On Chickens Returning to the Roost
On American Oligarchy, Class Politics and Media Dishonesty
It’s an understatement to say that Donald Trump’s legacy has been a train wreck. Trump’s mantra was to “Make America Great Again” and his term is ending with a divided America, a country that is flailing under the effects of COVID-19 led by a government that failed to act on issues of social urgency and public health. Since Trump won the White House on a promise to make the lives of the working class better, we have seen quite the opposite over the past four years.
While Joe Biden makes the promise to heal America, the problems go far deeper than plastic political rhetoric. Matt Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security advisor, is reported to have resigned in protest to this week’s protests. Republicans and Democrats alike have denounced Wednesday’s violence with Mitch McConnell stating, “We will not bow to lawlessness or intimidation.” Twitter and Facebook suspended Trump’s accounts on Wednesday, five people are dead and many questions remain as to why the policing of the Capitol was inadequate. But this is not the end of the story. It’s just the beginning.
A broad interpretation of this week’s actions at the Capitol is that the American working class is apparently ready to fight for a better future than they currently have. However, this particular group of Trump supporters, to include in their midst a group of lawless thugs who opted for violence over a lie, mistakenly believed that Trump has anything to offer them in the eleventh hour. (Spoiler alert: Trump has nothing to offer the working class beyond MAGA hats.) Given Wednesday’s protest, Trump has burned what little legacy he had hoped to build and it is almost certain that he will now go down as one of the worse presidents in American history, joining the ranks of James Buchanan, a president who made pro-slavery policy a central tenet of his administration and who boasted, ahead of the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) ruling, that slavery would be “speedily and finally” resolved by Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision. This Supreme Court ruling two days after Buchanan’s presidency began effectively defined African Americans as subhuman non-citizens who should have no rights. Ultimately, Trump will sit in good company historically alongside Buchanan with a twist—Trump will be remembered as the president who used words to plump up his reputation for which his actions simply did not match.
So, let’s bookmark Trump since the focus on this man’s presidency has obfuscated the larger problems that the United States of America has faced for decades and will continue to confront unless words are met with actions. As I have stated previously, Trump was never the problem—he was the symptom of something much deeper. So too can this sentiment express the actions on the Capitol this week.
But let’s examine why the Capitol protests matter here because this building is a symbol of our country’s democratic processes—it’s the meeting place of the United States Congress and the seat of the legislative branch of the U.S. federal government. The Capitol is also within a brisk 30-minute walk of the White House across which one will necessarily traverse our country’s National Gallery and FBI Headquarters. The Capitol is that stop on the trajectory between the head of state and the Congress confirming that ours is not a country of a single leader, but is of the people. Wednesday, some of the people chose to defile this historic and national symbol and this action was met with the most psychotic of hyperbole. People were calling this “domestic terrorism”, a threat equal to that of 9/11 and sedition. The media parroted this hyperbole.
While we can express outrage or disdain for Wednesday’s actions, our task now needs to be that of understanding why this happened. That a few of the protestors were violent, that many sheepishly followed the queue into the Capitol without any clear plan, all this is testament that this was not the “coup” that Democrat lackeys are germinating in the neoliberal press. Indeed, this protest, destruction and bad costumes aside, was very much media-driven by both the liberal and right-wing press which seems, together with Big Tech, pushing for the creation of permissible monolithic media messages. Anything else, and well, to use the expression of our POTUS, “You’re fired.” At least this is the reality that many of Wednesday’s protestors are experiencing as their identities are being leaked. (Note to the wise: Before breaking into federal buildings, remove your employee badge.)
While it might be tempting to ignore the protestors whose voices are being dismissed by major media as an “insurrection” or by the wokerati as having “white privilege,” our ethical duty here lies in addressing the dissent of these voices from these protestors who largely compose the working class. Confederate flags, mullets and crass vandalism aside, make no mistake that the storming of the Capitol was effected by disillusioned members of the working class who sought out a symbolic victory through trespassing and destroying a national symbol. And this leaves us with a black hole in the centre of American political discourse today because we have witnessed a class of individuals whose own party did not answer to their struggle, to their needs. And now the million-dollar question: Given that Trump has failed to make America “great” or even to address working-class issues through necessary changes in policy, who will take up this challenge?
