The people who need to a good shit-kicking are most politicians, CEOs, and senior civilians.
Well, and cops, obviously.
And they need to know the cops can’t protect them from another one.
The President, the mayor of New York, the Governor of New York, almost everyone who works for the Federal Reserve, all senior Wall Street Executives, every senior executive at Google and Facebook, every executive at a private equity firm is on that list. (Even if they are personally “good,” they work to make evil more powerful.)
Yeah, this is the Rubicon, shit we’re not supposed to actually say. Powerful people routinely arrange to have weak people (98 percent of the population) killed, beaten, impoverished, and effectively enslaved by debt and fear of debt.
But the weak are told that if they resist all the things done to them under the threat of violence (and it’s all under the threat of violence), they must never be violent.
It’s the logic of the bully, of the coward: “My victims must not fight back, they must lie there and take their beating, and not resist. My violence is legitimate because I am powerful, but the weak must not use violence. If they do, we’ll escalate and escalate and escalate. We won’t just kill them, we’ll take everything, rape and torture; lock them up for years, deny them healthcare. There is nothing we will not do to those who resist us.”
So, for your own sake, understand in your bones that the violence your lords and masters (and they are your masters, and you are their slaves) do is legitimate, and that you have no right to resist.
If you do resist, and, worse, if you dare be violent, you are a bad slave, a bad peasant. Violence is reserved for the master class and their enforcers; it is something that they have the right to do. It is good when they do it, and it is bad when you do it.
This is a social fact: It is true because it is made true.
Be violent to the master class or their lackeys and the penalties are huge. It’s better to just sit there, and become homeless, go into debt, spend your entire life at a job you hate, doing what a petty tyrant tells you to, until you’re too old to work.
Because as bad as all those things are, they are better than what they’ll do to you if you really fight; if you do to them what they give themselves the right to do to you.
The only time you have the right to be violent is if you are violent against their enemies: domestic or foreign. Angry? Full of hate? You can get it out. Put on a uniform, or just play vigilante against a mutual enemy.
But never, ever, strike at the actual masters. The lords. The people making your life hell.
Because they control violence, they control money, and they will hurt you. If somehow they can’t get you under the rules, well, they’ll hunt you down like a dog, like they did the Ferguson protesters, killing them over years.
Who gets to use violence is a social fact.
You don’t.
The people who rule your life and make it hell do.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Stirling S Newberry
It is why “murder” is different from “assassination.”
Eric Anderson
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Obama was a constitutional scholar. He knew the power of hopie changie lies. A mask for the evil contained in the small print.
Ché Pasa
A few months ago, I said I thought June or July would be the inflection point, the point of no return and that whatever our future would be, it would be determined then.
And here we are. Signs are pretty ominous, both obviously and behind the show.
In some places, police violence is wildly out of control — NYC, Louisville, at times in DC and LA, Minneapolis, Seattle, etc. The uprising from below is not dying down, however. Numbers of people in the streets keep growing, defiance of curfews spreads, “peaceful protest” the mantra. Whoever has been rioting, looting and destroying — from their multi-hundred thousand dollar cars, it would seem — have been largely pushed aside, outed, rejected. This does not meant there won’t be further looting. People are growing hungrier, and the surpluses we’re living on won’t last forever.
The White House is being fortified more than it’s been since I don’t know when. Even cowardly Bush, Jr. didn’t ring fence it quite as much as Trump is doing… Cheney blasted a bunker under the Vice-President’s house at the Naval Observatory, and there’s long been a sub-bunker under the White House, but now what seem to be mercenary troops (nobody will say who they are or what service they belong to) are manning an expanding perimeter around the White House and various locations around DC. This is in prep for something. You know it is.
More and more high placed voices are disputing the president’s authority. The photo-op clearances of protesters the other day seem to have catalyzed the kind of internal resistance that actually means something. How it will play out, we don’t know and can’t know.
Mad Dog Mattis’s statement about it all looked to me like he positioning himself as possible (temporary) military caudillo until things settle down. But there are others. Esper is one of them, though he seems more cowardly than even Trump.
While some police forces are definitely out of control and cannot handle the tension, others are trying to demonstrate at least some solidarity with the masses, and when push comes to shove, they may actually prove their solidarity.
The world looks on in bemused horror. Not much they can do about it but hope for the best — eventually. I think Justin Trudeau’s extended “uhhhhhh” pretty much summed it up.
