I’ve read through the powerpoint deck that was circulating among the Jan 6 coup plotters. It’s on archive.org [arch] and it’s pretty interesting reading. It occurred to me that it’d be an interesting series of postings, to go through it a couple slides at a time, except it’s 36 slides of unadulterated bullshit and that would be a pretty hefty load for us all.
See what I mean? Let me ask you a question, Senator: If there aren’t “failsafe” paper ballots, then what are your people counting over and over again? Could it be paper ballots? And, aren’t you promoting hand counts which you just said can be easily subverted?
The bit about Chinese involvement is just embarrassingly stupid and – unfortunately – it mirrors the democrats’ embarrassingly stupid line of enquiry about Russian involvement in 2016. I actually do believe that there was some Russian activity in 2016 but the democrats lost because they ran the candidate who was most likely to lose, who was relentlessly attacked with bullshit aimed at her baggage – bullshit that the republicans had been building up for years. So, if Russian involvement is OK, why isn’t Chinese? But, seriously, that’s a whopping huge assertion to make with no supporting evidence, but that’s the point.
What’s going to happen?
- The republicans are going to steal the next presidential election by nullifying it if they lose, or trumpeting it as a great victory if they win.
- Trump already tried that, and the current situation is a result of the first round.
- The democrats are too busy being stupid, unable to control their caucus, and backdoored by “stealth” republican agents, that they are not going to be able to do anything about it.
- Even if they did do anything about it, the democrats lack the political will and unity to be effective. What are they going to do, ask Merrick Garland to look into it and write a great big memo in a few years? Remember the way democrats sat there crowing about “Mueller Time” when it was obvious to any tyro that Mueller’s specialty was burying evidence of crimes not uncovering it, and nothing was going to come of the report.
- When the election is stolen and the democrats stand around wringing their hands, the republicans will leap into action and start passing laws to cement their control of the government. And that’ll be the end of the USA’s experiment with “democracy.” It was pseudo-democracy all along, and the people never were sufficiently invested in it to fight for it – it was democracy for the corporations and there is a high likelihood that the coporations’ll realize that an imperial republican party will be better for business, and that’s how it’ll roll.
- What will the people do? I hope that there are people planning for general strikes and civil disobedience when the next election is stolen. In an ideal world, when the election is stolen, every government-owned computer will stop working correctly over a period of a week or so. All the payroll, logistics, military logistics and orders – all that stuff will grind to a halt and hard drives will “fail”, data will be corrupted, the wrong answers will be given, the FBI’s “fusion centers” with department of homeland security and ICE will begin spitting out garbage, etc. And the people will take to the streets and the economy will screech to a stop. The establishment will respond with violence, mostly establishment goons beating people up while police stand by and watch. The goons need to be gunned down. And, if the police start getting into it, then it’s time for a full-up insurgency including IEDs, attacks on the power grid, disabling rail and truck supply transportation, and (why not?) direct personal attacks against high net worth individuals, who are part of the problem. I.e.: I see no reason why the Koch brothers, who helped finance this mess, should survive it intact.
I’d give about a 30% chance that the scenario will play out the way I see it. I’d give about a 70% chance that the republican take-over will work, the remains of the democrat party will see the writing on the wall (seriously, can you see Nancy Pelosi as a revolutionary? She’s already a republican, basically) and form up with the new imperial republican party, and the US will enter its final stage: imperial America, which will stand alone against the world and, as usual, it’ll lose the insurgency because insurgencies work. The Brits have been doing a good job incompetencing themselves into political irrelevance, which is why the US started aligning with Australia, which it is going to turn into a nuclear power to counter-act China. [Which is stupid because China doesn’t need counter-action] France is a weird mess and will remain so. The EU will react to the rise of the imperial republican party with strength and resolve; i.e.: it won’t do anything either. But, I will predict that a lot of countries will leave NATO. If Putin is smart and survives, he’d do well to establish a Warsaw Pact 2.0 and start getting the framework for that in place right now. Unfortunately, it’ll look like a muscled-up version of OPEC. And, while all this fiddling takes place, Rome burns in the form of climate change – by 2100 we’ll be at +4C and all of the stuff I’m talking about above will be irrelevant because we’ll be staring into mass extinction events. Hopefully nobody decides that nuclear winter might offset global warming.
