Another valuable post from Counterpunch:
Regime Change Abroad, Fascism at Home: How US Interventions Paved the Way for Trump, by Rebecca Gould.
Some excerpts:
“People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.” These words, from James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street (1972), his book-length essay about race in America, were quoted as the epigraph to Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), a now classic novel about the demographic often referred to colloquially as “white trash”: the poor, disenfranchised white working class. With his theory that justice is made manifest in and through the lives we lead, Baldwin was referencing the entanglement of race politics within the American dream, and facing forthrightly all the contradictions this legacy has generated. Allison was thinking about the poverty of the white working class, their systematic disempowerment, and the exclusions they face, that far outlast the moment of their occurrence. Although they tell their stories in different ways, Baldwin and Allison are making the same point: crimes have consequences. When we cause others to suffer, we end by suffering ourselves.
At no moment in history has the boomerang effect of everyday ethics been expressed more thoroughly or remorselessly than in the outcome of the elections for the forty-fifth President of the United States. America has made countless other peoples around the world suffer. It has turned democracies into dictatorships with a systematicity that far outpaces any other country. The only legitimation for its actions has been the agenda of “regime change” in the interests of “global democracy” that neither the Republican nor the Democratic party ever questioned publicly. On 8 November 2016, that agenda was suddenly exposed for what it was: rank hypocrisy that has contributed the impoverishment of the majority of Americans, while enriching the ruling class.
—snip—
In the aftermath of 8 November 2016, the façade of democracy promotion around the world no longer holds in the center that espouses this ideology. Citizens of the USA are getting a taste of their own medicine. The authoritarianism they have exported since the beginning of the Cold War has suddenly, and unprecedentedly, been transported home. It is now exploding in our face, through racist attacks on school children, the proliferation of swastikas around the country, name-calling, death threats, and a general atmosphere of hate. It can no longer be denied that what we do abroad shapes what we experience at home.
—snip—
When US history is taught in public schools, its contradictions are often packaged into a narrative that reflects the country’s variegated makeup and multicultural history. Because of my lopsided education, it took some time before I was able to recognise that the real horror of 8 November 2016 was not what it meant for America on the world stage, but what it meant at home. For the first time in modern US history, the greatest impact of American foreign policy would be experienced within the US, in the domestic sphere that for so many generations has been sheltered and isolated from the suffering it inflicts on the world. For once, the most direct and immediate victims of American stupidity and prejudice are the American people themselves. Minorities and people of colour have long been targets of discriminatory policies within the USA. Following the vote of 8 November, these forms of discrimination have been legitimated for use against everyone, from women to Latinos to the disabled and gay.
This state of affairs marks a turning point in world history. For many generations, US voters have elected politicians of a wide range of political persuasions while closing their eyes to the overturning of democracies, forcibly installed dictatorships, the punitive taxes, sanctions, and other penalties that have been extracted unilaterally as the world looked on in obedient silence, or turned the other way. Although these disasters nagged at the conscience of the more internationally minded among the US electorate, voters did not have to face the consequences of our actions abroad. Voters could afford to be blind to the suffering of Iranians, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, and the citizens of Honduras, because it does not occur on US territory.
The very same political system that brought the first African-American President to power elected a racist and misogynist bigot to the same office eight years later. In fact, in many of the swing states that determine the election’s outcome, the very same people who voted for Obama voted for Trump. It was as though there is no real difference, from the point of view of a disenfranchised American electorate, between a racist bigot and an African-American promising change, so long as they both promise to overhaul the status quo.
To say that these voters are right not to discern any difference would mean defending racism. But to fail to learn from their decision to put every ethical consideration aside when faced with economic suffocation would mean hiding from reality. “One good thing that may come from this election,” an Egyptian colleague, Mona Baker, said to me. A Professor at the University of Manchester, Baker has made her reputation as a scholar of Translation Studies, most recently by studying activists’ contribution to the Arab spring. Baker sees no difference between Clinton and Trump, and regards both as likely architects of global atrocity. “The system is broken,” she concluded our discussion, “It cannot be fixed by an election. The status quo needs to end.”
Will a Trump presidency help to bring an end to the status quo? Whatever happens, it is a certainty that Americans will soon have a great deal more in common with Iranians, Russians, and other peoples living live in authoritarian regimes than they used to. For once, the common ground between the US and the rest of the world will not be founded solely on what we have done to others, or on our on-going complicity in sustaining their oppressive governments; it will be based on what we have done to ourselves. We can now start learning lessons in democracy from the many countries where the US government has orchestrated coups, rather than exporting US ideologies abroad in the form of guns and arms. This is not the lesson I would have liked to take home from Election Day, but it is a lesson nonetheless. Precisely because it is humiliating and humbling, 8 November 2016 will prove to be a salutary education in the limits of American democracy.