Z
The NYC cops are getting brutal partly because they’re getting pissy about being forced to work OT so they’re trying to stomp out the protest to get some time off.
The thing is though is that the system can’t process and jail all these protestors and keep them in jail for any amount of time so even if things let up a bit from the cops’ brutality, the minute they get days off and their forces thin, the protests will rage again. They’ve jailed about 2K protestors, but the pool of protestors ranks in the hundreds of thousands.
There is a lot of bad blood between NYC’s black community due to Mikey B’s rein as mayor. A ton of bad blood from that financial oligarchic bastard’s stop-and-frisk program and his remarks about minorities. And also between the Occupy movement and Mikey B.
And then there is COVID out there and if that starts working its way through the police stations they could really find themselves in a very bad position. And I don’t think those cops will get much sympathy from the blue collar healthcare workers in NYC either, especially with the minority ones.
Z
Z
Ché,
The military forces in DC are primarily there to prevent the Russians from parrot-trooping protestors into the nation’s capitol.
I don’t know much about Russia and I’m just amazed that they have such a large African-Russian population. I never would have thought it.
Z
S Brennan
Assange, Julian: Did more to upset the status quo than anybody burning down a Target store…no record of violence, his only crime? Revealing crimes; of telling truth to power.
Julian Assange wastes away, hidden yet, tortured for all to see
deprived of all human experience and yet
many here did not find him “their cup of tea”
Assange violated their esthetic and for that
he can never be free
Dan
Bureau of Prison people at the White House. To say these guys aren’t exactly Army Rangers or Navy Seals would be an understatement. Still, stupid and out of shape or not, heavily-armed goons congregating at the White House, refusing to identify themselves…
krake
It should go without saying that if you want to speak to the abuse that is power that as a first condition you don’t abuse power. Like doing the bidding of polonium-distributing autarchs. Or raping people.
krake
Plan before you act. Know what you want, what you can live with, and what you have the strength to lose. Nietzsche (no right-winger, that blind seer) was right: “…No more than anarchists harm princes. Only because the latter are shot at do they once more sit securely on their thrones.”
Z
Brennan,
I got a ton of respect for Assange. We might not know half the shit we do without him. He provided us insight into our rulers’ corruption and cruelty which has led to mass outrage at being ruled by these assh*les.
He’s in my thoughts, but he’s not here. I wish the Londoners would protest more for his release, but I’d imagine they have plenty already.
But I agree that he is out of mind too much, especially considering all his sacrifices and his persecution. It’s sad that he is whittling away in jail while this movement that he seeded in some respects is raging outside his bars.
Z
Z
Some of the worst people of the U.S. right have a mindset like this:
– If the left doesn’t do anything they laugh at them and basically call them sissies
– If the left fights back then they call them unreasonable and dangerous
It’s a bully/coward syndrome: push around whomever you can and then cry to the authorities for help when people fight back
Z
scruff
From Derrick Jensen’s Endgame
Some related points:
Jan Wiklund
I suppose that violence may be justified if it succeeds, otherwise not. If the only result is that one gets the worst of it it’s just hypocrisy to advocate it.
Americans have (yes, I know that I am generalizing) a confounded habit to believe in redemption through violence. I guess this is because their fucking history – being colonizers of other peoples’ land. But violence only succeed if one has more of the means of violence than one’s adversary. And one seldom has – unless one belongs to the 1%.
Historically a much more efficient method is the strike. Strikes may imply violence, but the most successful strike in the US history – the 30s sit-downs – used very little of it. They used class-based solidarity that once even disarmed the police; after all, policemen are also underclass people that may sometimes, when conditions are favourable, solidarize with the 99%.
Z
In regards to the NYC cops, I don’t live in the city but I’d imagine that they have a fair percentage of black cops, it’s probably mandated to some extent, maybe 10 to 15% I’d imagine.
I don’t recall seeing any videos that have shown a black cop beating on a protestor in NYC. Now I’m sure it has happened, but if you were a black cop would you want to fight against a movement that’s sticking up for your own people? Would you want that on video for your neighbors and friends to see? I doubt it.
It’s just a guess based upon anecdotal evidence, but I’d imagine that there is a lot of racial dissent brewing within the NYC police department right now. And that’s probably not the only police department it is happening in.
Z
someofparts
I remember being so confused when my wealthy friends would ask me about being afraid of terrorists, by which they meant the kind who hijack airplanes. I always felt that my entire life was already dominated by terrorists in private equity, abetted of course by the self-serving greed and deliberate ignorance of my wealthy friends.
