Committed to the Bit
All the top flunkies have pocket pardons in the personnel files
By now it is clear that all of the inside operators of the Trump Regime have been given blanket pocket pardons. They all have committed to the bit because they have no fear of consequences. The Homan bribery case let them know for sure they were safe from Pam Bondi ever prosecuting them. Just be sure to commit all the crime at the federal level. The pocket pardon, tucked into their personnel file, can be removed by the President at any time. Please him, and you will still find it there when you need it. Displease him, and you are on your own. Flipping won’t help, since everyone above you has a pardon as well.
Amendment XXVIII: No federal officeholder may be pardoned for crimes committed while in office.
Who is with me on this one?
We should add “commuted or otherwise shortened by anyone other than a judge assigned to the case,” but I think this one should be included in the new constitution.
We have to write a new constitution, one way or the other. The Supreme Court created a paradox in their recent interpretation of the document (Trump v. United States), which is exactly the opposite of the Judiciary’s responsibility to clarify the document. Trump posting a eschatological fantasy of personally attacking the United States creates a paradox of the Office. He swore to preserve, protect, and defend the document that itself protects the American people from being targeted by their government.
This is not the action of a person secure in their sense of self. It betrays the Alpha Male fantasy that Trump reveres; he has declared himself an “Alpha” without seeming to understand that if you have to say it, you are not it. Authenticity demonstrates itself, or it does not exist.
During the fall of the Eastern Bloc, we witnessed the Balkanization of the Balkans, with ethnic groups engaging in territorial struggles, absent the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. I wondered how a Serb could tell who was a Croat. Having lived in America this past decade, I now know: It was obvious to them.
One of the problems we have run into, blending democracy and capitalism, speaks to their fundamental incompatibility. Contrary to U.S. propaganda, capitalism is anti-democratic, as we are witnessing. Proportional representation based on ownership shares not only awards more votes to some owners over others, it leaves all the non-owners out of institutional decision-making—that includes workers, customers, and the general public. Call it what you wish, but that is not democracy. Model the larger society after it, and what you end up with will not be democracy also.
That was the model of the United States, from the outset. To this day, even with “universal” suffrage, there are particular demographic groups who, more than others, have lost suffrage or have seen their votes diluted through districting. These groups (racial minorities, the landless) are the same ones that were not granted suffrage at the start.
A Serb could tell a Croat by his red hat and the flags and stickers on his truck.
No. That’s the uniquely American form of how we have applied branding to politics. The corporate capitalist parties have applied capitalist methodologies to the social research that is our electoral process, and have gotten people to become and behave like fans. Just like with professional sports, fans can have no fucking clue about how the game is actually played, yet still enjoy when their team wins (There’s a saying in professional sports: If you think like the fans, pretty soon you will end up sitting with them.). The uncritical sports fan loves spectacle more than strategy, so photos of ICE agents deporting Latinos in military airplanes count more than effective immigration policy.
It does not matter that more people were deported under Obama than under Trump (given the 1200 disappeared from the DeSantis concentration camp we cannot be sure of any numbers, which is one of the Trump Administration’s goals). To the fans, absolutely everything the opposing side does is worthless, because they are the opposition. I could pose the hypothetical opposite—that should Trump and the Republicans create tuition-free higher education, the Democrats’ fans would object to it—but Trump’s branding is too disciplined and consistent to do anything “liberal,” unlike Obama’s conservatism.
Recall Obama chose one of the most conservative Democrats available—Joe Biden—as a foil for his Blackness and presumed progressivism. In retrospect, Biden pursued as President a far more progressive agenda than Obama, seeking to end long wars, trying to forgive usurious government student loans, and making passing gestures toward federal marijuana law reforms and in favor of organized labor.
Barack Obama was just as warring a president as George W. Bush, but the Democrats did not register similar objections to those they laid at the outset of Bush’s militarized War on Terror. We once had an organized antiwar movement in the United States, but it seems the 2001 attacks marginalized those who opposed all warfare, sparing Bush and Obama substantial pushback. Back then, Bush established the teams: You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists. In a sense, we just brought the war home, with Trump now declaring Democrats to be the terrorists—literally.
President Donald Trump on Thursday directed his administration to crack down on backers of what it described as “left-wing terrorism,” naming two top Democratic donors as he alleged without evidence a vast conspiracy to finance violent protests against the government.
They TELL me it’s dirty George Soros money, but the organizers are paying in Dogecoin.
A nation-state has a civil war when there is the attempt to maintain against resistance, or create a new, overarching authority over the territory. If the Trump Administration tries to keep the territories of those states and people who reject their legitimacy claims under their rule, or if those who would secede seek to overthrow the Trump Administration instead, there could be a need for a “war.”
Regardless, it’s clear the United States v. 3.0 is done*. The hegemony of the former ruling class has been intentionally sacrificed, in the interest of a self-styled revolutionary faction. The American Dream came in many forms, but every one of them held in common the belief that one’s labor could return more than bare survival. It required a lot of collective activity to keep up that illusion. No matter how much they labored, the working class of the 19th century stayed the working class of the 20th century, and stayed the working class of the 21st century. Individuals may have garnered surpluses that offered savings, or perhaps launched businesses that moved them, personally, into the petit bourgeoisie, but the working class remains dispossessed, lo these many centuries.
There are all sorts of ways to justify a society where more than half of its 340 million members eke out survival while just 6 people hold more wealth than 200 million do, combined. Those justifications come ringing from all the media they own—operational frameworks that define freedom as the ability to choose from among that which one can afford, that substitute the market for democracy, that tell us there can be no economy but transnational capitalism—and aren’t we lucky that it just so happens to be the absolute very best one possible? Surely, it is but coincidence that it is the very same economy that produced the global billionaires and their communications regimes that tell us this.
The United States was the first Modern nation-state, and as the corporatists dismantle the state its operational framework must also be dismantled. This will create little pockets of anarchy—power vacuums the Administration will attempt to fill with violence, as the state holds “a monopoly on legitimate violence in a territory.” But breaking down the hegemony means disrupting claims to legitimacy, and it, not violence, is what the state holds in monopoly. The Trump Administration are more strongly defining the teams/brands and they are dismantling state legitimacy. Expect violence to follow.
*USA v. 1.0 The Articles of the Confederacy
USA v. 2.0 The 1789 Constitution
USA v. 3.0 Post Civil War Federalism