Never give a sucker an even break.
For good reason, people are concerned about the worst case scenario.
Trump is sabotaging the Post Office, sending mercenaries to beat demonstrators in American cities (those run by Democrats, anyway), and figuring out how to rig or postpone the election.
I have some troubling scenarios of my own. But maybe what we are seeing is something else, as another BMGer has already suggested.
Two years ago our own gmoke wrote:
According to The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It… Every Time by Maria Konnikova (NY: Viking, 2016 ISBN 978-0-525-42741-4), there’s a structure to the con:
The put-up picks out the mark
The play establish a bond
The rope lays out the pitch
The tale proffers the benefit
The convincer is where the conman lets us win
The breakdown is where we start to lose
The send is where the victim is recommitted
The touch is where the mark is completely fleeced.
The blow-off gets rid of the mark ASAP
The fix prevents marks from making official complaints
On that score, we are at the end game: the fix.
If so, Trump’s provocations are bullying threats designed so that, when the time comes, we will agree to immunity and goodness knows what else for him to simply leave. To get us to give him a deal better than Nixon’s, with the same thin rationale “to move on and bring the country together” etc. while telling ourselves we got off lucky.
It’s got to be about the money with this guy and his family. The idea that they have some political agenda reminds me of the scene from Die Hard where they all think that the bad guys were political terrorists but in fact, they were simply thieves looking to steal $640 Million in Bearer Bonds
Trump just wants to leave with the money.
Indeed it is about the money, although it isn’t at clear whether Mr. Trump and his family will have much by the time this is all over — unless he, as a puppet of Vladimir Putin, succeeds in his hostile takeover of America.
I think it’s more likely that it’s about the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in Russian cash that Mr. Trump and his family have collected over the past decades — and of course in the last few years — from Russian organized crime. It goes without saying that that means at the direction of Vladimir Putin.
I think any political agenda is at the explicit direction of Mr. Putin. I think the political agenda, directed by Mr. Putin, is not limited to Donald Trump.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in Russian cash have flowed into the GOP in the past few years. Some of it has already been documented in the flows from Dmitri Firtash (set up by Vladimir Putin in order to be Mr. Putin’s Ukraine handler) through Lev Parnas, Igor Frumin, and Rudy Giuliani into GOP campaign coffers. Some of it has already been proven to have moved through the NRA into similar recipients.
This is about money and self-preservation for Donald Trump and his family. It is about money and power for GOP Trumpists.
It is a political agenda of Vladimir Putin. We are, in fact, watching a coup. This time, it’s an economic coup.
The question is whether or not we can still stop it.
I think the question is more along the lines of will we stop it. It would be naive to think that Republicans and only Republicans are connected to this. It is like assuming that only Republican lawmakers had connections to Jeffery Epstein.
No doubt there are prominent Democrats and (more importantly to them) prominent Democratic donors who led less than saintly lives and there is no doubt that Putin has the goods on them all.
Once elected, will Biden have the guts to clean house? I do not have confidence that he does, but I do have confidence in some of the women on his short list for VP who may lend him the backbone he will need.
Politicians won’t save us. A tidal wave election won’t be enough (roughly three months of lame ducks Trmp and McConnell is not a bright prospect and that’s a best case scenario). We have to do it ourselves by recognizing our own power and exercising it.
Between 4 and 7% of the USA population have now participated in (primarily) nonviolent demonstrations against the government (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html). According to the studies in Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, 3.5% of the population out in the streets is usually enough to cause regime change. I feel like I’m the only person who’s noticed that. Yet.
It’s been interesting this weekend have these conversations with my in laws who participated in the People Power movement against Marcos and lament that Duterte is crossing many of the same red lines (taking away the Broadcast license for the more critical of the two major broadcast networks, suspending habeas corpus under the fog of Covid, musing aloud about changing term limits, etc.) without a similar movement in the streets. I do wonder if my generation and the ones that are following me substitute online action for real world action. BLM protests (which I took Physically part in with my Gen Z students) seems to counteract that fear. I do hope both countries follow the example of John Lewis and Jose a Rizal and get into good trouble to make a better democracy.