Z
You can write off most of the U.S. professional class, particularly the white professional class, they’ll be of no help whatsoever to any positive change, the vast majority of them. They’ve been bought off with stock certificates.
Z
krake
Scruff,
Weird, I just dug this out for a reread. It’s sitting atop y Gasset’s “Revolt of the Masses”. I haven’t opened it yet. The quote is from Volume 1 or 2? (Been years since I’ve read it. Same impact as “A Sideways Look at Time”, but I got turned off by a Jensen interview where he went deep-eco and prim.)
I have 1. Would you recommend 2?
steeleweed
Che: The new Praetorian Guard consists of Bureau of Prisons personnel under Barr’s control – no insignia, no name tags.
Z
Wouldn’t be too surprised if Blackwater might be among those unmarked DC “defense” forces.
Tinpot Trump might have figured it was time to call in the civilian slaughtering professionals.
Z
steeleweed
And isn\’t that the very definition of Government – the entity with the [self-declared] monopoly on violence? Has there ever existed a governing body that did not claim the right to commit violence? Given what\’s on our plate now, how much worse could full anarchy be?
krake
ICE and CBP have been deployed to provide support to Federal police, states and cities. But, mums the word on specifics.
“It would not be appropriate to disclose law enforcement operational specifics which could jeopardize operational security,” CBP spokesperson Stephanie Malin said in a statement.
Z
I don’t think Trump would be that reckless though to bring in Blackwater. If something happened involving them, like a civilian fatality, he could find himself being the first president thrown into jail.
Having companies like Blackwater in the U.S. is another blowback from the Iraq War, in addition to all the used military equipment that the police departments now have from it.
One million, primarily innocent, Iraqis dead and the only accountability that came from that war involved some lower level military personnel who were dumb enough to take torture photos.
Z
Mark Pontin
Z wrote: “Wouldn’t be too surprised if Blackwater might be among those unmarked DC “defense” forces.”
That was my first speculation, too. But you should know that Blackwater has rebranded as Xe (in 2009) and yet again (in 2011), hilariously, as Academi (not be confused with the similarly-named literary agency) —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi
Also, the company has expanded and diversified its offerings and services —
https://www.academi.com/pages/training/individual-courses/academi-experience
“The ACADEMI Executive Experience is an unmatched teambuilding event that brings your organization to ACADEMI’s 7,000-acre flagship facility in Moyock, North Carolina. Your team will go behind the scenes and experience the world of elite training with veteran U.S. Special Operations Forces and U.S. Law Enforcement professionals. These opportunities are tailored to corporate & executive staffs.”
Since we were talking about who gets to be violent, right?
Mark Pontin
Z wrote: “I don’t think Trump would be that reckless though to bring in Blackwater.”
Come on. Trump is *absolutely* that recklessly stupid.
However, what he also is a cheap crook and he’d have to pay for mercs on his own dime, because there’s no way he could rationalize getting that paid for out of the U.S. budget.
(Unlike the excessive golf cart rental rates that the U.S. Secret Service has to pay at Trump properties so their agents on the presidential security detail can follow him around.)
So the probability is that those unnamed folks are not mercs. Unless of course Trump is getting paranoid about the U.S. military, who do not like him.
Doesn’t that conjure up an amusing scenario — a final firefight on the grounds of the White House between U.S. Special Forces and mercs defending Trump in his bunker?
Z
Sounds like Blackwater is now running boot camps for fascists, under a different logo.
Z
S Brennan
Children, how one sided your memory is:
Obama White House Coordinated Occupy Wall Street crackdown while D’s/”liberals”/Progressives, at best, stood silent while most cheered Obama on! Who can forget EZ-rah Klein celebrated the moment at WaPo? But you can’t remember that can you? Fair enough, let me crank-up the WABAC Machine.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/14/did-the-white-house-direct-the-police-crackdown-on-occupy/
krake
Brennan,
Maybe your error is you accept the corporate narrative that people who work for competing corporate outfits are “leftist”?
Most of us who identify as actual leftists – and this will include a certain percentage of suburban “progressives” who otherwise cannot be counted on to see past electoralism – do not consider the Washington Post or Barack Obama to be anything but adversaries.
What Obama may totemize for you he most certainly does not for us. Like Assange, or the Vox boys, or MSNBCs parade of national security Democrats, they are all merely to be expected. Gatekeepers and functionaries – in the older idiom: running dogs.
