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A cautionary tale for policemen

The vehicle entrance for the station was around the corner in Meeting House Lane.  Breadwardine turned in and drove the few yards to the security gate.  As he waited for the motors to crank the gate open there was a knock on his driver’s window.  Initial alarm turned to perplexity as Bredwardine registered the face of Andy Crabtree.  He was not in uniform.

Breadwardine opened the driver’s window.  “Ronald, I’ve been suspended over this Holly business,” Crabtree said, wasting no time, “Can we speak privately?  Not in the station.”

“Better hop in,” Breadwardine said.

Westminster was becoming a sexual minefield now, Charley understood that.  He should have stuck to lavishing his attentions on female researchers, though even that was becoming dangerous.  Female MPs were now completely off-limits.  As a type, the female politician just does not understand her own essential, submissive nature.  One false, perfectly friendly move and instead of a half-hour spent in mutual pleasure and satisfaction in an inexpensive little hotel he knew just around the corner – a bit bijou but very discreet - you get a squawking gobshite and an enemy for life.

His enemy for life was Donna Scott-Walters, she of the old money, sloany county style, Tory Grandee grandad and famously-Thatcherite economist mother.  To make matters worse, both he and Scott-Walters were eyeing the security brief currently held by Chris Maxwell who, as everyone knew, was destined for higher things at the next reshuffle.  A superior brief and privy council status could be his.  The jolly old career would still be moving forward (stasis being the preliminary to rigor mortis in this game).  If it was to be him or the hated Donna who would be snubbed by the girls and boys in 10 Downing Street, well, no contest.  Step forward Miss Sloan Square.

The best way to put down the hated Donna was, of course, to demonstrate a superior knowledge of her brief than she herself possessed.  And right now, that meant getting the inside story on this race-hate business from Andy Crabtree.  Which was proving bloody difficult.  Samuella assured him that she had left messages on his Curtis Green number and mailed both his accounts twice over the weekend.  Not a peep, apparently.  Which was very unlike Crabtree.  Probably too busy networking somewhere else.  Such a self-publicist, that man.

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A cautionary tale for policemen

Interview Room 3 was the only one with an observation window; observation in the other three only being possible through live video feed.  Usually, it was just the more serious cases which attracted an audience.  But Slice had said he wanted to view, so here they were, Ian Bennett, Kevin Boulder and the BAME officer assigned to the case, Tony Eilam, waiting on his pleasure outside the interview room.  They waited fifteen minutes before he strode into the corridor.

“Ah Ian,” he said, “Sorry to hear about the no-show at Telegraph Hill yesterday?”

Bennett replied, “Three hours of my life I’ll never get back, sir.  And then, when we did finally enter the flat, we found it had already been cleared.  But there’ll be DNA evidence somewhere.”

“Something for the SOECA officer attending, then?”

“Hopefully.”

“Right, well,” Breadwardine declared, rubbing his hands together, “I see everybody is here but the suspect.  Shall we have him in?”  With that, he and Bennett entered the observation room and took up position before the window.

Prakash Ghosh, a slight figure in his mid-twenties, had been taken into custody three hours earlier.  Physically, he did not remotely match the muscular nature of his on-line rhetoric as detailed in John Holly’s crime report.  As he spoke in the preliminaries it was immediately apparent that he was born and raised not in this country but in India.  His accent was quite heavy but his articulation was that of an educated man.  Beside him, was a local criminal lawyer Narayan Singh, also Indian-born, and very familiar to all the Peckham detectives.  Opposite the pair of them sat Boulder and Eilam.

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A cautionary tale for policemen

The silence in Breadwardine’s office was broken by Crabtree’s warbling mobile.  He squinted at the screen and starting out of his seat.  “It’s the Home Office.  I must take this,” he announced, and disappeared out into the corridor.  Breadwardine was left alone with the black woman.  He wondered if she might offer at least some comment on the thoughts he had articulated a few seconds earlier.  A modicum of agreement perhaps.  Instead, she fished out her own mobile from her bag, and was instantly captive to its fascinations.  There are people in this world, Breadwardine reflected, who do not care in the slightest about, or even recognise the existence of, profundity; and here were two of them.

Three miles north-west by police helicopter, where the wheels of government were turning, was a third.  As Minister of State for the Police and Fire Service, Charley Tout MP had what was widely regarded as the cushiest job in government.  His opposite number in the Ministry of Defence ran him close – all those regimental dinners and photo ops ensconced in a Challenger at Castlemartin.  But these were thin times for an Armed Forces Minister presiding over a losing war with the Treasury, which had precipitated a subsidiary conflict for the scraps between the manpower advocates - basically the army chiefs - and the big price tag junkies of the RAF and the RN. 

Charley’s ministerial life, however, was serene.  After Grenfell, it was politically impossible for the Treasury to take an axe to fire service funding, while crime was far too much the perpetually hot political potato.  Charley, a nimble operator, had learned that his most judicious course was to talk up the ever rising tide of criminal activity across the land while projecting an image of high-energy, on-the-button competence in dealing with it.  With Charley, PR also stood for politicians’ relations.  Going manic with talk of teamwork was another good, option; because this created the impression of spaces into which all that energy disappeared.  It all helped to put off the evil day when some Treasury bean-counter conducts a proper audit of his office and concludes that, actually, the police and fire service run themselves perfectly well, and Charley Tout doesn’t have a real ministerial function at all.

