[Peace-discuss] [Peace] Fwd: Trump's Removal Can't Wait for Impeachment by Paul Street

Wed Nov 20 15:55:51 UTC 2019

He is demented.He is fascist. He is an oligarch. He is corrupt. I believe in democracy.  Periodically 50% or more of the people will swoon over a demented fascist oligarch. And his ruthless VP. And his loyal people surrounding him. So, my point is that I think the problem runs much deeper than the current president and vice president. I think we do not have a healthy democracy. We, and generations before us, permitted the erosion of the building blocks of democracy.  So, what would removal of Trump and Pence and the loyal entourage accomplish for the democracy?The crimes against the refugees might end -- or would they? The crimes against the environment might end -- or would they? ...And how long would it be before another demented fascist oligarch charmed the people?- Karen Medina
-------- Original message --------From: Karen Aram via Peace <peace at lists.chambana.net> Date: 11/20/19  09:20  (GMT-06:00) To: peace <peace at lists.chambana.net>, Peace <peace at anti-war.net> Subject: [Peace] Fwd: Trump's Removal Can't Wait for Impeachment by Paul Street 
The most important point Paul Street makes, in addition to the futility of impeachment, is: 

“If we are serious about
 getting rid of the demented fascist oligarch and his insurance policy, Pence, then we are going to have to join and expand an authentic opposition, a real popular resistance in the streets. The effective and meaningfully democratic way to remove Trump is not
 through elite procedures designed by 18th century slaveholders for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare. It is through sustained mass civil disobedience—through rebellion by and for those whom the American ruling class fears and hates the most: the working-class
 majority."

Trump's Removal Can't Wait for Impeachment

COMMENTS

President
 Donald Trump addresses the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, at the White House in August. (Mike Vucci / AP) 

The most powerful position in the world’s most powerful nation is occupied by a demented fascist oligarch.
He demonizes and scapegoats minorities and immigrants. He provides dog-whistle
 cover for white supremacists. He sparks racist hate crimes with
 his vicious nativist words. He speaks
 with disdain about inner-city black communities. He tells police officers not
 to “be too nice” with suspects.
He packs
 the courts with hard-right racists, classists, sexists and eco-exterminists, toxically reshaping the federal judiciary for a generation. He has cultivated and rewarded Christian
 fascists, one of whom (Mike Pence) is his vice president
He calls African nations shithole
 countries. He told four nonwhite progressive U.S. Congresswomen to “go
 back to … the crime infested places from which they came.”