As for Occupy, it was doomed. Doomed by its structure. Doomed by geography, besting in the twin centers of late-stage capitalism of the Bay Area and NYC, as it did. Doomed to a formalist symbolism, trapped by its ties to the mediated Spectacle; doomed to be consumed, emptied of content, re-animated as the husk of a memory without history.
krake
*nesting
Z
Mark,
You’re probably right.
Trump twittered while Rome burned …
Z
Ché Pasa
So I saw the part of Bill Barr’s news conference this afternoon in which he said that he’d called in Bureau of Prisons SORT “operators” to defend the president from the mob in DC, and because they don’t wear identifying marks/name plates in their ordinary assignments in the prison system, they don’t do so on the streets of DC, and they probably wouldn’t want to be identified anyway, mumble, mumble.
SORT for those who don’t know, is a nasty bunch of thugs purpose organized and put to work to keep federal prisoners and detainees in line. With whatever force they deem necessary.
As pointed out by a number of folks above, they aren’t the only federal officers Barr has brought into DC to make a show of force. Some are fiercely loyal to the person of the president. Others, especially National Guard troops, not so much.
I would also not discount the presence of mercs paid from taxpayer dollars. We’ve seen examples of just how fungible federal dollars are no matter what they’re appropriated for. The regime needs/must have loyalists above all. If they have to pay private “security” companies to get them, they’ll do it.
On the other hand, even paid loyalists might turn.
Z
It’s reached another depth of nastiness in NYC.
Apparently, a judge ruled that they can hold protestors in jail for over 24 hours without charging them and those jails are probably crowded COVID dens at this point.
These protestors have shown a ton of heart. Frontline heroes against fascism.
Z
Zachary Smith
I really liked this way of presenting the issue. So long as your violence is approved by an Authority, it’s just fine. But “unofficial” violence also exists, and the Powers That Be have suddenly decided to Do Something About It.
To amend title 18, United States Code, to specify lynching as a deprivation of civil rights, and for other purposes.
Hurrah! After 230 odd years of its existence, the US of A is on the verge of getting Federal Legislation which makes lynching of citizens by other citizens illegal. But there is a fly in the ointment – an insect named Rand Paul.
Rand Paul Admits to Blocking Anti-Lynching Bill
Naturally the new anti-lynching law was written in Lawyer-Talk instead of plain English, so I worked to track down section 245, 247, and 249.
Federal Civil Rights Statutes
My impression of reading those “Sections’ is that this isn’t about Lynching, but rather another power grab. The “insect” Rand Paul may be a jerk, but on this issue I believe we need to slow down and do it right. What might that be? Another search I made was for “the history of american anti-lynching legislation” and that exact title was at the top of the duckduckgo search.
In 2020 dollars those fines would be about $85,000 and $170,000 today. But the part I like is the jail time for the Officials who allowed this to happen. Police, prosecutors, mayors, etc.
When Both Useless Parties get together to push a bill which focuses strictly on everybody but their precious selves, and with incredible flexibility for both police and prosecutors, I smell a rat. Just as the generally horrible Rand Paul does.
Saint Obama could have passed an anti-lynching law with real teeth if he had wanted to. He didn’t bother. There have been other times this could have easily happened. It didn’t. I think this is just some fancy Legal theater for the serfs. And to give even more power to the police and prosecutors.
Zachary Smith
Some headlines from a ‘humor’ site I found at another blog:
Sure, the Velociraptors Are Still On the Loose, But That’s No Reason Not to Reopen Jurassic Park
*
The Only Acceptable Form of Black Protest Is to Stand in This Field In Rural Nebraska and Scream Into the Void
*
The City of Minneapolis Releases Statements of Probable Cause for Other Notable Violent Incidents
From the last one:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net
scruff
@krake:
The principles are listed at the front of volumes one and two, and then defended throughout the chapters of – IIRC – both volumes. If you got turned off by Jensen going “deep-eco and prim”, I doubt you’d enjoy volume 2.
Stirling S Newberry
Protesting Past Curfew in New York City
Broken windows Broadway Greenwich
Harlem sparked emergency executive
Severe endangerment
thousands demonstrators curfew
clock struck eleven
rematerializing ghost presence
sustained confrontation
settled strategy ambulatory dynamic
documented violence perpetuated
nightfall convene.
your breath.
long journeys home
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/protesting-past-curfew-in-new-york-city
Ché Pasa
Whatever our rulers do on “our” behalf is theatre. Always. Nothing is quite as it is made out to be, and nothing amounts to what is claimed. It’s all a show.