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A cautionary tale for policemen

“I have that victim report you asked for, sir,” announced WPC Brook, a Leeds lass and The Fragrant Linda to the small and dwindling coterie of officers over 40 who, like Boulder, had yet to fully internalise the rigorous standards of a-sexuality required in the work context of the, of course, perpetually modernising and by no means hysterically anti white male, post-racial, post-gender Met.  Delicately, she laid thirty-four sheets of densely-typed A4 paper on Kevin Boulder’s desk.  He looked down at them, then up, questioningly, at her face.  He leafed through the first dozen.  A crime report typically filled a single page - maybe two in exceptional circumstances. “Where’d all this come from?” he asked.

“He gave me a memory stick he’d smuggled past the custody desk in the waist band of his trousers,” she said, “He must have had it all ready when you arrested him.  There was one Word file on it, just needing me to copy and paste, and quite a few screenshot images I copied but did not print out with the report because we’ve no colour cartridges until tomorrow.”

“Well, thank fuck for that.” Boulder sighed, picking up all thirty-four pages and headed for Bennett’s office.

“I think we’ve been ‘ad, guv?” he said as he went through the door, “This guy Holly is playin’ us.”  Like Boulder, Bennett was fazed by the sheer bulk of the document.  He flicked through back-to-front, like a pack of playing cards.  It consisted of fifty numbered quotes and URLs, beneath each of which were two or three paragraphs of commentary in sparely-written legal language.  Bennett read the first and longest numbered quote:

“Karu nadu 20 hours ago
Like all fµƈking racists you are obsessed with defending a non-existent purity.  This is a constantly invaded land.  The people who came here were Basques and Romans from Africa and Jews from the Middle East and now they are Pakistanis, Indians, black Caribbeans and black Africans as well.  The English you obsess about have only ever been immigrants and then mongrels.  There is nothing to defend because there is nothing to replace, though replacing you naȥi retards will improve the gene pool a thousand times over.  Hatred and intolerance will die with you.  In fact, why don’t you just fµƈk off now?  It is the beautiful black and brown native people of England who own the future.”

Bennett took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.  “Well, Prakash Ghosh isn’t a very diplomatic fellow,” he observed dryly, “But yeah, Ghosh thinks he’s playing Holly, but it’s clearly the other way round.  Holly knew he was going to be questioned sooner or later.  He wanted us to question him.  He was all ready for us to question him.  He’s playing Ghosh and he’s playing us.  What’s his game?”

“What are you going to do about it?” Boulder asked.

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A cautionary tale for policemen

All morning, John Holly lay sleepless on the thin, blue plastic mattress in his cell. Several times he heard the sounds of activity in the corridor outside, metal doors slamming shut, once some shouting.  But beyond a couple of momentary check-ups through the panel in the door and the arrival of WPC Brook with sweet, weak tea in a plastic cup, no one took any interest in him at all.  It seemed that the Metropolitan Police Service was not used to suspects putting a large spoke in its little procedural wheel.

It had all gone horribly wrong for the Met four long and lonely hours earlier, in Holly’s initial interview, following his arrest at home in the small hours.  The fall guy had been the glotally challenged Detective Sergeant Kevin Boulder, seated across the table from him and the duty solicitor, a Miss Agarwal, in Interview Room 1.

“An ‘ate crime,” Boulder had confidently begun in the approved ex cathedra sing-song of the local comp boy made plod, “is a crime that the victim or any uvver person perceives to be motivated by ‘ostility or prejudice towards any aspect of a person’s identity.  In this case we are dealin’ wiv ‘ostility or prejudice based on a person’s race or perceived race.  If the investigatin’ officer is satisfied that the offence took place as described by the victim ...”

“Prakash Ghosh,” interjected Holly, plainly stating a fact he knew only too well.

Miss Agarwal shifted in her seat.

“I am unable to disclose the victim’s precise identity at interview under caution,” replied Boulder, “That information will only be supplied if, at the conclusion of this investigation, a formal charge is laid.”

“But it was Ghosh,” Holly shot back, “You know it.  I know it.”

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Yeeeehaaah!  Sooweeeee! Get em   ....Leroy and Schlomo

“The United States Should Seriously Consider Peaceful Partition”, so says Vincent Law at AltRight on 24 April 2017.

How convenient that Vincent Law, a Ukrainian American (?) living in St. Peterberg, Russia, would proffer how balkanization of The US might go.

The right wing and Jewish perspective from which he comes is not to be trusted on either side of this issue. They created these conflicts, they created these immigration problems and now they want to create hackneyed “solutions.” They may bemuse and distract larpers, but in the end they will serve a Jewish and complicit right wing perspective. This will create disaster and conflict for others while these weasels A) escape to gated communities or B) escape the country entirely if need be (with their money, of course); finally, e.g., leaving remaining Whites to get raped by blacks (who are “really not so bad”, or perhaps “your problem”, when in fact, it was their perspective that long ago imposed them on normal Whites et al.).

