Best-Case Scenario: Impeachment Hearings Doom both Trump and Biden

What's clear is that Trump doesn't want the full whistle-blower complaint revealed. Trump is willing to provide a transcript of his telephone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who Trump will meet today at the United Nations, and he's willing to negotiate on the whistle blower providing testimony to congress, but as of now he is only considering the release of the complaint in redacted form. My guess is that there is a name or a description of an particular event that needs to be blacked out in order to prevent further inquiry.

When U.S. involvement in Ukraine is opened up to public scrutiny it is not going to play well for either party. Compared to Nixon scuttling peace talks with Vietnam in 1968, Trump's efforts to drum up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden seem insignificant. Trump sees impeachment as a "positive" for him. Newt Gingrich has declared “It is a win-win for Trump.” World Socialist Web Site encapsulates impeachment as

[A] significant escalation in the conflict within the US ruling elite between two right-wing factions: the Democrats, aligned with sections of the military-intelligence apparatus, and the Trump White House, which is turning to ever-more personalist and dictatorial forms of rule, based on fascistic appeals to the military, the border patrol and the police.

That being said, I think some good can come out impeachment hearings, depending on how much information is revealed about what the Obama administration was up to in Kiev. A best-case scenario is that hearings doom both Biden and Trump. It might be a bit of an outlier, but it could happen.

Trump Will Go the Way of Nixon

I've been telling people since before the inaugural that it can't be sustained, that Trump will flame out. My epiphany yesterday was that what we are are dealing with here is a convoluted backward reanimation of Nixon.

Nixon came to power after winning a squeaker in 1968 because the Democratic Party had imploded. A shrewd campaigner and a dirty tricks magician, Nixon colluded with the South Vietnamese to upend LBJ's peace initiative, dooming Humphrey's chances of victory; then, in 1972, thanks to Kevin Phillips' Southern Strategy and the assassination attempt and crippling of George Wallace, Nixon reaped the whirlwind and smoked McGovern, remaking the GOP as the party of the cracker working man.

After that '72 landslide there was Watergate, and it was the GOP's turn to wander in the wilderness. Until the Reagan messiah appeared to cleanse the body politic six years later.

But Trump, who fancies himself a Reagan, is no Reagan. Trump is a Nixon, a deluded, brooding, grudge junkie without any of Nixon's Deep State sophistication, on foreign policy, on the labyrinthine federal bureaucracy, etc. Rather than recording himself on mountains of magnetic audio tape, Trump mainlines himself into the global noosphere via Twitter.

Nixon's election was a river flowing backward against the zeitgeist. The country continued to get freakier as Nixon welcomed Billy Graham to the White House. The same thing is going to happen now. Western society is now solidly feminist and multicultural and pantheistic. The old time dysfunctional cracker monotheistic patriarchal order is broken beyond repair. It can appear from the corner of the eye, like a ghost encountered on the staircase of the Winchester Mystery House, as majority sentiment, but it is not. Trump's 45% approval rating is probably his maximum level of support. We'll see tomorrow when a Right-to-Life march stacks up against last week's women's march.

Trump is headed full speed for the cliff. If I had to bet I would say that his goading of the Dragon is an almost certain path to destruction. To understand why read "Trump Injects High Risk Into Relations With China" by Jane Perlez and Chris Buckley. Trump's scrapping of the TPP convinced the Chinese that he might do the same thing with Nixon's One China policy. The Chinese are now preparing for a trade war; they will target Boeing aircraft and U.S. agricultural bounty. The Trump administration has also been hinting at a blockade of the islands China has recently constructed in the South China Sea. According to Perlez and Buckley,

Mr. Trump has also threatened China on control of territory it claims in the South China Sea. The comments by Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, on Monday echoed those made by his nominee for secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, at his Senate confirmation hearing.

While Mr. Trump has not explained how he will keep China off islands where it has built airstrips and installed weapons, the comments by his appointees suggest the possibility of an American blockade. While Mr. Obama tried unsuccessfully to leverage American allies in the region to compel China to back down, Mr. Trump seems willing to abandon them and face China on his own.

That go-it-alone attitude has raised alarms at the Pentagon and among American Navy experts, who said such a blockade would be tantamount to war. The idea has also alarmed America’s allies.

Australia, Washington’s staunchest ally in the Asia Pacific region, would not participate in such a venture, its defense officials said, adding that a blockade could not be successful and could serve to persuade disenchanted American friends in the Asia Pacific to pivot toward China.

A scenario where the Pentagon refuses orders of the commander in chief and then works with allies in Congress to remove him is not far-fetched.

One thing is certain, the Masters of the Universe, the 0.1%, are nervous. "Elites Eying the Exits Signals America's Crisis," by Robert Johnson, was posted yesterday on Naked Capitalism:

Yves here. A former private equity partner mentioned the New Yorker story on 0.1% bunkering. He noticed how they focused on the private jet pilot as a point of vulnerability, that he might fly his family out and leave them stranded. So the approach is to assure him that his relatives get seats on the plane too.

Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

Interviewed as part of an extraordinary New Yorker investigation into growing anxiety among America’s corporate elite over the potential for anarchic social collapse, Institute President Robert Johnson saw his peers’ talk of bolt-holes in New Zealand as reflecting a deeper crisis.

