Give us the unredacted Mueller report…Do your job, Congress, investigate, impeach!
Just two things. That is all I want, and hopefully, what any sane, politically engaged progressive can reasonably call for these days. Amidst the daily distractions provided by Trumpism, which is breathlessly recounted by the national media, two fundamentals need not be forgotten. We should be able to read the Mueller report, and to expect the Democrats in Congress to do their job, and investigate every single scandal that the Trumpist Republicans have engaged in for the past two years.
How do we get these?
Enter Algeria.
Or France.
Both offer examples of how a focused group of engaged citizens can bring down a government, in the former case, or also enthrall a nation and force an Imperial president to change and begin a “national conversation,” in the latter case vis à vis the yellow vest movement.
In America, power responds to economic realities. Nothing gets the attention of Washington more than money and influence from their corporate overlords. How do we, the progressive public, get the real influencers in the country to force Trump, and Congress, to give us what we want? Ultimately it must come from shutting down the economy with a general strike.
Consider the following — through our collective efforts, we get the various airline unions (pilots, flight attendants, baggage handlers) to strike. Just for one day, to show that we are serious. The disruption to the economy would be immediate and have serious consequences. It would certainly get Washington’s attention. No business travel. No Amazon shipments.
Done in conjunction with this national day of action, to have our nations teachers “call in sick.” This would force parents to stay home, effectively driving the remainder of the economy to a standstill.
This is how real power will wake up to what it is we want.
Just two things.
We deserve this.
As we enter the 2020 presidential primary season, none of the Democratic candidates are truly leading a call for action, a rallying of the progressive base to mobilize the nation in this moment of need. What we have instead is the silo-ing of the electorate behind various candidates, diffusing the energy into over a dozen streams instead of one unified torrent. We can still have a full and robust primary contest, but we need to have a unified message behind a national general strike.
This will be remembered as the Easter Revolution. When America finally had enough and shut it all down.
More below the fold...
A Low Dishonest Decade
“I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives…”
“A low dishonest decade” indeed. It has been ten years since Obama won the presidency in 2008, and as all “the clever hopes expire” in tweet after tweet, these prophetic words from W.H. Auden’s seminal poem September 1st, 1939 whisper to us across the ages. As Americans we have moved further and further apart since that evening when two hundred thousand celebrants crowded in Chicago’s Grant Park, self-segregating in an ever increasing rate into our own neighborhoods, gated communities, ZIP codes, and information bubbles. During that decade we endured nevertheless in a kind of self-affirming hope that the future was ours, despite the baseless nonsense that was the Obama birth certificate controversy (a fiction given legs by Trump, by the way), an absolutely obstructionist Republican Congress (shutting down the government for 16 days in 2013, and denying the President’s choice for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, a hearing, much less a vote in 2016), and the gradual chipping away of basic guarantees (the suspension of voting protections by the Roberts Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder) even as other basic rights such as the right to marry for homosexuals were extended.
We endured, but to a large extent, were complacent. Lazy under the gentle shadow of that towering promise of tomorrow, knowing the demographics were on our side, and that the “arc of history” was tilted in justice’s favor. The reassuring grin of Obama, that wit and sparkle he could exude when he was at his finest, was a balm for a beleaguered nation following the tragedies of 9/11, the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the incompetence of W. Bush (exhibit A: the “heckuva job, Brownie” Katrina response). So the majority of us let our guards down, and fewer and fewer of us participated as citizens in the sacred republican duty of voting and becoming informed on the issues facing the body politic. We put all of our trust in Obama, to the detriment of down-ballot, off-year elections.
As a result, the census year election of 2010 (in which Congressional redistricting would shape the electoral landscape for the next ten years) was lost to the Republicans, and statehouse after statehouse reconfigured their districts using state of the art software to micro-engineer Republican gerrymandered safe seats, while simultaneously making voting harder and harder for Democratic constituencies (the poor, racial minorities) by limiting early voting, restricting voting registration drives, requiring cumbersome voter identification certification, and using classic repressive tactics such as installing fewer voting booths and locations in Democratic precincts than in white, upper-middle class ones. The reliance of our mantra “Let go, and let Obama” resulted in the decimation of the Democratic party at the state and local level in many parts of the country.
We told ourselves that eventually the Republicans’ fever would break. Surely, there were sane conservatives who would bring the party back into the realm of good governance, who would be willing to compromise and deal for the good of the country. After a couple of glasses of wine, we could envision House Speaker Boehner admitting that he didn’t believe half of the crap that his Tea-Party base was pushing, and that he would willingly push Senator Ted Cruz into the path of an on-coming bus. But yet, slowly and methodically that thin reed of a hope was whipped to a pulp, so much so that the Party of No walked away from the infamous Washington Establishment’s Holy Grail of the “Grand Bargain,” ceding the possibility of a 90/10 split in cuts to Medicare & Social Security in exchange for a corresponding 10% increase in tax revenues on the wealthiest Americans.
