The Politics of Impeachment

The Politics of Impeachment

By Donald Monaco
Information Clearing House
December 18, 2019

The decision by Democrats sitting on the House Judiciary
Committee to approve Articles of Impeachment that will
be affirmed in a full vote of the House of Representatives
just handed Donald Trump a probable victory in the 2020
election barring a sudden economic downturn, the eruption
of an unlikely war, or yet another revolt by a discontented
electorate.

The Democrats know that conviction in the Republican
controlled Senate is impossible.

Why pursue a dead end agenda?

From all appearances, the strategy seems to involve an attempt to
discredit Trump and increase the chances of defeating the orange
tinted billionaire in next year’s November election.

If that’s the calculation, the Democrats are grossly misguided
as Trump is America’s second Teflon President, the invariably
cheerful Ronald Reagan being the first.

Nothing sticks.

Reagan beat Iran Contra-gate.

Trump beat Russia-gate and will most certainly emerge unscathed
from the Ukraine-gate impeachment proceedings in the eyes of his
supporters thus lending credence to the fact that he is fighting the
swamp.

As for the popularity of Reagan and Trump, both opportunistic
politicians had a simple persistently optimistic ‘Make America
Great Again’ feel good message that played well amongst the
disenchanted masses.

Reagan won office amidst the economic stagflation and malaise
of the Carter years.

Trump won the White House after the prolonged recession of the
Bush and Obama eras.

The extended economic slump that propelled Trump to victory
occurred as a direct result of the financialization of America and
the subprime meltdown.

It should be well understood that Wall Street’s speculative frenzy
was financed by the deindustrialization of the United States,
a global flight of capital that cast millions of American workers
on the scrap heap of various rustbelt cities.

Both Reagan and Trump used rightwing populist rhetoric to
win their respective elections only to serve the interests of
the corporate plutocracy as exemplified by the enormous tax
cuts both gave to the upper class and the corporations they
own.

So why don’t the Democrats fight Trump politically and contest
his far right policies of upward wealth transfer; deregulation
and privatization of the economy; slashing of food stamp benefits;
environmental destruction; unending war; unqualified support for
apartheid Israel, the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian dictatorship;
and the imposition of deadly economic sanctions on Iran, North
Korea, and Venezuela?

Because they agree with the substance of these policy orientations
that’s why.

The Democrats pose no serious alternative to the Republicans
on matters of economic and geopolitical significance, the anti-
corporatist noises being made by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth
Warren notwithstanding.

Stripped of all pretenses, both parties advance an imperialist
agenda that protects the process of global capital accumulation
in America’s corporate neo-liberal empire.

Not a dime’s worth of difference on that score between the
two rival gangs that former independent Minnesota Governor
Jesse Ventura once insightfully referred to as, "Democrips"
and "Rebloodlicans."

The difference between the two parties in foreign policy is
fundamentally tactical and stylistic, not strategic or substantive.

In the realm of international relations both parties genuflect
before the alter of international law and national sovereignty
in word while violating their essence in deed by supporting the
peculiar notion of ‘American exceptionalism’.

Diplomatically, both political regimes employ a negotiating strategy
that conceals the clenched fist of mafia-like demands within a
velvet glove of duplicitous dialogue.

They make offers that cannot be refused.

The price of refusal is regime change.

For example, sequential coup d’etats were engineered by the CIA in
Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1965, Chile 1973, Haiti 1991,
Honduras 2009 and Bolivia 2019.

Militarily, the Republicans favor unilateralism, the Democrats
prefer multilateralism; the Republicans utilize pre-emptive
invasions, the Democrats employ humanitarian and responsibility
to protect (R2P) interventionist rationalizations.

Both parties backed the overarching strategic paradigms for global
hegemony after World War II, namely the ‘War on Communism’
and the more recent ‘War on Terrorism’.

Serial U.S. military interventions occurred in Korea 1950, Vietnam
1965, Dominican Republic 1965, Lebanon 1982, Panama 1983,
Iraq 1991, Somalia 1993, Yugoslavia 1994, Afghanistan 2001 and
Iraq 2003.

These interventions were led by Democratic and Republican
presidents alike.

The foregoing lists documenting covert and overt interventions
are partial, the criminal pattern is evident.

Domestically, the Republicans pose as the party of individualism
and self-reliance.

They serve the American plutocracy by hiding behind the pretense
of support for personal freedom and individual rights against a
corrupt government and media.

The Republicans appeal to religious fundamentalists who oppose
abortion, separation of church and state, and LGBT rights;
second amendment literalists who oppose gun-regulation;
free market fundamentalists who hate taxation of the rich,
corporate regulation, trade unions, immigration; big government
(meaning welfare for the poor); and unrestrained militarists.

They are openly the party of wealth, war and bigotry.

To court favor with their domestic voting base, Democrats have
adopted the veil of identity politics to disguise their support for
the American plutocracy.

They support greater social rights for women, the LGBT community,
immigrants, racial minorities and some modicum of a diminished
welfare state for the poor.

But the Democrats are caught in a web of contradictions because
of their support for the plutocratic minority and its predacious wars.

They claim to support American workers but signed the NAFTA
trade deal that destroyed millions of jobs in the heartland.

They pretend to support main street but deregulated the financial
industry by removing Glass Steagall and continuing the Bush bailout
of Wall street.

They opposed Trump’s ban on Muslim immigrants but supported
the invasion and bombing of the very countries that Muslim’s fled.

They support refugee status for Central American immigrants but
engineered a coup d’etat of the Honduran socialist President Zelaya
in 2009 causing a flood of migrants from a newly installed neo-
liberal regime that deeply impoverished country.

They support LGBT rights but are closely allied to Saudi Arabia,
a country that executes its gay subjects giving a new and hideous
meaning to the heterosexual dictatorship once so aptly described
by Christopher Isherwood.

No small wonder the majority of Americans view Washington as a
fetid swamp inhabited by creatures that need to be flushed down
the drain of history.

Electoral politics will never accomplish this ameliorative task
because of the deep divisions that animate a political terrain
in freedom’s land that has been systematically fractured over
the past several decades by both political parties on behalf of
the wealthy few at the expense of an increasingly despairing
many.

A revolutionary politics is needed to initiate the monumental
project of progressive social transformation.

But that brand of radical political ideology is sadly missing amongst
the ranks of Trump lovers and Trump haters in the age of
personality politics.

In the end, it may be useful to recall that ‘America has only one
political party, the party of private property consisting of two right
wings’, as the iconoclastic writer Gore Vidal never tired of
asserting.

Only when the property party and its benefactors are directly
confronted can genuine social change occur.

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