For if the Democrat party has had anything to offer to the working class, they have mysteriously shelved this plan alongside Trump’s MAGA plan. While the Democrats believe themselves to be the benevolent party for the working class and poor, they too have fully turned their back on the working class while paradoxically having supported similar political actions to this week’s Capitol protest. Only the “insurrections” that the Democrats have historically supported never took place on US soil. British scholar, Paul Cockshott, refers to the Democrat’s and mainstream media’s encouragement of similar political strategies in recent years, eloquently writing on Facebook:
Good to see chickens return to the roost. For a decade or more the US has made a practice of claiming that any election where an anti-US president wins the election was fraudulent. The colour revolution scenario is then supposed to go from demonstrations to storming the assembly. We saw this in Ukraine, Bolivia, Venezuela. Biden and the US establishment had no compunction at cheering on those who invaded the Assembly in Ukraine, had no compunction in hailing losers as winners in Venezuela and Bolivia. But if you practice that abroad, do not be surprised if it comes home.
Turn to Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests where anti-government protestors stormed the country’s government buildings eventually toppling Russian-backed President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. This action was heartily supported by then Vice-President Joe Biden who stated the following year, “[T]hat flame of hope was reignited by thousands of brave Ukrainians, some of you in this room, storming the Maidan, demanding a Revolution of Dignity. The world was transfixed. This time they were not going to be denied the future that so many of your country have longed for, for so long.” Biden’s words of support were not lost on Russia’s deputy U.N. Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy who posted on Twitter, “Quite Maidan-style pictures are coming from DC,” adding, “Some of my friends ask whether someone will distribute crackers to the protesters to echo the Victoria Nuland stunt,” referring to the 2013 visit to the Ukraine by then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Nuland who offered food to protesters.
In discussions with The Nation in 2018, Stephen F. Cohen speaks of the US support for the Maidan protests, “As anyone who followed the unfolding of the crisis knows, prominent members of US officialdom—from the State Department, Congress, and the Obama administration—were persistently present throughout the Maidan events, publicly and privately urging a showdown with Yanukovych, the constitutionally elected president.” Cohen goes on to relate the various narratives that created the “myth of Maidan” to include his analysis of NATO expansion eastward towards Ukraine, US interventionism and the EU’s “partnership agreements” which were extended to former eastern bloc nations. Cohen notes that the Democrat establishment was not alone in its support for insurrection in the region, noting the liberal media similarly egged on the Euromaiden protests elaborating the other side of the Russiagate myth from within Ukraine. “Anybody who watched the TV...knows it wasn’t democratic,” referring to the snipers sent by Right Sector, a quasi-fascist group, which killed between 80 and 90 people on the streets. These murders created the semblance of an “insurrection” to advance the brokering of an agreement which forced Yanukovych to form a coalition government while moving for early elections. The next day Yanukovych was gone which is why many in Ukraine today view his removal as a US-sponsored coup. This in addition to the fact that in 2013 President Obama made Biden the proconsul of Ukraine while Hunter Biden joined the board of the largest private company in the Ukraine, Burisma. All this was known three years ago, yet somehow the protests this week at the Capitol are now suddenly an “insurrection”?
This week Politico announced that Victoria Nuland, instrumental in aiding the coup in Ukraine, will be nominated for the role of Under Secretary for Political Affairs. (For those of you confused as to what a coup means, this week’s mob was nowhere near a coup.) If this comes to be, then this will mean that President-elect Biden has chosen yet another neoconservative war hawk for key roles in his administration that was already being built up from the moment Biden and his cronies effectively laundered what Alex Christoforou estimates to be approximately $45 billion in funds that the US-assisted coup pillaged through energy deals with Burisma, IMF loans to Ukraine and various forms of indebtedness while overthrowing the democratically elected government. The liberal media gave this entire story a pass.
Here Matt Taibbi details some of what happened in Ukraine:
Poroshenko was telling Joe Biden that in order to get an American aid package, he’d gone beyond even what the I.M.F. asked for and raised energy prices for ordinary Ukrainians not by 75%, but by 100%, as well as taking steps to curtail subsidized medicine prices.