What was mistakenly thought to be a fever, however, was actually the birth pains of the Republican party delivering Rosemary’s baby.
Childishly petulant, a liar, a man-boy who has the vocabulary of a dim-wit. Well-meaning, charitable people can agree to disagree whether he has the disposition of a four year old, five year old, or eight year old. Tomato, tomahto. Regardless, he is the “Pop-rocks & Coke™” president — a sickening concoction of foam that is emblematic of our age, post-Empire, a kind of Fascism-lite.
Fascism-lite. America can’t do anything well anymore in its post-Empire phase, not even fascism. No infrastructure (the Nazis gave Germany the autobahn, but Trump’s new airports, highways, and high speed trains have been diminished to one “wall,” now not even a wall, but slanted metal stakes), no concentration camps (aside from the asylum seeker desert concentration camps), no brown shirt / black shirt uniforms (aside from the red MAGA hats), no ubiquitous banners and Leni Riefenstahl orchestrated masses (aside from those slack-jawed, mouth breathing, lower middle class mobs that attend il Dumbo’s rallies), no “official” government propaganda news outlet (aside from the obvious, Fox, and our own version of Josef Goebbels, that lazy-eyed, Ozarkian Sarah Huckabee-Sanders), no systematic “other-ing” of racial or religious minorities (oh, wait…)…
As Andrew Sullivan has detailed in a recent post in NY Mag.com, the new normal in the age of Trump is the lack of outrage by the vast majority of Americans, any sense of shame by those who are in a position to hold the president accountable. The new normal is to keep going back to the 2016 rally cries of lock her up, not just because it is fun and part of group-think, but also because the corruption decried by the mob is one of upending the established patriarchal traditions of Western civilization, not any kind of criminal corruption. To the authoritarian Right, corruption has been re-defined, and what is most important is guarding the purity of America, defending the traditionalist notions of a Great America of yore, in which gender norms were sacrosanct, with the white male firmly atop of the power pyramid. With this view of reality, amplified and turbo-charged through the incessant chirping of the bobble-heads on Fox News, Trump is indeed delivering on his promises, and at the same time constantly antagonizing the self-righteous liberal/progressive Left to the utter delight of his minions.
Passive protest is no longer an option
Passive consumers of politics, that is what most people are.
America has become a culture of passivity, a celebration of consumption (even of hoarding), where narcissism has become banalized with selfie-ism via social media, and political “news” is received mainly through late-night talk show hosts in their comedic monologues, the overwhelming majority of citizens are blissfully unaware of what is being done (and what could be done if voted into power) in their name. As a result only the activist edges of the public square are engaged, on the Right as well as the Left.
Where is the protest music, the anti-establishment / anti-Trump anthems in pop music to rally a movement of angry Millennials? During the 1960s music had a nearly universal theme of protest regarding the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and a sense that the world was going in the wrong direction. There were political messages in songs that made the Top 40 pop charts. Musical acts as diverse as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkle, and even Elvis had hits that were about revolution and social issues.
In post-Empire America, we can’t even get protests done the right way. The only vanguard in the resistance that brings marchers out in the hundreds of thousands is the splintering Women’s March, rapidly evaporating in strength due to charges of anti-Semitism and racism. The earlier example of spontaneous, ground-up mass protest, Occupy Wall Street, collapsed from its own lack of a program and leaderless organization. Both movements claim that they in fact succeeded, the former pointing to the 2018 mid-term elections which elected a record number of women and the Democrats retaking control of the House, and the latter by stating that they moved the Overton Window by making wealth and income inequality a major focus for Democrats going forward.
Those unsuspecting citizens in the passive middle are slowly being disenfranchised by the Trumpist Right, where reports that over 1.5 million were voters purged from the state of Georgia alone in the span of four years, and then there is North Dakota and the disenfranchisement of the Native Americans, and Dodge City in Kansas, of course, plus the litany of voter identification laws in North Carolina, Texas, and well, the list is growing. Added on top of this, the lack of paper receipts showing how an electronic ballot was cast, has created paranoia in Texas, and legitimate concern about hacking capabilities across many states. Indeed, the panoply of irregularities and institutional barriers to the free exercise of the right to vote (e.g. the umpire of elections — the Secretary of State, Brian Kemp — was also running for the top office in the state of Georgia, an obvious conflict of interest, but refused to remove himself from the controversy) can lead many to question whether the United States does hold “free and fair elections.”
Yet one must have some responsibility, some agency in a democracy, even in the face of impediments. Colloquially calling it “adulting,” we sometimes need to organize our lives temporarily making priorities out of daily minutiae to get some important things done, whether it is making sure the rent is paid before the 10th of the month, or building enough time into our commute to get to work on time, we are expected to function despite the many unexpected barriers we encounter. Throwing up one’s hands and whining “it’s too hard” to vote just doesn’t resonate anymore, not when so much is at stake under Republican consolidated government.
So let’s shut it down.
Give us the unredacted Mueller report…Do your job, Congress, investigate, impeach!