Meanwhile right wingers from other races will be trying to swing deals established by Jews and right wingers as well. Saying that the kind of Jews and right wing huxters posing as “ethno nationalists” on this thread at Alt-Right represent White people and their ethnonationalism. They don’t. And they will create conflicts with people that White ethno nationalists should ally (not integrate or fight) with: Asian and Amerindian ethno nationalists.

The Right Wing/Alternative Right cannot be trusted with this issue any more than anything else - i.e., not at all. They are the ones who put Trump and his Jewish entourage into power. And that is just for starters in terms of their screw-ups. There are some basic issues that need to sorted out yet - not interminable matters, but too important to go right ahead and start bargaining on the bases and within the parameters that Jews and right wingers establish. They cannot even be trusted to say what is White or not.

silviosilver ✓ᵀʳᵘᵐᵖ ˢᵘᵖᵖᵒʳᵗᵉʳ Kumiko Oumae • 2 days ago

Asians do not belong in white ethnostates. It’s as simple as that.

F—k off and die, please.

  Kumiko Oumae reply to silviosilver ✓ᵀʳᵘᵐᵖ ˢᵘᵖᵖᵒʳᵗᵉʳ • 2 days ago

I completely agree that Asians should not be on the same side of the line as White people if a partition occurs in North America. That’s precisely why I placed Asians and Hispanics together outside of the White ethnostate partition in the hypothetical scenario I described. Re-read what I actually wrote.

I would not even ask you to moderate the tone or language that you take when dealing with Asian people, since I think that Asian people do need to know how White Americans really feel on this issue, so as to shatter the illusion of there being any kind of shared destiny. You want to promote ethnic division in North America. So do I.

The American ‘melting pot’ was never going to work out. And even if it somehow did work out, it would be undesirable for all groups concerned. And so it should never be allowed to work out.

DanielS: Silver is an (admitted) non-White (who “wouldn’t be surprised if he is part Jewish”, but at any rate, “has an affinity for Anatolia and the Levant”). He lives in England, not America, and agitates to deliberately stir-up strife among Whites while he tries to create enemies for them among non-Whites. In this case, with Asians. I drove him away from Majorityrights long ago for these reasons. He is in no way to be taken seriously, as a representative of Whites; nor as a negotiator of ethnonationalism in good or bad faith.

While I draw attention to Alt-Righters, trolls and the experience that I have of them misrepresenting White interests, Kumiko calls some interesting facts to my attention about Alt-Right.com. - they allow for slurs against Asians in their comments, but if you use the word “Jew” the comment will be blocked.

She also noted that she was the only one who gave an up-vote to Bowery’s comment:

jabowery • a day ago

Sortocracy: Sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them. http://sortocracy.org

Bowery’s idea of Sortocracy is among the most fair and intelligent on the thread, but the drawback of Sortocracy is for his/its empirical bias, as it lacks the historical element that hermeneutics corrects for. If that were to be incorporated, and it could be, it could be a very good vehicle.

Clicking on the map will take you to a site that allows you to click further onto particular states to see all of their counties. For various reasons this is a helpful grid when examining matters of secession.

A peaceful day in Clock Town

As of 11 Apr 2017, the train is moving with 32 containers. Assuming that everything goes well, the train should arrive at Yiwu in 18 days.

There is of course a geostrategic element behind each of these developments as well.

As Xinhua wrote about a particular section of the initiative last year:

Xinhua, ‘First train from China to Iran stimulates Silk Road revival’, 16 Feb 2016 (emphasis added):

[...]

The train, also referred to as Silk Road train, has passed through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to Iran, travelling a distance of 10,399 kilometers. [...]

The travel of cargo train from China to Iran is part of a Chinese initiative to revive the ancient Silk Road used by the traders to commute between Europe and East Asia.

Tehran will not be the final destination of these kinds of trains from China, the Iranian deputy minister said, adding that in the future, the train will reach Europe.

This will benefit Iran as the transit course for the cargo trains from the east Asia to Europe, he said.

Chinese ambassador to Iran Pang Sen told Xinhua that as one of the cooperation projects after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Iran, the cargo train is playing a important role to promote construction of the “Belt and Road” initiative.

And cargo trains reaching Europe is precisely what is happening.

It’s very nice.

But there’s a problem

The shadow cast over all of these kinds of proceedings, is that there is an ongoing background problem where the Trump administration and the Israelis are constantly trying to disrupt everything for their own reasons which revolve around Zionist strategic imperatives.

The phenomenon of Zionist strategic imperatives—such as the Zionist opposition to the Iran deal, or the Zionist desire to hand Syria over to Al-Qaeda—finding their expression through American foreign policy, is a phenomenon that is a real problem, and it is a problem that will have to be combated with more determination than ever if we are going to secure post-Brexit prosperity for Britain as well as economic growth in Asia.