He has absurdly threatened to “end
 birthright citizenship” (the granting of U.S. citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment) with an executive order.
Trump violates international
 asylum law and separates
 migrant children from their parents. He indefinitely detains
 tens of thousands of migrant children and families in for-profit
 concentration camps.
He declared a fake
 national emergency to criminally divert taxpayer dollars to the construction of a nativist border wall that most of the citizenry hates and Congress refused to fund.
Believing his dotard self “the
 world’s greatest person,” he promotes an absurd cult of personality, proclaiming himself a “stable genius.” He regularly
 praises dictators and despots the world over. He absurdly claims that Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution means that “I have the power to do
 whatever I want as president.”
Donald Trump attacks basic press freedoms. He demonizes and falsely conflates liberals and leftists. He mocks and disrespects intellectuals and science.
He absurdly denies climate science and arch-criminally ramps up the eco-exterminist war on livable ecology. He refused
 to adequately prepare for and respond to the epic climate change-fueled Hurricanes Harvey and Maria. He absurdly blames California’s deadly climate change-driven wildfires on the state’s failure to “sweep
 the forest floors.”
He threatened North Korea and Iran with nuclear annihilation. He provided
 cover for the absolutist Saudi Arabian regime’s murderous vivisection of a dissident journalist. He funds and equips the Saudis’ criminal
 and catastrophic war on Yemen over Congressional
 opposition. Last Friday he pardoned three
 murderous U.S. military war criminals.
He has turned the U.S. Attorney General into
 his own personal attorney. He has conducted a corrupt foreign policy on behalf of his own economic and political self-interest. He brazenly violates
 the Constitution’s emoluments clause while preposterously calling
 that clause “phony.” He denies and obstructs
 Congress’ constitutional right and duty to investigate his conduct. He criminally intimidates witnesses and whistleblowers, calling them “traitors.”
 He describes a constitutionally appropriate inquiry into his immoral and illegal behavior as a
 “lynching” and a “coup.”
His far right-wing attorney general, William Barr, argues that his executive
 powers are essentially unlimited and seeks
 to undermine the constitutional separation of church and state.
He wages a relentless Orwellian war on Truth, replete with more
 than 10,000 documentable false statements since his inauguration.
He openly
 flirts with calling for the use of extra-legal political violence on his behalf by his heavily armed backers, suggesting that impeachment could
 spark “Civil War.” He is the first president in American history to pose a serious threat of refusing
 to honor a re-election count that doesn’t go his way.
This is a national, and indeed global, emergency. We need Donald Trump out of the White House. How do we make that happen?
There’s no great mystery about how citizens humble and even overthrow corrupt and tyrannical governments. They take to the streets in significant numbers, engaging in mass disruption for as long
 as it takes. Look at Algeria,
 Hong Kong, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Ecuador and Chile,
 to mention six places where mass protest and popular resistance have recently proven highly effective. Look now to Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have marched against corruption, even
 in the face of lethal live ammunition, and to Bolivia,
 where workers and peasants are facing bloody repression to resist a
 neofascist coup that was immediately applauded as a victory
 for “freedom” and “democracy” by Trump.
It doesn’t take the whole population to change history from the bottom up. Five days of insurrection by 200,000 people forced the French government to back
 down on its regressive gas tax last year. Extinction Rebellion leader Roger
 Hallam notes that it requires dedicated resistance by just 3% of the population to overthrow a regime. If Hallam is right, then ten days of rebellion by a quantity of Americans roughly equivalent to the population of the Chicago metropwolitan area could
 force the U.S. ruling class to get rid of Trump.
It is unthinkable that any but a few marginal voices in the mainstream “liberal” Democrats and their media (CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Atlantic, The New
 Yorker, et al.) would call for peoples’ power in the streets to bring down the Trump tyranny. The “liberal” elite is fiercely committed to Fake Resistance. It may be obsessed with Trump to the exclusion of practically everything else that ought to matter in
 national and world events (popular rebellions from France to Chile, Beirut, Quito and Hong Kong included) but they will not embrace the most effective method of collapsing the Trump-Pence regime collapse: mass mobilization and protest. Embracing an authentic
 people’s resistance movement would open a popular-democratic door that the Democratic establishment prefers to keep shut.
That establishment is instead advancing two tepid, deeply conservative strategies that will likely fail to get Trump out and will come with dreadful downsides—even if they succeed. Both of these
 strategies are designed keep the U.S. working-class majority functioning not as engaged historical agents, but as passive, system-trusting spectators who accede to a
 narrow definition of “politics” as little more than the occasional, strictly time-staggered marking of ballots next to the names of candidates selected in advance by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire.
The first of these power-serving strategies is the standard quadrennial get-out-the-vote effort to rally citizens behind yet another corporate-centrist billionaire-pleasing and militaristic “national
 security” Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Democratic presidential candidate like Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or the newly
 minted Iowa Caucus front-runner Pete Buttigieg—a silver-tongued right-winger (see Nathan
 Robinson’s brilliant take-down in Current Affairs last spring) wearing fake-progressive identity cloaking (like a certain technically
 black Wall Street-serving drone bomber-to-be in 2007). This is the same
 depressing neoliberal track that has so badly betrayed, divided and demobilized the nation’s working-class majority so as to grease the skids for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America, George Bush Jr, the racist Tea Party
 and the malignant white nationalist Trump.
With the usual help from the anti-democratic
 Electoral Collegeand racist
 voter suppression in battleground states, Trump will likely prevail over yet another dismal, dollar-drenched capitalist Democrat in November 2020. But even if the Democrats are able to win the Electoral College count and induce Trump to leave (with some
