Melodrama Heightens Call for Action
It must be difficult for the “Tweeter in Chief,” Donald Trump, a fugitive from Reality TV to assume the reins of power in a political realm for which he has little experience. The demise of the “repeal and replace” health-care tax break for the elites serves as a lesson in the realpolitick of Washington D.C. Now the Trump-Ryan-McConnell team proposes to take on tax reform and infrastructure while seeming to ignore the Republican Freedom Caucus, which historically opposes deficit spending.
So how do you lower taxes and reduce revenue while proposing to spend more money? Reagan proved that the trickle-down tax breaks didn’t stimulate a compensatory rise in revenue or jobs.
Meanwhile The Donald carries on his war with the media even as his approval ratings slide down the slippery Gallup Poll to 36%. His virtual colleagues in the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan and Devin Nunes, cover up the peccadilloes peculiar to the Russia conspiracy. Putin and the Oligarchs apparently laundered money via a Cyprus bank, partially owned by Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, Mr. Ross, a bank which may have funded Trump enterprises in an effort to out-maneuver sanctions against Iran and Russia. The paper trail involving Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s enterprises will probably reveal a squalid case of insider dealing and pirate finance if we ever see the President’s tax returns.
Too, Trump and Sessions, the latter bigot and one of the alleged campaign conspirators, terminated the U.S. Attorney investigator of Russian-Turkish-Trump money connections and alleged laundering, a paper trail that suggests criminal violations of sanctions against Iran and Russia. The complexity reminds one very much of the Watergate case but without a smoking gun or single voice surreptitiously meeting reporters in parking garages or, as yet, a John Dean confessing all to a rapt Congressional hearing.
The Trump campaign team apparently possesses guilty knowledge about its own doings, knowledge that Nunes and Ryan are willfully ignoring. Ryan’s Randism appears to be a cover up for piracy rather than an ode to libertarian self-sufficiency.
Will Jared and Ivanka save Dad from the brutal grasp of Darth Vader Bannon and his White Supremacists? Or the Planet from a fiery death as the coal miners and rust belt resentful die of opioid excess caused by a lack of jobs due to industrial manufacturing, jobs long since hijacked by financiers and Silicon Valley robots?
Will blaming a generation of Hispanic farm workers, gardeners, house cleaners, bussers and cooks, i.e. destroying their families and neighborhoods while harassing them in the better parts of the country satisfy Trump’s trumped up followers?
Will AG Sessions and his racist policies aimed at Muslim immigrants fleeing American wars started in their homeland solve the metaphysical corruption of the republican soul?
Will the democratic supporters of Clintonian Neo-Liberalism or free market privatization and preservation of inequality acknowledge their own participation in what amounts to right-wing class warfare, promoted by Fox and Limbaugh, the policy-makers?
The pathological state of denial affects both sides of the aisle when it comes to Political Policy, Science, Christian Charity, and Marxist False Consciousness.
Never have so few lied to so many.
But the resistance, like the grass, watered and nourished by spring rains, is stimulated by repugnance for “injustice.” American “ordinaries” are resisting retrograde officials at town meetings and border cops at airports, while providing moral support and legal assistance to our fellow human beings and border crossers.
The coup d’état at the White House and in Congress sows the seeds of its own demise when it takes away American liberty and denies the progressive values affecting civil rights, the safety of the environment, and the principles of justice, fought for during the last fifty years. Jefferson said, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
When freedom becomes just another word for nothing left to lose, the masses will rise and the cops will be overwhelmed by millions of citizens who march and resist. The majority of government leaders in the White House and Congress apparently believe in a return to early 19th Century values and mercantilism. Then as now a weakened government succumbed to a foreign power.
In 1812 a foreign army invaded the country and burned the White House. Today a foreign power has subverted democracy and placed its proxies in charge of the American dream at the White House. It’s our turn to take back the government and drive out the pretenders, who would destroy civil society, curtail human rights, and hasten the death of the Planet.
Taos Friction reports, you decide.