Our time is limited. The American Zionist problem needs to be fixed before 2060, otherwise it might merge with the next migration problem and then something truly horrible and completely unmanageable will happen.

Do not become despondent. The situation is extremely dangerous, but as long as you understand the problem then it means there is a possibility that you can solve the problem. It is possible to defeat the American Zionist agenda. The tools do exist for accomplishing that, and they have always existed.

You have to believe in your strengths.

Before you complain

An American once said to me that whenever they see me post an article about the United States now, they just have to brace for a total assault on their morale, and that “it is almost like seeing something like Tokyo Rose’s work in written form.”

I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not, since despite her best propaganda efforts, Iva Toguri D’Aquino was ultimately not able to convince the Americans to stop supporting the United States. Perhaps some of the Americans did have pause though, perhaps they did think occasionally, “You know, those things that Tokyo Rose is saying on the radio, could there be something to all that?”

But really, it’s not like I have to go out of my way to come up with these socio-economic angles against the ‘Make America Great Again’ concept. They present themselves to the world daily in such a high volume that it’s almost like trying to catch a cup of water from a firehose of negative developments. One has to be very selective about which part of the non-stop blast of negative news one is going to select, interpret, and develop a piece on, on any given day.

Today’s selection is going to really induce a feeling like when you’re sparring with someone and they forget to hold back, and next thing you know their foot is trying to tickle your kidneys or something, and it’s just like, “Oh wow, this pain is real.” It’s pretty bad. I apologise for the pain that you’re going to feel in advance.

True to the tradition I’ll get things started by putting the music on.

How things reached this stage

When Donald Trump was inaugurated on an overcast day about two months ago, he stood in front of the lectern and in a stern voice spoke the words that initiated a miserable new trade war:

TIME, ‘Trump Inauguration: Transcript of Donald Trump Speech’, 20 Jan 2017 (emphasis added):

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.

Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every breath in my body and I will never ever let you down.

America will start winning again, winning like never before.

We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.

It may seem on the face of it that Donald Trump was saying that all the decisions he would make would be based on whether they will benefit American workers and American families. His mouth said that somewhere in there, but is that what protectionism actually does in the longrun?

We know that it does not benefit ‘workers and families’ in the longrun. 

There is widely understood empirical evidence which shows that in the present era, free trade is what benefits the broad mass of the people, not protectionism. Free trade is what enables wider access to products at a cheaper price. Free trade enables this indirectly by facilitating regional division and specialisation of production to enhance productivity on a planetary basis. 

Broadly speaking, tariff and non-barrier barriers are mostly retrogressive, as it is low income consumers who spend a greater percentage of their income on food, clothing, consumer electronics and vehicles, which tend to be most highly protected under the kind of tariff regime proposed by Donald Trump’s White House and supported by his Alt-Lite and Alt-Right supporters.

So if American ‘workers and families’ do not really stand to benefit, does this mean that I am saying that Donald Trump is not putting America ‘first’? By no means. The misunderstanding that many have is that they conflate rhetoric about a country’s interest with the interest of the broad mass of the people. Trump essentially tailored his speech to exploit that misunderstanding.

In fact, America is indeed being ‘put first’ by Trump, but that is not a positive thing. The policies which he is advocating ensure that those who really stand to benefit are primarily the American financiers and the upper-bourgeoisie stratum of big and middle-sized manufacturers, who feel themselves to be under stiff competition from their counterparts in Europe and Asia. This scenario comes at the end of a long cycle of a widening pattern of global investment during and after the Cold War environment, which had led to the repair and economic rehabilitation of that section of the world that America had razed to the ground in the process of destroying Axis. 

The repair and rehabilitation was possible because the leaders of various European and Asian economies opted to play the longest of long games, accommodating the liberal global order that the American victors had maintained for their own diplomatic and geostrategic benefit (to economically contain their next opponent, the Soviet Union), but which were used by the former Axis countries and other Third World countries to build something again from the ashes of the Second World War and to take advantage of the mutual benefits that came from having the economic vitality and thus the military wherewithall to deter the Soviet Union. 

A hegemon’s dilemma

The flourishing of any world order in which a hegemon has to allow power to devolve into the hands of outsiders, is a world order which will eventually unravel itself as the hegemon will come to fear its own deputies. Much as the Greek Empire unravelled itself when each of the governors, tribes, and exarchates which had been permitted to accrue power so as to encircle common enemies, suddenly realised that they had reached a stage where they could bid for global power in their own right, so too the American liberal world order is coming to a close as this cycle of capital accumulation draws to a close.

The productive capacity which had been offshored from the United States and implanted into the European and Asian periphery so as to reinforce economic containment and encirclement against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, now becomes in 2017 the potential weapon which the American high-bourgeoisie fears will be turned against it in a multipolar world, the first chapter of which is now opening. America’s old Cold War gendarmes of capital, are now gendarmes that are increasingly operating autonomously, and the United States is struggling to chart a course to address that new reality.