As you can tell, I’m not sanguine that any of the stuff that is being uncovered by the January 6 committee is going to amount to much. The facts are already known and the situation is already obvious and what is equally obvious is that the committee is going to search for a safe dividing-line above which they will not reach. The useful idiots have already been swept off the table, but the senior idiots and organizers are going to get away with it. A few of them, maybe Bannon, will have court cases that they need to slow-walk until the republicans are able to run the table in the next presidential election, and they will all be pardoned and given high positions under the new imperial republican administration. We can already see that safe dividing-line forming: Mark Meadows decided he’d play with the committee, then un-decided and, what’s going to happen to him? Nothing. Also: democrats who are holding their breath waiting for Trump to be charged for tax fraud or evasion – stop, and draw another breath. What’s going to happen there? Trump will get hit with a tax fine, and won’t pay it and that’ll be that. He’s never going to get perp-walked or wear an orange jumpsuit. That’s not how oligarchies work, and in case nobody noticed the US has always been an oligarchy.
My framing for the scenario above is heavily influenced by what happened when Smedley Butler, who was as credible as anyone at the time could get, disclosed the Wall St coup plot and … the oligarchy shrugged. The oligarchy is good at shrugging this sort of thing off: they shrugged off the militarized insurgency of coal miners and the battle of Blair Mountain [stderr] the Tulsa white supremacist war, the Haymarket police rampage, The brutal suppression of the Bonus Army in Anacostia, The FBI’s involvement in suppressing the human rights movement, the Battle of Homestead, the arrest and imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs, etc, etc, etc. The point is that these shameful incidents show the remarkable resilience of the establishment and its willingness to openly commit the most heinous crimes against the US’ fake democracy. When you can read, in black and white, US history of the US Air Force dropping bombs and military gas on miners in Virginia, you’ve got to be remarkably naive to think that Merrick Garland is going to send the Proud Boys to prison. When the right-wingers in their chat rooms are talking about killing the libs, they’re planning, and they expect to get away with it, because the Baldwin-Feltts did, the Pinkertons did, and every corrupt, redneck cop who shot someone and got away with it, did. The score is about 210,000 to 5 (although the 210,000 are dead and the 5 are just in prison for a few years) and the long-term trajectory of US imperialism is unchanged.
When we liberals (am I a liberal?) sit around yapping about voting rights, which is a serious issue, we’re doing it in the context of a country that has been entirely comfortable with voter suppression from the beginning. The whole structure of the country’s electoral system is to perpetuate the oligarchy established by the “founding fathers” [stderr] who, I’m going to say it, were as bad or worse than Hitler, but were certainly smoother. It seems naive and stupid that we’re watching wooden suit model Joe Biden pretend to be pushing a voting rights bill, which has no chance of passing, in a country that established Jim Crow vote suppression historically just the other day.
I’m not even sanguine about our chances for a revolution. The French revolution was a worthy effort but most people don’t realize that they only managed to guillotine the slowest-moving and most stupid of their oligarchs [about 2,300] The dangerous ones had already left, with their wealth and their necks intact. Most of the guillotining was left/liberal versus right/revolutionary and all they did was set the situation up for a take-over by an aggressive young general named Bonaparte. Since then, France has been a mess. I love the place, but it still is a mess. And that’s good because, like the British, they have incompetenced themselves off the world stage as a power. Our best hope is not a revolutionary liberal take-over of the US or a liberal reconstruction, because those won’t happen – out best hope is that the US incompetences itself off its pedestal. Which, with global warming and our ridiculous military spending, we may do. Revolutionaries in todays’ US best strategy is to keep magnifying the status quo and/or embed themselves into places where they can really fuck things up when the time comes. The executives at Enron did more damage to the US in 5 years than a small army of revolutionaries ever could. Encourage the CIA to put all its data in Amazon’s cloud, then get a job as a system administrator and drop the cloud. That probably won’t happen but when I see the US government’s increasing reliance on external IT, I see a ray of hope: they’re relying on the unreliable. Unfortunately, the doctrines of cyberinsurgency haven’t caught hold of people’s imaginations – yet – but monkey-wrenching the US government into being less efficient may be our only hope, eventually.