This is clearly newsworthy, but the few outlets like the Washington Post that even bothered to report on these tapes only did so to convey their distaste for the source, and to relay news that the Biden camp believed it all to be “a continuation of a long-standing Russian effort to hurt the former vice president.”
Press outlets began some time ago to describe such material as “misinformation” or “disinformation,” even though items like the Derkach tapes (or the leaked calls between State Department officials Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who should be Ukraine’s interim leader after the Euromaidan revolution) are neither. By definition, both terms normally require an element of “false information.”
In one recent AP story, reporters spent more time asking Twitter and Facebook why they’d allowed material from the Derkach tapes to be spread than they did weighing the truth of the information in the tapes.
So the scandal last fall about the New York Post Hunter Biden story was the tip of an immense iceberg which reaches back to the scandal involving oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, owner of PrivatBank, $4.51 billion in IMF funds being poured into the National Bank of Ukraine, $1.8 billion of aid missing and “funneled to the outposts of the international finance galaxy” as Alexander Cockburn reported back in 2015.
What we learn from this week’s protests is not only that the chickens have come home to roost, but that the US government and major media have been complicit in misrepresenting our government’s meddling in plain site with the government of Ukraine which resulted in the laundering of $1.8 billion with the working-class Ukrainians being handed the bill for these US-backed shenanigans.
Given the United States’ long heritage of imperial control of much of the planet’s wealth, ecological destruction and political decisions, Wednesday’s mobs at the Capitol building should hardly come as a surprise to Americans on the left or the right. In recent history, Americans have shown little resistance to the imperial efforts of the US abroad—from the wars in Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the dozens of countries where the US-sponsored covert wars, supported death squads, cosied up to dictators, forced privatisation of public utilities, and a list that would be the size of both volumes of the OED.
It is time that we stand up to the imperialists who have now decided that they don’t need the working class any longer. The mission has been accomplished for the elite of the US war machine which is now centred between the heads of the weapons industry and Big Tech. And now with major media cheering on the Democratic party sycophants who are calling this week’s protest in DC a “coup” and “insurrection” we are seeing yet another stage of this elaborate play by those in power to shut down free speech and movement. The more that people echo the lie that this weeks action were a “coup” or an “overthrow” of the US government, the more they empower the government and Big Tech to control who is speaking, what is being said, and where these words are being emitted. As Allan Nairn stated on Democracy Now this week, “It’s going to be harder for movements legally, for movements like the Black Lives movement, for example, to go out on the streets again. There are sure to be more restrictions. And there are sure to be more restrictions on speech, through the newly empowered corporate censors, like Facebook and Twitter and so on, and perhaps through the government itself.” And it’s already happening as Twitter has now permanently suspended Trump’s account yesterday.
So, dear readers, let’s move against major media that has set up the lie that this week’s protest composed of Jamiroquai lookalikes was an “insurrection.” For anyone who watched the footage of the protestors inside the Capitol, most of these individuals were more concerned with taking selfies than committing to any form of insurrection. There remain many questions that must be answered about the paucity of police presence, why BLM supporter, John Sullivan, who last year called for a violent left-wing revolution was inside the Capitol building (ostensibly “to film” the events) and why the media is posing this protest and storming of the Capitol as an “attempted coup.”
What is plain to the eye is that the 90 people who illegally stormed the Capitol are part of the right-of-centre working class and they are angry, even if misguided in their actions, idiotically believing that trespassing and vandalism would promote their cause. The real question is why can’t the working class on both sides of the aisle drop the pretence of the two-party charade and instead join forces to demand a future POTUS that will not sponsor violent coups overseas that end up uniquely protecting the interests of the elite while disenfranchising the poor.
Let’s not pretend that idiotic selfie flash mobs inside the Capitol are homegrown insurrections. This is what Biden and Big Tech want you to parrot, just as G.W. Bush counted on Americans’ fear of the 19 terrorists to shut down our civil rights in the years following 9/11. The sad truth about Wednesday’s protest was all that was missing was the Hamburglar and the rest of the Village People. Let’s shut down the lies and look for answers as we demand transparency from the government while pushing back on major media and Big Tech which are now, in the aftermath of Wednesday, shit stirring for clicks.