The American high-bourgeoisie wants what it views as ‘its wealth’ back. But they are not the actual owners of it. The wealth, limited though it is, and not without imperfection in its distribution, which is presently enjoyed by the peoples of Europe and Asia was re-built through hard years of work by the generation of people who survived the Second World War, and who, seeing their ideals crushed by the Americans, resolved to build their countries again during the Cold War.

The American high-bourgeoisie knows that it cannot fight the world alone, since it is only a small class of people, and therefore it must assert leadership and bind the other American classes to itself. They do this by appealing to a form of populism, where people like Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, knowing that they cannot appeal to a class consciousness, instead appeal to a civic nationalist mantra: “Make America Great Again.”

What is America that anyone should want to make it ‘great’ again? That is the most astounding development in this whole sequence, particularly in the context of the Alt-Right and other nationalist opinion-formers such as David Duke, who largely made themselves responsible for having enabled all of this. For example, Hunter Wallace at Altright.com said late last month: 

Hunter Wallace / Altright.com, ‘We Are The Vanguard’, 24 Feb 2017 (emphasis added):

[...]

The primary reason the media is so interested in us is because it is our ideas that have entered the political mainstream. For years now, we have been the ones calling for an America First trade policy, an America First foreign policy, an American First immigration policy, rapprochement with Russia, scrapping the refugee resettlement program, stressing our interests as opposed to liberal ideology, strong borders and a crackdown on immigration, assaulting political correctness, making peace with the labor movement, etc., etc. [...] Now, we are living in the digital world of social media and young people are watching us on YouTube and Periscope. They are interacting with us on Twitter. We don’t need the “mainstream” to network or spread our ideas.

[...]

We are the vanguard now. The world has changed, the “mainstream” is dead and the media is trying to catch up with the times. Rich Lowry’s National Review and Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard are at the nadir of their influence over the Right. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if flyover country conservatives are familiar with Richard Spencer and the Alt-Right. If our ideas are triumphing over David Frum’s ideas and Bill Kristol’s ideas, it doesn’t matter. If our discourse triumphs over and displaces “mainstream” discourse, then we are having a massive impact whether the “mainstream” cartel acknowledges it or not.

The same kind of people who for years had operated under the suspicion that the United States was possibly falling under a ‘Zionist Occupation Government’, are now the very same kind of people who are actually trying in these days and hours to fight as hard as they can to attempt to defend and perpetuate the global reach of the United States government and its centrality as a manufacturing centre now that it is  transparently going into openly-verifiable overdrive in that regard. Now that the ‘occupation’ is openly parading itself in their faces from the White House in verifiable statements that have been reproduced in mainstream media outlets, they suddenly and magically cannot seem to see it.

Perhaps it may be that it is difficult to understand why that contradiction exists until you look at the socio-economic class dimension. Perhaps they choose not to notice the Zionism issue now, because it’s the case that it is inconvenient for them financially, given that most Trump voters are middle class and may believe that they stand to gain from the Trump administration’s budgetary, financial and economic policy direction. Or perhaps it is the case that they are just really bad at politics and aren’t paying attention to what is happening, and are more interested in identitarian form and signalling, than in actual policy. Or maybe it is the case that there is a kind of ongoing entryism which is usually not visible to the public but which only is revealed in short glimpses, such as, for example, when it emerged that Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine had actually been writing for the old AlternativeRight.com website in 2010. Or it could be some combination of all of these things.

Whatever the case happens to be, for all those who ever believed in anything that those people previously said, these present developments can only be seen as a betrayal. If they are ‘the vanguard’ and this is what they have produced, then they have a considerable amount of explaining to do.

Unfortunately with the situation as it is, I am not expecting that an explanation will be coming from them, but I am expecting that the Alt-Right and Alt-Lite opinion-formers will continue to act as a kind of grassroots support for the Trump administration, one which will have a high resilience and effectiveness because it couples a tacit support with a consistent pseudo-denial of actually being on the same side as the administration. We hear on the one hand the Alt-Right continually saying that they are ‘not Trump’, but then on the other hand they like the specific actions the administration is doing and its overall direction which they see as a ‘stepping stone’ (to where?), they just wish that that those actions would be done with more intensity.

The effective function of the Alt-Right internet presence is basically that they remain engaged on social media as a ‘grassroots’ presence which continually presents narratives and arguments that serve to socially legitimate Trump administration spokespersons, supporters and key cabinet figures and their policy preferences in a way that is completely independent of the state, as it is done at arms length, behind a veil of denial and disavowal by the White House itself. The bonus that the White House receives in all of this is that there is no-one who has to be paid or instructed to do this for them. The Alt-Right doesn’t need to be paid, they do it for free.

Introduction

Getting started: This article is about one facet in the process of the Trump administration making its programme operational. The first operational step that the American high-bourgeoisie are taking is that they are seeking to enhance their structural power, or to turn a phrase, they are seeking to make themselves great again, by weakening the efficacy of checks or dissents against their power domestically. This would place them in the best command position imaginable, which would allow them the ability to then turn their focus to foreign policy and trade policy as their second step, with minimal interference at home. That second step is outside the scope of this article and will be covered at a later date. The first step is what will now be described here today.

