ABOVE IMAGE: DISINFO DISPENSED BY CBS. JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE FOR PSEUDO JOURNALIST SCOTT PELLEY. By BAR executive editor Glen Ford “We have entered an epoch in which everything that is said by the regime’s mouthpieces in the Democratic and Republican parties and the corporate media is, at root, a lie.” The U.S. ruling class faces a crisis of legitimacy, having no solution to any of the multiple crises of capitalism. Therefore, it is compelled to lie about virtually everything, and to call speakers of truth purveyors of “fake news.” The false narrative must be maintained because “the world is outgrowing the U.S.-led, rigged economic and political system that is the last vestige of half a millennium of colonialism and white supremacy.”When the narrative at the heart of a system of rule falls apart, when the flow of history runs counter to the story told by those in power, then we know the entire edifice is crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions. The political crisis arrives when the people sense that the prevailing order is built on a foundation of oppressions and lies. The rulers panic, scrambling to reweave the matrix of fables and myths that justify their waning supremacy. At such points in history, the truth is up for grabs — and a change of regime is in the offing. That’s why the current “fake news” scare-a-thon is not just some minor eruption of rage by Clintonites frustrated at their failure to ride Hillary’s Big Tent campaign into the White House. Clinton’s defeat was a shock to the ruling class, which was as unified as fractious ruling classes can get in their opposition to Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric against corporate “trade” deals and wholesale “regime change” — pillars of current imperial policy. Although the billionaire hotel magnate is surely no heretic to the capitalist faith, his verbal assaults on Wall Street’s relentless export of capital and jobs and his oft-stated desire for a more cooperative relationship with Russia provoked a pell-mell stampede of the ruling class, its national security attendants, and the corporate media into Hillary’s Unified Imperial Corporate War Party, which fully expected to assume office on January 20th. “The political crisis arrives when the people sense that the prevailing order is built on a foundation of oppressions and lies.” Trump, the campaigner, turns out to have been a Party-of-One, a fat-mouthed globule around whom the Republican White Man’s Party is reassembling itself along ever-resurgent, Dixie-based white nationalist lines: old-school American fascism. The reactionary composition of Trump’s cabinet and the raw viciousness of the Republican majorities in Congress ensure there will be no effective challenge to the whims of Capital from within the governing system, in the near term. But that doesn’t even begin to solve Capital’s problem with the populace, majorities of which disliked both candidates and overwhelmingly saw the country as going “in the wrong direction.” By Inauguration Day, Trump will have thoroughly discredited himself with those working class whites that hoped he would reverse the global corporate Race to the Bottom. Meanwhile, corporate Democrats (what other kind are there?) must try to manage the vast base of the party that is both terrified of Trump’s white nationalists and yearning for a “social democratic” alternative that, many are now convinced, would have been better able to ward off The Donald. The Democrats can, and will, rally the party’s base against the most overtly racist and sexist manifestations of the GOP’s agenda — a typical Democratic holding action that attempts to save the Republicans from doing even greater harm to the functioning of a modern state — but they are incapable of offering any real relief to the masses or a hopeful vision for the future, for the simple reason that capitalism in decline has nothing to offer the people. President Obama’s $4 trillion “Grand Bargain” with the Republicans represented a ruling class consensus on austerity-plus-unending-war — the duopoly’s vision of the future. |
White Supremacy, U.S. Exceptionalism and Capitalist Dogma are All “Fake News”
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“Telling it like it is”, Trump is not an angel of death all by himself but he is a sign of the times and the logical end result of a social philosophy that was baked into the North American experiment from the beginning. The last three centuries have been a constant re-ordering of societies that in the eyes of conservatives have been falling apart because of social remedies and from other allowances for a more civil existence for the general populace. From the rebellions such as the Commune in Paris to the White Rose in Germany and beyond, small groups… Read more »