The other alternative, which I’ve mused about, would be if the people took a massive tax holiday. I don’t think this is going to happen, it’s just daydreaming, but imagine if when the republican steal the election, the citizen’s response is a massive “NO taxation without representation” 2.0 “if you’re going to nullify my vote, I don’t owe you taxes.” It makes sense but we need a Thomas Paine or Jean Jacques Rousseau to promote it. It won’t happen because, if it could, it already would have. It is already a documented fact that congress’ legislative agenda is entirely beholden to big money, and basically none of the things The People want happen, unless Jeff Bezos and the Koch and Mercers want it to happen, also. Again, the fact that America went to war in Iraq, in spite of millions of people marching in protest worldwide, ought to tell anyone that the voice of The People has been deliberately muffled all along. The vote is just a rigamarole.
If the vote is just a rigamarole, when the republicans take over, things may not change much. The defense budget will continue to soar, and they will continue to fuck the economy up by handing out gifts to the rich. Womens’ and transpeople and people of color’s rights will return to about where they were in the 1950s, which is what they were from 1776 until the 1950s. There will be wars and the justification for them will be bullshit and they’ll be hidden from oversight by The People or Congress, like they already are. I guess that what I’m saying is we’re already pretty comfortable with a ridiculous level of fascist imperialism, why imagine that there will be an uprising if the fascism dial moves a few more ticks to the right? If The People were going to rise up, they would have risen up over the attack on Iraq.
Who gives a shit? The republicans and democrats have been gerrymandering and manipulating the US vote since the parties were formed. They fought a civil war over nullifying the election of Abraham Lincoln, because southerners didn’t like his domestic agenda. The republicans have leveraged financial, non-governmental, and foreign allies including Ukraine and Russia to acquire INFLUENCE and CONTROL US voting nation-wide. They’re just whining about their fantasies of Chinese control which Donald Trump tried to invite from Xi, so who cares? They don’t care – they’re just looking for an excuse to stop playing by the sham rules that are in place.
(6): you appear here to be recapitulating the final scene of Brazil.
If you look at a current political map of the world, there’s an awful lot of borders drawn as dotted lines. They’re all over the place. But an astonishing number of them appear to be around China.
*snork* It’s not like he’d need one…
Ah, but we do both like to continue squabbling about who’s going to be allowed to genocide all the fish in the Channel.
Hmm. You might not like US policy, I certainly don’t, but it can only get away with so much because it is the biggest, angriest gorilla on the mountain. It is however checked, just a little bit, by Russia and China. Who are checked, just a little bit, by the US. Now the US goes away? Don’t think for a second that one of those two won’t immediately take over and do it worse because they won’t even be pretending to be nice about it.
xohjoh2n@#1:
(6): you appear here to be recapitulating the final scene of Brazil.
I am convinced at this time that the movie was written by time-travelers from our future, who came back to try to warn us.
If you look at a current political map of the world, there’s an awful lot of borders drawn as dotted lines. They’re all over the place. But an astonishing number of them appear to be around China.
China has been like that for a very long time. If they were a cancer, they’re remarkably slow-growing, compared to the US, which is one of those wildly metastatic things that crops up everywhere and adapts and evolves faster than chemo.