Enhanced dictatorship of the high-bourgeoisie

There are four major actions that the Trump administration is carrying out right now which would allow the American high-bourgeoisie to enhance their structural power domestically. These actions are as follows:

1. H.R.985 - Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2017.
2. H.R.720 - Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act.
3. The appointment of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States.
4. The elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation.

Let’s go through them in the order I’ve listed them. And in case you are trying to guess what the four items have in common, yes, what all of these things have in common is that they pertain to the ability to form a class so as to bring a class action lawsuit against companies or government agencies, and to raise funds to carry out that endeavour.

H.R.985

When people are facing systemic abuse from companies or from government agencies, class action lawsuits are a vital tool that is used to bring a halt to their behaviour. By bringing about a class action lawsuit, a few people can stand in for a larger number of people in a lawsuit against a perpetrator and seek either injunctive relief (where the perpetrator must cease a bad practice) or compensation (monetary damages).

The bill, H.R.985 which passed in the US House of Representatives by recorded vote 220 - 201 on Thursday 09 March 2017, and will next be placed before the US Senate, is a bill that makes it more difficult for people to bring class action lawsuits.

Bill H.R.985 makes it harder for people to form a ‘class’ by further restricting and constraining the criteria under which people may come together to bring a case, and placing various hurdles in the way of the collection of lawyers’ fees, thus decreasing the incentive for lawyers to take on class action lawsuits.

The net effect of this is that it will sharply reduce the ability of people to seek injunctive relief or compensation in any scenario where they are being harmed by a company or a government agency.

The architects of the bill and its proponents, such as Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), have tried to mask their intentions by presenting it to the media as a bill that is designed to prevent supposedly-existent ‘lawyer-driven litigation’, by which they mean a kind of ‘trolling’ litigation which is designed to enrich lawyers rather than address any actual grievance of the plaintiffs. By masking their intentions with such a cover story, the lawmakers have sought to conceal the actual reality of the attack which they themselves are conducting against working people and families.

The factor which exposes their cover story as a lie, is the simple fact that if they really thought that they needed to write a bill to prevent ‘lawyer-driven litigation’, then they wouldn’t have written a bill that attacks people’s ability to seek injunctive relief, in which money is not awarded but practices are changed, as well as compensation. However, that is precisely what they have done, and in doing so, their motive was revealed along with the effect.

On the issue of the hurdles placed in the way of the collection of lawyers’ fees, the bill deliberately limits lawyers’ fees in injunctive relief cases to “a reasonable percentage of the value” of the relief. This of course makes no sense, by design, because it is quite impossible for a court to determine what the monetary worth of a non-monetary action is, so as to calculate such a percentage. The effect is that lawyers would be disincentivised from taking the risk of bringing an injunctive class action case.

Furthermore, the bill also places a condition on the timing of the payment of lawyers’ fees to the date of full monetary recovery. This could even sometimes deny lawyers the ability to be paid their fees altogether, since some cases have a term of settlement that is longer than the remaining lifespan of the lawyers who are working on the case. For example, in a case where full settlement is expected to take fifty years, it would mean that the lawyers would not be paid until the end of those fifty years. Even with that potentially disastrous scenario aside, with regards to the duration of the litigation itself, the condition incentivises defendants to drag out and prolong litigation.

The possibility of never receiving lawyers’ fees or having to wait years to receive them, will act as an enormous deterrent for any law firm that absolutely requires those fees to pay their staff and keep their business running.

H.R.720

H.R.720 the so-called ‘Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act’ is a cunningly named bill which will actually require all federal judges to penalise any lawyer who brings what they consider to be a ‘frivolous lawsuit’. Up until now, it has up to the judge’s discretion to decide whether to do this.

The interesting thing about this is that for a lawsuit to actually make it to the point where it has come before a jury, it means that a judge clearly already considers it to be a valid lawsuit. Legislation like H.R.720, simply incentivises the behaviour where a defendant can continually protest that everything that is happening is ‘frivolous’, and it disincentivises lawyers from trying to bring a lawsuit to find out how it will be regarded.

In practice, this means that the legislative and executive branches of US government are seeking to attack lawyers for trying to help people to seek relief or compensation through the court system. After all, a corporate defendant would likely start out from the stance that any lawsuit brought against their esteemed selves is definitely ‘frivolous’.

The appointment of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the SCOTUS

An ‘originalist’ Judge Neil Gorsuch, having previously been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit by George W. Bush on 08 August 2006, has been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Donald J. Trump. A decent summary of his background has been written at FiveThirtyEight.

Beltway conservatives immediately feted him as having come out of the mold of another now late ‘originalist’ Judge Antonin Scalia, or at least something close to that. Evangelicals celebrated Gorsuch’s statements about his belief in the ‘pro-life’ stance, as that is a pet issue of maximal all-consuming importance to them. 

The Alt-Lite and Alt-Right’s reaction to the nomination was in a sense no more sophisticated or diligent than that of any of the other groups. Hunter Wallace published a very strange article at Alt-Right.com which referred to Gorsuch as a “real American”, as though this were a reason for why he wanted to see Gorsuch nominated in and of itself. Richard Spencer produced an article which had a similarly strange central thrust, referring to Gorsuch as “America’s wise, WASPy dad—an avatar of the ruling class of days gone by.” Spencer’s view was echoed by James Edwards on the Political Cesspool, which carried Spencer’s article verbatim. 