I go further. My studies of Gandhi have led me to believe we completely misunderstand his movement by seeing it as primarily political. I believe the objective for Gandhi was not just political nonviolence but a nonviolent state and a nonviolent economy. There is a lot of work which has gone into imagining a Gandhian economics (my notes on all my readings are available at hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com and you can start with http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/sarvodaya-swaraj-and-swadeshi.html which links to all the rest) and there are existing examples. For instance, the remarkable “strike” at Market Basket a few years ago is a prime example of the Gandhian concept of trusteeship where the owners of a business see their role as trustees for the business, the community, the workers, and the suppliers, not just as a way to make “mo’ money, mo’ money.”
Unfortunately, it seems the veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, including people like John Lewis and Bob Moses, never studied Gandhian economics while studying Gandhian nonviolence. I took the opportunity to ask them both about it when I made the chance.
Even today, BLM and Extinction Rebellion seem to have no conception of Gandhian economics as a possibility for leverage.
I’ve been saying Solar IS Civil Defense for close to 20 years and know that $10 retail buys a solar light and charger that can provide the light, communications (radio or cell phone), and small battery charging we are all supposed to have on hand in case of emergency. This is also entry level electricity for the billion or so in the world who do not have access now (another reality which is obvious to me and ignored by just about everyone else). If enough people practiced a solar civil defense, they could organize a grid electricity strike and open another front, nonviolently, to move the society in the direction they want.
“the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.”
Diane Di Prima
More than street demos, more than online activism, more even than Gandhian economics. Simply more imagination, please.
Thanks for picking up on what I put down. I appreciate it.
Of course, the answer to your question is it’s a floor wax AND a dessert topping, a Fascist coup AND a grifter’s end game.
The blow-off was always going to include many dead bodies but who knew it would be from a virus? Well, there’s still time to start a war too because, as Mary Trump wrote, Too Much and Never Enough.
I always read your stuff.
To me the takeaway is to solve the problem by standing up to these gangsters, not by cutting a deal with them.
It’s going to be ugly either way, but there is just no way the country ends up in better shape by backing down versus fighting back.
There are criminal investigations in the works in New York; they should run their course, and a denazified DOJ should do its thing as well.
Funny you should say that.
I was just listening to a podcast about Spain’s Fascist past (The Valley of the Fallen on 99% Invisible) and learned that soon after Franco’s death, the replacement government made a deal (The Pact of Forgetting) which moderates and leftists agreed to because it let many of them out from under the thumb of the government… but the Pact also meant that Fascists could not be punished for murders and other crimes they committed (Fascists were stealing babies from hospitals). The Pact made it difficult for families to find the bodies of those killed by the Fascists.
We–the people, and the Democratic Party–must open this up to sunlight, and expose everything the Republicans have been doing and punish them for wrongdoing. If not, then Trump is a rehearsal for an even worse Presidency.
Spain has thrived in the aftermath of the Pact.
Maybe Spain thrived (economically) because Franco’s death let it rejoin Europe and the world, but the grief and pain of the victims remains.
I very much hope that we do not reach the point where such a move represents the best path forward for America. At the time of the pact, Spain had been a dictatorship for decades.
At this time, it is clear that mounting the strongest possible opposition to the American Falangists is our best hope to forestall that possibility. That includes demonstrations in the streets and prosecutions in the courts. No accommodation.
As I am sure you know, in Spain today the pact is fraying as Franco’s victims and their descendants come forth and press their suppressed truth.
Amnesia is a regrettable national policy—at best.
HM Juan Carlos was mostly an example of how even a hereditary monarch could be a champion of democracy, but I understand that one would be well-advised not to speak ill of Franco (who is of course “still dead”) in his presence.
The former king has not aged well, but his actions ordering troops back to their barracks after Franco’s death in 1975 were pivotal and secure his place in history.
There was the time I think in 1981 when he stared down a possible Francoist coup on national TV. As someone who appreciates the role of monarchy I’ve always seen a restoration in such modern times as an example to replicate.