China, more than Russia, is going to be consumed with problems because of global warming. Russia will probably just shrug off the deaths in the agricultural sector and expect its people to deal with privation – after all, that has been Russia’s general strategy for civil defense since the dark ages or before. China’s a bit more complicated – a lot of its important real estate is going to be submerged. While they have taken a very long time and been very methodical about assimilating everyone into Han culture, China could still experience some ethnic division. I think they’re going to be busy. And, even if they try to grow, China has never seemed to aspire to global empire (Cheng Ho’s treasure fleet is both a good example of why and why not)
It is however checked, just a little bit, by Russia and China. Who are checked, just a little bit, by the US. Now the US goes away? Don’t think for a second that one of those two won’t immediately take over and do it worse because they won’t even be pretending to be nice about it.
No question about that. I don’t think the US will go away – I think it’s going to incompetence itself into a rump empire, like the French and British did. The Romans did that, too, and cast a long shadow through history even after they were no longer the superpower they once were.
I guess I’m hoping for the proverbial “soft landing” for the US. The alternatives are, what? Global thermonuclear war or a vicious, fascistic, imperialist overlord? The US is really not a very nice colonial power, right now – if it fully spreads its wings and blossoms as a fascist overlord, it’s going to be really, really shitty for everyone, including about 10-15% of its own population.
Quite a grim prognosis there, but one that I mostly agree with. I don’t see any kind of mass uprising after the Republican takeover of the government because mostly in this country, the people are too comfortable and have too much to lose for anything like a general strike unless the new dictatorship makes life too uncomfortable for them and in general, I think they know how to keep the bread and circuses coming–they’ve been doing it for a long time now. If a few brave souls however, were to conduct an attack on government and corporate information systems as in the scenario you laid out, that could make life miserable enough to get the populace to take action.
Thinking about last January’s coup attempt, those insurrectionists definitely weren’t a mass of downtrodden people with their backs against the wall, as is stereotypically what you think of when there’s a massive revolt against the ruling class, but were it seems quite a lot of small business owners and middle class types–temporarily embarrassed millionaires if you will, who thought they weren’t getting a big enough slice of the pie because of all the immigrants and people of color were getting too much. That and all the nonsensical propaganda they’d been fed for years.
crivitz@#3:
those insurrectionists definitely weren’t a mass of downtrodden people with their backs against the wall, as is stereotypically what you think of when there’s a massive revolt against the ruling class
Like the Wall St coup plan, it was a revolt by the ruling class. Not really a revolt, just a “magnification of power by other means.”
[Edit: Let me expand on that a bit; part of my projection of America’s future is based on its past. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes – I forget who said that. The Wall St coup plot appears to me to be a reaction by the wealthy elites and corporate bigshots to the New Deal. The coup was hatched in 1933, and so was the new deal. Can’t you just picture today’s republicans looking at the labor unrest, union organizers, new deal, wobblies, and bonus army and see them thinking “let’s turn loose the cossacks on those moochers”? Remember that the federal government, after the Wall St coup failed to get traction, basically fought tooth and nail against itself because, god damn it, those freeloading poors were really getting ahead of themselves and refusing to know their place. Today’s “conservatives” are still butt-hurt about the first new deal, and congress is home to “deficit hawks” like Nancy Pelosi – “deficit hawk” meaning they’ll write any size check to the military and police but they’re going to start yelling about deficit spending and ‘entitlements’ as soon as someone suggests doing anything for anyone without working some debt-piling soul-crushing corporate job, first. You know, the kind of job Nancy Pelosi has never held in her life. The essence of “conservatism” is, it appears to me, they want to see other people suffer things that they have never suffered, themselves, while they tell themselves that they are self-made hard-working and humble. Basically, they are chanting aloud Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth which Gordon Gekko abbreviated as “Greed is good.”]
can you even not pay taxes there? the way Australia is set up taxes are automatically done from businesses paying salaries, so maybe some of the small businesses could withhold tax, but the rest of us can’t.
dangerousbeans@#5:
can you even not pay taxes there?