In my view none of this matters anyway, but while ‘Gorsuch’ may be an old Anglo-Saxon name, the man himself is ancestrally Irish. Additionally, Gorsuch was raised as a Catholic, and then he converted to Episcopalianism later, so he is not a ‘WASP’. He’s also not America’s ‘dad’, he’s a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States, for goodness sake.

Unfortunately no real analysis of Gorsuch’s views on class action lawsuits has been done by anyone in the nationalist sphere. If anyone had chosen to do so, then some extremely meaningful patterns, all of which are negative, would have emerged into view immediately.

SCOTUSblog gives us an interesting look in with the summary containing this excerpt:

Amy Howe / SCOTUSblog, ‘A closer look at Judge Neil Gorsuch and class actions’, 08 Mar 2017 (emphasis added):

[...]

Covering the Wal-Mart decision for this blog, Lyle Denniston described Scalia as the court’s “most dedicated skeptic about the class-action approach to litigation.” Whether Gorsuch, if confirmed, would follow in Scalia’s footsteps remains to be seen. During his decade on the bench, Gorsuch has participated in relatively few class action cases. In the cases involving class action issues in which he has participated, he has generally, but not always, ruled for the defense. Notably, both in cases in which he has ruled for the defense and those in which he has ruled for the plaintiffs, Gorsuch has emphasized the need for courts to stay in their lane, so to speak – that is, not to exceed their authority, particularly when it comes to decisions that are in his view best left to Congress.

[...]

The Bazelon Center has a review which also contains some example of cases that were not class action lawsuits, but seem to give some idea of how Gorsuch interprets civil rights law in general:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Hwang v. Kansas State University, 753 F.3d 1159 (10th Cir. 2014), Judge Gorsuch wrote an opinion ruling against a longtime professor at a state university who had taken a six-month leave of absence to recover from her cancer treatment. At the end of that period, she requested a short period of additional leave at the advice of her doctor in order to avoid a severe flu outbreak on campus that could endanger her already compromised immune system. The university refused to grant additional leave. Judge Gorsuch began his analysis of Professor Hwang’s claim by asking: “Must an employer allow employees more than six months’ sick leave or face liability under the Rehabilitation Act? Unsurprisingly, the answer is almost always no.” Although the ADA and Rehabilitation Act say nothing about the length of leaves granted by employers and specifically require that that such accommodation requests be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, Judge Gorsuch held that a leave of absence as long as six months would “turn employers into safety net providers for those who cannot work.” He also described Professor Hwang as “a problem other forms of social security aim to address”—even though the professor was willing and able to resume her duties through online classes immediately, or through in-class teaching after the additional short leave. Judge Gorsuch also rejected her argument that the university’s inflexible six-month leave policy was discriminatory, instead reasoning that applying the same leave policies to all employees, without providing reasonable accommodations for qualified employees with a disability, would protect employees with disabilities from being “secretly singled out for discriminatory treatment.” Judge Gorsuch thus concluded that the six-month leave policy was “more than sufficient to comply” with the Rehabilitation Act. [...]

I’m sure everyone can guess where these examples are going. Here’s another:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Wehrley v. American Family Mutual Insurance Company, 513 F. App’x 733 (10th Cir. 2013), a panel including Judge Gorsuch found that the plaintiff had not established that he had a disability that entitled him to the ADA’s protections. Wehrley, an insurance field claim adjuster, injured his knee and back in a workplace accident, and his employer fired him because of his inability to work on claims that involved going onto roofs. At trial, Wehrley introduced evidence of significant limitations in major life activities, including a medical report stating that he could not walk or stand for prolonged periods, that his pain disrupted his sleep, and that he had to change positions every 30 minutes while sitting. Judge Gorsuch and the panel concluded, however, that Wehrley had not shown that these impairments were substantial because the report did not say that he was unable to “walk or stand in the ordinary course of a day,” nor did it describe the extent or severity of the disruption to his sleep. Without sufficient evidence of a substantial impairment in a major life activity, the panel found that he did not meet the definition of a person with a disability.

And one more:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Adair v. City of Muskogee, 823 F.3d 1297 (10th Cir. 2016), Judge Gorsuch joined an opinion affirming summary judgment against the plaintiff after finding that he was unable to perform an essential function of his position. The plaintiff, a firefighter who held the position of HazMat Director, injured his back during a training exercise. The city required that he complete a functional-capacity evaluation, which showed that he had some restrictions on his lifting ability. He sued the city under the ADA for disability discrimination, alleging that he was constructively discharged when the city encouraged him to retire rather than be terminated because it regarded him as disabled. The plaintiff argued that he was capable of performing the essential functions of the HazMat Director position even with the lifting restrictions, testifying that he did not need to lift in his position and had never performed regular firefighter duties during his four years as HazMat Director. However, Judge Gorsuch and the panel discounted the plaintiff’s testimony and instead deferred to a state law listing the ability to lift up to 200 pounds as an essential function for all firefighters, regardless of specialized roles. Since the plaintiff suggested no potential accommodations other than being relieved of the lifting duty, the panel concluded that he was not a qualified individual under the ADA.