I watched some of the Seattle mayor’s and police chief’s efforts to calm the restive rabble the other day. The police, of course, had been behaving badly, the way they have done for many a long year.
Mayor and police chief promised, the way they always do, to “look into” incidents of police badness, and “to take action” if they find anything “actionable.” Yes, yes, the videos were “disturbing” the way they always are, and “a thorough investigation” will be conducted to get to the bottom of what happened. Sure, right, whatever.
In other words, nothing will be done.
An ad hoc task force was formed though, to “discuss” problems with policing in Seattle. Oh joy. Leaders from the protest movement were appointed (by whom? heh) and met for hours with the mayor and police chief and by golly! You wouldn’t believe.
5 changes to Seattle policing will be instituted:
1) Police will no longer be allowed to cover their badge numbers the way they have been doing during crowd control operations for decades. (But then, who’s to say they’ll wear badges? Hmm?)
2) Curfew lifted. Yay, right?
3) Consent decree ordering police reforms in Seattle — which the police have repeatedly refused to observe — will continue in effect. (The city had been trying to have it canceled. But it hardly matters, since police refuse to reform.)
4) Maybe turning on police body cameras during crowd control operations. In discussion. Maybe. Has to do with surveillance operations by The State.
5) Review use of force policy, especially use of flash bangs and tear gas, and maybe require some form of communication (oh, like loudspeakers or something) when dispersal orders are issued.
Big changes, right?
No, not really.
And that’s the problem. Almost everywhere that big problems with policing are identified and documented, big promises are made and changes if any are at best minor, often nonexistent when the chips are down, and sometimes the changes lead to even worse behavior by police.
This is a game. They play this game all the time, and protesters and activists fall for it all the time.
Unless the police forces are defunded or disbanded, we the rabble are not going to see significant police reforms. The only way to get them to change in a positive direction is to make it impossible for them to continue their evil ways. And that’s not going to happen as long as the overclass is satisfied with their control operations of the underclass.
Which, for the most part, they are.
Stirling S Newberry
American Solitude
Visual bard
Maudlin projection
fortuitous poignance
isolated states
Symbolizing America
abstractly magnificent
E pluribus unum
Balkans sovereignties
conceivably atomized
inauspicious gestate
realist Symbolist
ruthlessly aesthetic
Nighthawks stylistic
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/08/edward-hopper-and-american-solitude
Stirling S Newberry
Cold as ice
Half life alcohol
Young teacher subject
Spirits Material evolution
Modern English
#bunkerboy in confession
authoritarian spectacle
tragic menacing absurd
Histoire de la sexualité
Lafayette Square
denounced desecration abomination.
Beaux-Arts residence
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/bunkerboys-photo-op-war
Stirling S Newberry
Why are we paying for this?
egregious unprovoked violence
practices governing rallying
financing surveillance punishment
prisons starves
distinctions stark
expansive expansive
Skewed incarceration
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/defund-police/612682/
Arthur
Look at the video from Buffalo. There can be no doubt that this will end in violence all of which will speed the breakup of the United States. Ten, twenty years from now the map will look very different. Glad I’m 65.
Hugh
Arthur, in Buffalo, 57 officers resigned from the special response unit “in disgust” at the treatment, not of the 78 year old they sent to the hospital, but their two fellow officers who were suspended. The mayor refused to fire the two officers saying they deserved due process and sort of blamed their victim: “He was told several times to leave.” And of course why do police officers (and those who can afford it) get due process while the rest of us don’t? Why weren’t the police as concerned about the due process of their victim?
The police are like the Bourbons. They learn nothing and forget nothing. All through this mass revulsion at their tactics they keep reverting to the same tactics that created this delegitimizing crisis for them. Every police officer in the country should look in the mirror everyday and say, “If I m not already part of the problem, I could be before the end of my next shift.” They don’t. And has anyone heard the head of a local police union who hasn’t sounded like they would be much more comfortable in 1930s Germany?
What is wrong with the police is that everything is wrong with the police. The police have shown over and over again they are completely incapable of reforming themselves. And while many of them and our PTB want it that way, the only way things are going to change is not to reform the police but to restructure them from zero.
someofparts
That’s almost as bad as this video from Austin.
