually made more concession, because Trump desperately needed an agreement he could lie about and proclaim to be a great victory for Trump America. In poker terms, Canada had a pair, and Trump had a busted flush, and Canada walked away with the pot, leaving Trump to scream that his hand was a lot closer to a real flush than a lousy pair!

Most of the world looks at Trump with a mixture of sadness and apprehension. He’s a pathetic clown, but he is a very troublesome pathetic clown, and what’s more, he is greatly strengthening the hands of other players in the game who are not clowns: China and Russia.

So as Americans vote, American prestige and influence, already plummeting, might go past the point of no return. If it does, that means a lot of problems for a lot of people, but in the end the world will carry on, they way it did following the fall of every other mighty empire.

In a best case scenario, the Democrats take the House, and Trump is in prison by 2020. That won’t solve the problem of Republicans in general, a party gone mad, but it will pin their ears back some. Worst case scenario, Republicans keep the House and Senate, and only the most naive or the most cynical Republican supporters believe America will have anything in common with the America of 25 years ago. Oh, America will still have an election in 2020, but it will be about as relevant as the elections they used to have in the Soviet Union.

The elections won’t save America, and could seal America’s fate. It’s not a great choice, but it’s probably the last best chance most people will get to have a choice.

Just remember that when you wake up on Wednesday, Trump will still be in the Oval Office. Republicans will still control congress, and will have two months to try and entrench as much of their toxic fascist agenda as possible. The Supreme Court will still consist of four liberals, four fascists, and a GOP ratfucker. November 7th will not be rainbows and butterflies, and the real fighting may just be starting.

The other day I wrote about an article by Stephen Marche on a respected blog in Canada speculating on what Canada should do in the event of an American civil war. It was a jarring thing to see.

CBC radio, the heart of journalist decorum and restraint, had a lead story referencing Marche under the headline, “What should Canada do if there’s a civil war in the U.S.?” This is the CBC, which probably started its September 1st 1939 broadcast with something like, “There appears to have been a spot of bother in Poland today as Chancellor Hitler continues to behave in an impolite manner.” They aren’t given to frantic arm waving, or, being non-profit, overly obsessed with ratings and clicks. Such a headline would be unthinkable unless they seriously believed that a civil war or other forms of violent chaos was truly in the offing for the United States.

Despite Trump, Canada remains the closest thing to a friend the United States has. If a friend tells you you look very ill and ought to see a doctor, you should at least consider the advice.

I’m not sure such a calamity can be sidestepped. But all sane Americans need to be aware of the danger, and think hard on how it might be averted. Despite what the history books say, nobody ever wins those types of battles.

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Civil War II: The election of 1860, reducere

Civil War II

The election of 1860, reducere

October 28th 2018

There is an article by Stephen Marche in the current Walrus that, while addressed to Canadians, is of major importance elsewhere: “America’s Next Civil War.” https://thewalrus.ca/americas-next-civil-war/

The article delineates a process by which in the fairly immediate future, America may descend into civil war, or perhaps widespread chaos.

The existential threat this provides to Canadians is clear. Much of Canada’s identity and economy result from the twitches and grunts from the slumbering elephant next door, and indeed, Canada’s very existence stems from northern ambition and desire to expand in the wake of their victory in the first civil war. It’s no coincidence that the movement to unify the British colonies into a “not-United States” materialized in 1864, when it was clear the North was going to win. (Some BNA colonists, while absolutely hating slavery, hoped for a prolonged standoff between the Confederacy and the Union, which would nullify American expansionism.)

Of course, the threat is even greater to Americans, who in the event of a civil war can reasonably expect to die by the tens of millions. The first civil war was extraordinarily bloody and vicious; there’s no reason to suppose that a repeat, involving a far larger population that heavily is armed in and of themselves with weapons of mass destruction.

People like to pretend that conditions in the US were more polarized and antagonistic in 1860. They weren’t, at least not outside the more radical enclaves in the deep South. Republicans, sensing the danger the nation faced, backed down and nominated a moderate, who could live with the existing institution of slavery but opposed allowing it to spread westward (reflecting existing law). That moderate, Abraham Lincoln, subsequently became President.

But the southern leadership had adopted an intractable position, and the war happened anyway.

It’s important to remember that most Americans in 1861 believed the war would be brief, relatively bloodless, and would end as soon as the politicians realized it was bad for business. You often hear similar sentiments on the eve of any major war; in living memory, Americans remember how it would take weeks to subdue Iraq and the war would pay for itself. Or so they were told.

Nobody is going to mistake Trump and the Republicans for moderates, and unlike the era of the civil war, the institutions of voting, the judiciary, and congress itself weren’t delegitimize they way they are now. Voters expected their votes to be allowed, and counted. Judges were supposed to be impartial, at least most of the time. Congress was hagridden by moneyed interests, but at least those interests were human residents who had a stake in the country, rather than a multinational bottom line.

I suspect that next week’s election might be the irrevocable last step, the way the presidential election of 1860 was.

The really scary thing is that it may not matter who gets declared the victor in the 2018 elections; the validity will be in grave doubt. If Republicans don’t get their way, they will spin endless conspiracy theories about George Soros, globalists, the ‘deep state’, immigrants and Hillary. If Republicans hold the house, the massive irregularities already evident in George, Kansas and other states will cause many to doubt the validity of the vote count. Nobody will trust state investigators working for states that created the sense of illegitimacy in the first place, And the Trump administration has done an excellent job of carrying out the Republican policy of subverting the courts, making them apparatus of the Party, so there will be widespread mistrust there, as well. And of course neither side will believe press reports, valid or otherwise, seen as coming from “the other side.”

I don’t expect instant disintegration following the election. If the Democrats prevail, there will be lots of outrage on the right, and probably a sharp uptick in terrorist attacks like the ones we’ve seen this week, lots of pearl-clutching on Faux and the right wing media, and outrage as the Trump administration continues to collapse, with the attendant threats of a Reichstag fire or major war as unifying distractions.

The response will be at least temporarily subdued as the same fascists who have been promoting the Republican agenda stop to consider their bottom lines (despite the popular saying, war is actually very bad for business) and strong doubt about what the stance of the American military might be (The officer corps are strongly Republican, but reportedly deeply antipathetic to Trump).

If the Republicans prevail, the chaos may come more quickly. Trump and his handlers will rush to consolidate what they will doubtlessly see as the successful conclusion of a coup against the United States, and a largely disbelieving populace is likely to take to the streets.

Some police organizations are deeply infiltrated by extreme righties and evenneo-Nazis, and they won’t hesitate to use extreme and bloody methods of suppression against what they will call “communist agitators.”

At which point the fuse will be well and truly lit, the ensuing explosion inevitable.

Can this be avoided? I’m not sure. I honestly don’t think so. When America’s closest friend and ally, Canada, begins openly preparing for chaos and bloodshed south of the border and pondering what to do with the inevitable flood of refugees, it means prospects are grim.

Pay attention to this election like your life depends on it. It probably does.

And if you hear public officials opining that the spreading unrest is just temporary and should be over in a few weeks, a month tops, then run for shelter!

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