Read on.
Please.
Meanwhile, back at the (D.C.) ranch:
House Dems brace for Wednesday’s secret ballot
House Democrats return to Washington on Tuesday grappling over the best course for the party’s future.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), facing a challenge from Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), is seen as the heavy favorite in elections on Wednesday to keep her top leadership spot, where she’s been perched for the past 14 years.
Democrats will decide on their new leader in a secret ballot vote that highlights the caucus’s restlessness and resurrects internal tensions that have simmered since Democrats lost control of the lower chamber in 2010.
While House Democrats gained at least six seats this cycle — several contests remain too close to call — that figure was a far cry from the 25 pickups Pelosi had predicted. Seeking more accountability for the dismal results, dozens of restive lawmakers successfully delayed the party’s leadership elections to this week to allow more time for reckoning. But in the eyes of Ryan and his supporters, nothing short of a change at the top will get the party back on a winning track.
“The level of frustration in our caucus is as great as I have seen it,” Ryan said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
—snip—
Ryan’s challenge hinges largely on the argument that Pelosi, a San Francisco liberal widely despised in conservative circles, simply projects the wrong image for a party hoping to broaden its appeal to the Rust Belt voters who flocked to Trump.
“We have got to have the right messenger,” he said. “We have got to have someone who cannot just go on MSNBC, but go on Fox and Fox Business and CNBC and go into union halls and fish fries and churches all over the country and start a brush fire about what a new Democratic Party looks like.”
The elections have also heightened long-standing aggravations among newer members that the long reign of Pelosi and her top deputies — all of whom are in their mid-70s — has prevented other members from rising through the leadership ranks.
“Leader Pelosi is an incredibly strong fundraiser, she’s an incredibly dynamic leader, she gets out there and gets the caucus to do things together that most other leaders would have a very hard time doing. But that’s come at an expense,” a former Democratic leadership aide said Monday.
“There’s a generation of Democratic leaders who have been stymied or held down or even cut off at the knees to keep her and [Maryland Rep. Steny] Hoyer and others in power,” the former aide added.
—snip—
“We’re going to surprise a lot of people,” Ryan told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd.
Playing to Ryan’s favor, Wednesday’s leadership races will be decided by secret ballot, empowering members to buck Pelosi — even just to send a protest message — without fear of reprisal.
For that reason, the former lawmaker warned that whip-count claims from both candidates are dubious.
“It’s a secret ballot. Those commitments are pretty meaningless,” the Democrat said. “I’ve seen it so many times, where people tell both sides what they want to hear.”
The smart money is backing Pelosi. It was backing Hillary Clinton, too. Maybe the smart money is not so smart.
We shall see, soon enough.
If the Democratioc Party is going to change, this would be a good first start.
Like I said…we shall see.
Pelosi is a second generation Dem. [Her father was] Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a Democrat U.S. Congressman from Maryland and a Mayor of Baltimore.[4][5] Pelosi’s brother, Thomas D’Alesandro III, also a Democrat, was mayor of Baltimore from 1967 to 1971, when he declined to run for a second term.
Her father’s career smells of rot. His Baltimore was one of the most racist cities of America…as it still is today, of course.
D’Alesandro was then elected to the 76th Congress and to the four succeeding Congresses, serving from January 3, 1939, until he resigned on May 16, 1947. While in Congress, D’Alesandro strongly supported the Bergson Group, a “political action committee set up to that challenged the Roosevelt Administration’s policies on the Jewish refugee issue during the Holocaust, and later lobbied against British control of Palestine” despite his equally strong support for Roosevelt’s other policies.[4] Following his service in Congress he was Mayor of Baltimore for 12 years from May 1947 to May 1959. He was defeated for renomination by the Democrats in the March 1959 primary election. He was also an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate in 1958.
D’Alesandro ran for Governor of Maryland in 1954, but was forced to drop out due to being implicated in receiving undeclared money from Dominic Piracci, a parking garage owner convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and conspiracy to obstruct justice.[5]
His one term as mayor was dominated by civil unrest and budgetary troubles.[4] In 1968 D’Alesandro ordered the relocation of the East-West Expressway unstarted since 1941 to be rerouted through the Western Cemetery, followed by cancelling the project, followed by implementing a HUD program to finance 475 of the vacant homes abandoned after they were previously condemned to create “homes for the poor”. The homes were demolished in 1974, with the Rouse Company creditors abandoning the project.[5][6]
He was unable to respond effectively to the Baltimore riot of 1968 that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and National Guard troops were called in to control the situation. He would never run for another political office…
I got yer “Dems,” right there!!!
Isn’t it about time we moved on?
I think so.
You?
AG