Donald Trump didn’t.
OK, that’s the “snappy answers” version. A more reasoned version is that there are two ways to do it. One is to arrange so that no salary withholding is done. Most employers would not go along with that. But if you are a member of the investor class/self-employed you are responsible for paying in your taxes. When I was a consultant, I had to send in quarterly payments (around $40,00/quarter) and then file a return justifying that the government give me most, or a big chunk of that back. Someone who lives off rent/capital gains doesn’t have anyone looking over their shoulder: they send in whatever they think they can get away with and then hope the IRS doesn’t challenge it. My accountant used to have one client who ran a highly profitable business who’d wait until 2 years and 10 months from when he filed his taxes (there is a 3 year statute of limitations) then file a return saying “oops, please give me all my money back” and then he’d hunker down in the Bahamas and hope the IRS didn’t act before the statute of limitations ran out. Basically he never paid any taxes on the millions he made.
The other option is to do what Trump does: file a return that assesses a 100% return of whatever money the treasury managed to get its paws on. And here’s a funny fact that will help you figure out who the tax code was written for: the IRS is required to issue the requested refund without review. So, if they later want to question your return they have to schedule an appointment with your tax lawyer and arrive, hat in hand, to ask whether you can please explain your return? The system is configured to serve the wealthy. A normal person gets a demand letter that reads something like: “Your filing is wrong, you owe $2,900.00 plus $1,200 interest and penalties. Pay up or we’ll just take it out of your bank account or forclose on your house. By the way, our assumption is that we are right, so if you want to argue with us, you have to prove a negative. Have a great day.”
In 2016 I asked my accountant what he thought about my just refusing to pay taxes (on the “no taxation without representation” principle because the electoral college had ignored the popular vote) He said, “first, you have to find another accountant.”
A tax revolt would not work, exactly, because the federal government would just crack open the money-valve, but doing that in the context of a tax revolt would almost certainly result in the devaluation of the US dollar, and a financial death-spiral: exactly what the ruling elite are afraid of. [Edit: As Muad-dib said, “the power to destroy something is the power to control it.” It seems funny to me that the republicans keep playing debt ceiling russian roulette – maybe we should give them a fistful of fucking economic collapse, because they sure as hell are gambling it’ll never happen. A general strike would do that, too. A 13,000 point drop in the dow would wake the motherfuckers up.]
For some time now I’ve been of the opinion that the only hope humanity has left is for someone to actually crack the general AI problem in such a way that the resulting machine can and does take over everything. Hell of a slim hope, but it’s really all we’ve got.
those insurrectionists definitely weren’t a mass of downtrodden people with their backs against the wall, as is stereotypically what you think of when there’s a massive revolt against the ruling class
Generally, revolutions are led by middle or upper class dissidents though massive demos or riots (the massacre of Les Cent-Suisse at Versailles or the St. Petersburg riots in 1917) may give the opening needed. Check out the Bolshevik leadership—the only thing the leadership of the workers party lacked was a worker member..
If Putin is smart and survives, he’d do well to establish a Warsaw Pact 2.0 and start getting the framework for that in place right now.
I have never read the agreement but the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a “Eurasian political, economic, and security alliance” has been in existance for some time. I believe Iran just became a full member.
Putin is probably a wee bit ahead of the USA.
There seems to be an increase in the amount of labour action happening over there, so maybe there’ll be some general strikes. the oligarchs aren’t going to approve, but it seems like there are a lot of people over there with not much to lose.
jrkrideau@#8:
Check out the Bolshevik leadership—the only thing the leadership of the workers party lacked was a worker member..
I don’t recall where I read it, but someone pointed out that the Mark Meadows powerpoints were basically right out of the bolshevik playbook. I’m not sure if I believe that; I’m not familiar enough with bolshevism (file under: political assholes) that would certainly be ironic and would fit the republicans’ tendency to project their desires and insecurities on others.