Russiagate, poor substitute for real anti-Trump opposition

This 23 March 2019 video from the USA is called Russiagate Fizzles Out As Mueller Ends Investigation.

25 March 2019

On Friday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded his nearly two-year-long investigation, finding no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

“[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”, reads a section of the report excerpted by the Justice Department.

Allegations that Trump “colluded” with Russia have been at the center of the Democrats’ opposition to the Trump administration. Beginning with Paul Krugman’s declaration in a July 22, 2016, New York Times op-ed that Trump was a “Siberian Candidate”, the Times, Washington Post and other news media carried hundreds of articles supposedly proving that Trump won the election through a nefarious conspiracy with Vladimir Putin.

But Mueller, the former FBI director whose investigation spanned over 600 days, and who, according to the Justice Department, issued “2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communication records… and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses”, could find no evidence of these claims.

The outcome of the investigation is a debacle for the Democrats and their associated media outlets, leaving the fascist Trump in a stronger political position. “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION”, Trump declared on Twitter. Now, as Trump intensifies his frontal assault on the social and democratic rights of the working class, he will have the political wind in his sails.

In the more than two years since Trump’s election, the danger posed by this administration to the working class has become abundantly clear. Trump has used emergency powers to allocate funds not appropriated by Congress for his wall on the US-Mexico border, a vast expansion of executive power directed at the suppression of all opposition. The administration has imprisoned tens of thousands of immigrant children in concentration camps, in what human rights officials have called torture.

By Caitlin Johnstone in the USA, 22 March 2019:

I’ve only taken a fraction of the flack more high profile Russiagate skeptics like Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey have been getting for expressing doubt in the Gospel According to [NBC‘s Rachel] Maddow.

This 25 March 2019 video from the USA is called Rachel Maddow Reacts To Collapse Of Russiagate.

The insane, maniacal McCarthyite feeding frenzy that these people were plunged into by nonstop mass media propaganda drowned out the important voices who tried to argue that public energy was being sucked into Russia hysteria and used to manufacture support for dangerous cold war escalations with a nuclear superpower.

Just think what we could have done with that energy over the last two years. Think how much public support could have been poured into the sweeping progressive reforms called for by the Sanders movement, for example, instead of constant demands for more sanctions and nuclear posturing against Russia. Think how much more attention could have been drawn to Trump’s actual horrific policies like his facilitation of Saudi butchery in Yemen or his regime change agendas in Iran and Venezuela, his support for ecocide and military expansionism and the barbarism of Jair Bolsonaro …

Think how much more energy could have gone into beating back the Republicans in the midterms, reclaiming far more House seats and taking the Senate as well, gathering momentum for a presidential candidacy that truly threatens Trump.

The Andre Damon article continues:

In recent months, Trump has declared war on socialism, as part of his appeal to fascistic forces in the United States and internationally. His fascistic rhetoric has inspired neo-Nazi terrorists, such as Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 50 people in New Zealand this month; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in a synagogue last year; and James Alex Fields, who drove a car into anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville in 2017.

…

From the start, the Democrats’ opposition to Trump has centered on differences over foreign policy and how best to secure the predatory interests of American imperialism. Trump’s enemies within the ruling class demanded that the president take a more confrontational stance toward Russia and invest additional military resources in destabilizing and overthrowing the Syrian government.

The dispute, in other words, has been confined to an “intramural scrimmage” (as Obama put it after Trump’s election) between right-wing factions of the ruling elite. A major goal of the anti-Russian hysteria promoted by the Democrats has been to divert the broadly-felt popular hatred and hostility to Trump into a right-wing, pro-war framework, while serving to justify attacks on democratic rights.

The campaign surrounding allegations of Russian “meddling” has been used to legitimize internet censorship, leading to a massive search traffic decline to left-wing sites. It has also been used to demonize WikiLeaks and create the conditions for jailing whistleblower Chelsea Manning and escalating the persecution of Julian Assange.

At the same time, the Democrats have, on many fundamental issues, formed what amounts to a national unity government with Trump. They have rubber-stamped two massive annual increases to the US military budget, fully endorsing Trump’s plan to vastly expand the size of the US military in preparation for “great-power competition” with Russia and China.

In recent months, the Democrats have not only embraced Trump’s trade war against China but have criticized the White House for being insufficiently aggressive in the US campaign against Chinese telecommunications companies. And they have, almost without exception, backed Trump’s demand for regime change in Venezuela.

The Democrats’ main concern has been to avoid anything that would mobilize broader sections of the population. Thus, they have consistently opposed impeachment proceedings, insisting that everything must be subordinated to Mueller’s investigation. The Democrats are far more afraid of the growth of the class struggle than they are concerned about whatever factional differences they have with the present occupant of the White House.

All of this was determined by the class interests of the social forces represented by the Democrats, who speak for powerful sections of the financial oligarchy and military-intelligence apparatus, together with layers of the affluent upper middle class.

Trump is not an aberration. Rather, his administration expresses the most essential characteristics of the capitalist system. It is one symptom of a far deeper disease, of which his opponents within the political establishment are another.

The only social force capable of leading a real struggle against the Trump administration is the international working class. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in June 2017:

The working class confronts in Trump and his administration a vicious enemy, dedicated to the destruction of its democratic rights and a further lowering of its living standards… The working class must oppose this government and seek its removal. But this task must not be entrusted to Trump’s factional opponents in the ruling class. The working class cannot remain a bystander in the fight between Trump and the Democrats. Rather, it must develop its struggle against Trump under its own banner and with its own program.

The nearly two years since the publication of this statement has been marked by the growth of an international strike movement spanning nearly all countries and industries. Last year, more than half a million US workers went on strike, a 20-fold increase over 2017. Ten years after the 2008 financial crisis, and after decades of social inequality, the working class has emerged on the stage of global politics. The initial expressions of working class struggle will develop and expand in the course of this year.

The growth of the class struggle on a world scale must be transformed into a conscious, international and revolutionary movement against the capitalist system. This is the essential and urgent political task.

AOC: REMOVING ‘HORRIFIC’ TRUMP WON’T SOLVE DEEPER PROBLEMS Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called Trump “horrific,” but added that he was just a symptom of “much deeper problems” facing the nation. “He can stay, he can go. He can be impeached, or voted out in 2020”, she wrote on Twitter. “But removing Trump will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the online radicalization that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified + reanimated.” [HuffPost]