 help perhaps from constitutionalists in the U.S. military command), putting another Wall Street Democrat in the White House will just open door the for another neofascist white-nationalist Republican president in 2024—possibly someone more ideologically dedicated,
 less obviously corrupt and thus more dangerous than Trump.
(Yes, the Democrats could prevail if they run the self-declared democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. But the Democrats’ big money bankrollers and media won’t let that happen. The Democratic establishment’s
 dirty little secret is that it would
 rather lose to the right, even to a hard-right nationalist right-wing party, than lose to the mildly left wing of its own party. Even the avowedly “capitalist
 to her bones” Elizabeth Warren is considered
 “too far left” by top Democratic Wall Street funders).
The second flawed “liberal” strategy is, of course, impeachment, likely by the end of the year. It requires just a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, where the Democrats hold sway.
 But (as a remarkable number of U.S.-Americans I encounter seem not to know) removal requires a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate, where the nation’s most racist and right-wing regions are absurdly
 over-represented and the Trumpified Republican Party holds sway. The Republican-run Senate is not going to remove the demented fascist oligarch from office just because he tried to trade New Cold War arms for political dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine—not
 when a
 super-majority of Republicans “strongly approve” of Trump’s performance no matter what he does or says. And Trump may well use “exoneration” by the Senate to his electoral advantage next November.
At the same time, the Democrats are pursuing impeachment on chillingly narrow and imperialist grounds that whitewash the crimes of U.S. foreign policy, past and present. Democratic politicos
 and talking heads proclaim House impeachment testifier Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr. a great “national hero” and all-around “good guy” because Taylor was a rifle company commander “serving” in the Quang Tri and Thua Tien provinces in the United States’
 beloved 101st Airborne during the
 so-called Vietnam War. Fellow Ukraine-Gate witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman is upheld as another great patriot for “serving” in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. How depressing: The U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky) murdered
 2-5 millionVietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians between 1962 and 1975. The arch-criminal U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq killed one million-plus Iraqis.
One need not be a fan of Vladimir Putin’s oligarchic regime to wonder what’s so great about Washington’s sponsorship of the corrupt U.S.-backed capitalist Ukraine government, which is the product
 of a U.S.-backed 2014 coup and contains neo-Nazis. On what grounds do top Democrats think Washington has
 the rightto play power politics and help fuel hot wars on Russia’s western border? “The U.S. government,” Sheldon
 Richman tried to remind Americans one year ago, “has no businesses policing relations between Ukraine and Russia. Even if that role were appropriate for some party, the U.S. government would not be the one, because it hardly has clean hands in the matter.”
How would U.S.-Americans feel about Russia and/or China sending military equipment to an anti-U.S. regime in Mexico or Canada? And if Democrats are so committed to democracy around the world,
 why have none of them beyond Sanders and a few other progressives denounced the recent neofascist coup in Bolivia or voiced support for this year’s popular uprisings in Ecuador and Chile?
Trump deserves removal not just for his crooked Ukraine shenanigans and related obstructions of justice, but for setting up concentration camps, separating
 babies and children from their families, inciting
 violence, interfering with voting rights, discriminating
 on the basis of religion, waging criminal war,
 criminally threatening nuclear war, abusing
 his pardon power, violating the emoluments clause, assaulting press freedoms, backing coups in Venezuela and Bolivia, unconstitutionally declaring a
 fake national emergency, violating campaign finance laws, illegal proliferation
 of nuclear technology, tax fraud, instructing
 Border Patrol to violate the law, stripping environmental and public lands protections, and doing everything he can to turn the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber as soon as possible.
Even if impeachment leads to removal, Trump’s defenestration merely for interjecting his personal interests into Washington’s imperialist policy in Eastern Europe could constitute both an undeserved
 validation of that policy and an exoneration of Trump for his much bigger transgressions. And it would put the dangerous right-evangelical troglodyte Mike Pence in the Oval Office—a chilling prospect.
To make matters worse, impeachment threatens to become a great rallying point for Trump’s ugly white-nationalist base while encouraging the nation’s all-too-silent progressive majority to stay
 seated in front of glowing Telescreens to watch House Democrats and liberal cable news taking heads falsely claim to be collapsing the Trump regime from the top down.
If we are serious about getting rid of the demented fascist oligarch and his insurance policy, Pence, then we are going to have to join and expand an authentic opposition, a real popular resistance
 in the streets. The effective and meaningfully democratic way to remove Trump is not through elite procedures designed by 18th century slaveholders for whom democracy was the ultimate
 nightmare. It is through sustained
 mass civil disobedience—through rebellion by and for those whom the American ruling class fears and hates the most: the working-class majority.
The sooner Trump can be forced out, the better. Curiously enough, impeachment makes the need to form a grassroots movement to overthrow the Trump-Pence regime more urgent than ever. Now that
 he’s looking at impeachment and a Senate trial, there’s no telling what Trump and his heavily armed minions might do. He has enormous means of mass destruction and mass distraction at his neofascistic fingertips.
We need Trump and Pence out now, not some time next year. The way to make that happen is with a mass movement that will not only sweep him from power but challenge the richly bipartisan racist, sexist,
 imperial and eco-cidal class rule system that hatched the Trump regime in the first place.

Paul Street

Contributor

Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,…

IN THIS ARTICLE:
chile donald
 trump ecuador fascism george
 h w bush hong
 kongmike
 pence new
 york times newt
 gingrich twitter ukrainevladimir
 putin william
 barr

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