Johnson told writer Evan Osnos of the mounting anxiety he had encountered among hedge-fund managers and other wealthy Americans he knew. “More and more were saying, ‘You’ve got to have a private plane,” Johnson said. “You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’ ”

Osnos writes: “By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, ‘I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.’ ”

Johnson bemoaned the lack of a “spirit of stewardship” and openness to more aggressively redistributive tax policy among the wealthy.

“Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he told the New Yorker. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.”

If anything, Osnos wrote, inequality is widening, noting recent statistics from the National Bureau of Economic Research that showed that while incomes for the top 1 percent of Americans have nearly tripled, half of the population was earning at the same level they did in 1980, comparing America’s wealth gap to that seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society,” Johnson said. “We’ve largely dismantled those things.”

He saw elite anxiety as an indicator America’s social crisis.

“Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson said. “What does that really tell us about our system? It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”

Trump is a manifestation of end times. When it becomes apparent that he is a lens magnifying end times, hastening their arrival, rather than punting them downfield for another decade or two, the GOP in Congress will abandon him. But by that time it will be too late.

Hillary's White House will be a Mausoleum for Neoliberalism

While it might be a stretch to label Hillary's "Get Out of Jail Free" card issued yesterday by FBI director James Comey a "Nixonian" moment, that is what it feels like to me. Certainly the powerless public is used to seeing the powerful skate. After all, how many times have we reminded ourselves that none of the "Masters of the Universe" behind the 2008 global economic meltdown spent time behind bars?

The difference here is that we were never asked to vote for Dick Fuld or Angelo Mozilo, at least not directly, as we are now being asked to vote for Hillary.

Nixon resigned in disgrace and was spared criminal prosecution, in what was almost assuredly a quid pro quo, thanks to a presidential pardon handed down by a successor Nixon himself selected. The public was enraged for a while, and it no doubt cost Gerald Ford a close election against Jimmy Carter in 1976, but it turned out that the whole Watergate Nixon resignation was a handy Judas goat scenario which allowed voters to think that the "good guys won" and the body politic had been healed.

Clinton is not going to bow out, and voters no longer believe that "good guys" serve in government. There is no wiggle room left, not anywhere near the space available to present-day elites as was nearby for those present at the creation of neoliberalism in the Carter years.

I say it feels like a Nixonian moment because we are at the threshold of the mausoleum. The mausoleum is the Hillary White House. Once we pass through it we will be in a different world.

When Jackie Robinson Almost Fought a Cracker in the Cow Palace: a Story of the GOP's Southern Realignment

Michael Beschloss is the type of American public intellectual who can appear on network television, which is to say that he colors within the lines of official, accepted opinion. Nonetheless, I own many of his books; for instance, his volumes devoted to LBJ's self-taped White House conversations.

Today, tucked in the back of the sports page, Beschloss has a story, "Jackie Robinson and Nixon: Life and Death of a Political Friendship," that provides an excellent thumbnail sketch of the electoral realignment caused by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Grand Old Party's nomination of Barry Goldwater in the Cow Palace the same year.

Let me pick up Beschloss's narrative right there:

Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, who opposed the 1964 [civil rights] legislation as unconstitutional. When Rockefeller denounced political extremism at the party’s San Francisco convention, Robinson, a “special delegate,” shouted, “C’mon, Rocky!” As Robinson recalled, an Alabama delegate “turned on me menacingly” before “his wife grabbed his arm and turned him back." 

Spoiling for a fight, Jackie cried, “Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose!” [How sweet! Oh, to have been there!] He later wrote with uncharacteristic overstatement that on leaving San Francisco, “I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” 

That fall, Robinson joined the 94 percent of the African-American electorate that backed President Johnson. (Since then, the percentage of the black vote for Democratic presidential nominees has never dipped below the low 80s.) In 1968, furious over Nixon’s courtship of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had once led the segregationist “Dixiecrats,” Jackie backed the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey. 

Jackie Robinson died of a heart attack at age 53, two weeks before the 1972 election. Although President Nixon’s civil rights record was considerably stronger (especially on public schools desegregation) than many understood, he was eager that year to carry the five Southern states that had supported George Wallace’s third-party candidacy in 1968; Nixon felt he had little chance to regain much of the African-American vote. 

That March, Robinson, ailing and tired, complained to President Nixon by letter that he was “polarizing this country.” No longer the political optimist of his earlier years, he poignantly wrote his onetime friend, “I want so much to be a part of and to love this country as I once did.”

If you want to know about the politics of the U.S. homeland, all you need to know is the Civil War. We've been fighting it for the last 150 years. We've been fighting the slavers, the money-power non-stop for 150 years. Goldwater begins the realignment of the modern Republican Party with the Old South; Nixon consummates it with his Southern Strategy, co-opting George Wallace's American Independent Party.

Presently, the GOP is a party that can't win a coutrywide election but is able to dominate Congress with its majority in the House and by filibustering everything in the Senate. The Democrats are sacks of piss and shit, infants sucking on the corporate tit, surviving only by wailing about Tea Party bogeymen.

The Beschloss piece is part of The Upshot, a new series of Gray Lady think pieces that owe more to the kind of writing found online than traditional journalism. So far they have been quite good.