PressWatch: The Trifecta of US Apartheid

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Thu, 09/20/2018 - 9:00am to 9:30am
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news you're not supposed to know

The good news is that there is a rising tide of awareness and social activism in the USA.  The bad news is that the reactionaries have built an impressive trifecta to buttress their iron grip on the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of national government.

 

Let me lay it out in terms of Trump's power bases:

1.  He has the enthusiastic support of the Evangelicals by delivering on his (arbitrary and insincere) decision to pack the Courts with anti-abortion fanatics.  They will forgive him anything, make up any excuse, overlook all his repulsive criminality, because with his help they are going to Put Women Back In Their Place.  They are salivating over this.  They are so God damned happy.  All their church members will be directed to vote for him early and often.

 

2.  He has the support of the billionaire class because he has signed a tax bill giving them trillions, assigned foxes in all the regulatory henhouses, and undercut environmental and labor regulations that reduced their excessive plutonian profits.  They love him.  They can't believe their good fortune.  They will find open and secret ways to pass along mountains of money to his party and their election efforts.

 

3.  This is the hard part to accept: he has the delighted vote of tens of millions of American racist monsters. Like it or not, this country was built on genociding the indigenous, working Africans and Chinese to death, and extracting half-price labor from immigrants fleeing American imperial mass murder.  The legacy is a generations-deep fantasy told and demonstrated to nominally White Americans from their cradles that they deserve to rule and extract profit from brown people.  Their certainty is and always has been impervious to reason, and now they have heard and seen the whistles and flags that tell them their time has come at last.  It doesn't matter a whit that they still live in paycheck-to-paycheck desperation, it matters that they are allowed to rage and hate and cheer when the cops gun down people of color.  Now they can play the White exclusion and violence game at a level not seen for generations, and they are very happy and will die in combat, really want to risk dying in combat, for their great White leader.  This is not about logic, it's about a gator-stupid feeding frenzy.  Maga maga magic!

 

All of these constituencies taken together do not make a majority, but with the funding from the billionaire class, Trump can steal election after election. The corporate-owned press will look the other way and treat world-class whistle-blowing journalists like Greg Palast like madmen.  The Democratic Party isn't going to make a big deal out of Trump's election stealing techniques either lest someone point out that they rigged their own primaries and stole California from Bernie Sanders.  

 

So this is going to be a tough, tough fight, but we can't afford not to win.  This country is the worst prison state in the world, one of the worst police states unless you're White and wealthy, and the police are well ensconced in that third plurality I just mentioned-- to the point that they are building an effective street alliance with the Alt-Reich.  So it's time to get serious in political agitation or else deal with the grotesque reallity of a Pinochet-style authoritarianism.  All the bricks are in place.

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