Ché Pasa
“Not even in war zones…”
So far, a couple of hundred police attacks on journalists and media have been documented. Words like “Unprecedented,” “Unacceptable,” “Outrageous” have become as commonplace as the attacks themselves. Being deliberately singled out and attacked by police in the US is not unknown by the media, but “nothing like this” has ever happened to them before. That, of course, has had an affect on the way these protests have been covered. It helps positive coverage that there are so many white people among the protesters, but what has really affected the coverage is the fact that so many media workers have been shot at, tear gassed, pepper sprayed, bludgeoned, injured and arrested by police in an orgy of out of control crowd suppression operations nationwide that have almost completely overshadowed the relatively rare and targeted riots and looting by (supposed) demonstrators. Ooops. PR disaster, right?
T. Greg Doucette on the Twitter machine and others are compiling and documenting incidents of ongoing police brutality and misconduct on demonstrators and sometimes random civilians that is now into the hundreds and hundreds. Just in the last ten days. Shoving and then ignoring the bleeding old white man in Buffalo has triggered so much loathing of police in so many places that the typical response to the “resignation” of the 57 other mooks “controlling” the non-existent crowds on the plaza that night in Buffalo was greeted with a collective “good riddance.” None of them did anything on behalf of the codger. The ones who did, the two NG troops, should be hailed as heroes in the face of the black wall of indifference.
We’ve seen many instances of police ignoring the injuries they have caused, often until the victim dies, when every single one of them is trained in first aid and CPR. They will do nothing, sometimes not even calling an ambulance. But leaving the Buffalo elder to bleed out while the rest of the RoboPopo went on the hunt for more triggered something visceral in enough people to call for the end of this sort of crap everywhere.
In some places, the calls to defund and dismantle police departments is reaching a crescendo. Minneapolis is one of them.
Interesting that some of the most strident defenses of police misconduct are found where some of the worst abuses have taken place: New York City and Los Angeles especially, and both Garcetti and DeBlasio are under fierce criticism for not standing up for the people. They haven’t figured out yet that the policing paradigm has shifted. They seem like dinosaurs.
The paradigm has shifted, but we don’t know yet what’s to come.
krake
Che: “The paradigm has shifted, but we don’t know yet what’s to come.”
Our overlords are very, very well armed. They have a nightmarish public-private surveillance machine. Their bosses want real property, and the belief in the sanctity of property, protected in any way; for now, that includes not damaging too many foundational myths, or causing the kinds of injuries to social memory that lead to subversion of the myths. With the cops, that’s too late. You’re right, Che. The cops are full-on occupation forces, and they don’t know how to be anything else.
There is one caveat: well off and majority white communities have always been allowed to self-police. They see the cops very differently, because for them, the police they know are a subscription service. This divide will sharpen at this seam, esp. since it is already a wound marked by wealth, race, religion and suspicion.
Nevertheless, I think it’s a safe bet that a crackdown is coming. Too many states and too much of the degraded Junta di Buffoni have end-times, nationalist, racist, xenophobic, blood-crazy zealots in positions of real power. Barr is still pissed at Poppy Bush for not letting him run LA red with “gang” blood in 1992. Cotton is a clear indicator that the Trump Regime will get enough institutional support to claim domrdtic legitimacy. We already know the Geneva Concentiins, the ICC, the UN and NATO cannot and would not constrain them.
The question is, will the protestors have the discipline, the training, the fortitude, the emotional and behavioral solidarity to weather the winnowing that is coming?
Are they, in fact, revolutionary?
If not, it will be a grim, short, brutal and catastrophic future.
krake
krake stupid: domrdtic?
Ché Pasa
Doesn’t much matter at this point. The central government is imploding. Who’s in charge? No one. It’s not Barr, though he’s been testilying to the media as if he might could be. The whole lot of them are scrambling, most for the bunkers, some for the exits.
The protests are not Teh Revolution, far from it. But they do represent popular discontent and determination to force the rulers (no longer Our Rulers) to pay attention. They’ve got the attention. Where does it go from there? Who knows?
A major crackdown will come if the rightist mobs start mixing it up for real with the street protesters. We know which side the cops are on, but… the legitimacy problem for police is critical. Who do they serve? Who do they protect? Eh, themselves alone, no?
So. Watch the generals who are speaking out about the regime’s trashing of the Constitution. Whatever happens this summer will be driven by one or more of them. The protests will be tamed, many “justice”demands will be met, but the underlying economic and environmental issues and problems will remain.