Being an ‘originalist’ and a ‘textualist’ seems to involve being deliberately absurd in ways that happen to be generally convenient for the defence. The addition of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States meshes with the thrust of the pieces of legislation, H.R.985 and H.R.720, which were described earlier and which are presently making their way though the US Congress, in a way that enhances their effect.

The addition of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court returns it to the balance that existed when Judge Antonin Scalia was still alive. It is not beyond possibility that sometime in the next four years another judge will be replaced, and at that point Donald Trump may even be able to appoint an additional ‘originalist’ and ‘textualist’ to the court, such as for example Judge William Pryor.

But it is sad that no one is paying any attention to these developments. Choices made during the Trump administration will shape the character of the American system for a generation or longer.

The elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation

They suggested that it was going to happen, and now they are moving toward doing it. See here:

New York Times, ‘Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget’, 17 Feb 2017 (emphasis added):

WASHINGTON — The White House budget office has drafted a hit list of programs that President Trump could eliminate to trim domestic spending, including longstanding conservative targets like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Legal Services Corporation, AmeriCorps and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.

Work on the first Trump administration budget has been delayed as the budget office awaited Senate confirmation of former Representative Mick Mulvaney, a spending hard-liner, as budget director. Now that he is in place, his office is ready to move ahead with a list of nine programs to eliminate, an opening salvo in the Trump administration’s effort to reorder the government and increase spending on defense and infrastructure.

[...]

Eliminating all funding for the Legal Services Corporation is the same thing as abolishing it. Some people may be wondering what it does, and such people would now be wondering about that at a time when it is too late to make a difference. Although the United States Constitution contains language that promises equality in the provision of justice, the language is operationally meaningless unless it can also be said that all people have the ability to access legal services and legal remedies.

Defendants in criminal cases are guaranteed the right to have a lawyer because of the outcome of the United States Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), but the same right to a lawyer does not actually exist for civil cases.

The beginning of the United States government’s effort to provide legal assistance Americans with low-income for civil cases, emerged during Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, which gave rise to the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964. In 1965, the office created the Legal Services Program, which provided assistance all over the United States.

However, the Legal Services Program was up for White House review in 1969, and the Office of Economic Opportunity itself was in existence because of the Economic Opportunity Act which was scheduled to expire in 1970.

President Richard M. Nixon, who took office in January 1969, asked the US Congress in February 1969 to extend appropriations for the Office of Economic Opportunity. The Ash Commission, headed by former United States Army Air Corps Captain Roy Ash, found “virtual unanimity that organizational improvement of the Executive Office of the President is needed.” Among the recommendations made on this issue, the Ash Commission advocated that Nixon ought to create an independent corporation which would receive funds from the US Congress to disburse to local legal aid organisations.

Nixon made the memo public in February 1971 and in May 1971 he sent a special message to the US Congress proposing the establishment of the Legal Services Corporation.

On 25 July 1974, Richard M. Nixon signed the Legal Services Corporation Act.

The Legal Services Corporation has not been without controversy during its existence, and several unsuccessful attempts to abolish it have been attempted over the years. The most recent unsuccessful attempt to abolish it was in 2005:

TexasLawyersHelp.org, ‘Eliminate LSC and Other Programs, Says Republican Study Committee in “Operation Offset” Budget Report’, 30 Sep 2005 (emphasis added):

A recent report issued by the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a group of nearly 100 conservative House members, calls for the elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation. U.S. Representatives Mike Pence (R-IN), RSC’s chairman, and Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), RSC’s budget and spending task force chairman, issued the 23-page report on September 21, 2005. The report—called “Operation Offset: RSC Budget Options 2005”—urges Congress and the President to eliminate federal expenditures as far-ranging as Medicaid and Medicare, graduate school student loan subsidies, foreign aid, the National Endowment for the Arts, matching grants for presidential candidates, and LSC. [...]

Yes, that is the same Mike Pence who is presently the Vice-President of the United States. It’s interesting how that has happened to work out.

Another interesting fact is that the Heritage Foundation which submitted the list from which Donald Trump selected Judge Neil Gorsuch’s name to nominate him to the United States Supreme Court, is also visibly active in crafting and giving legitimation to the budget which will abolish the Legal Services Corporation:

New York Times, ‘Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget’, 17 Feb 2017:

[...]

Stephen Moore, another Heritage Foundation economist who advised Mr. Trump during his campaign, acknowledged that powerful constituencies were behind many of the programs that are on the chopping block. But he said now that Republicans are finally in control of the government, they must make a valiant effort to fulfill the promises they have been making to voters for years.

“I think it’s an important endeavor to try to get rid of things that are unnecessary,” Mr. Moore said. “The American public has a lot of contempt for how government is run in Washington, in no small part because there is so much waste.”

If you know anyone who seriously believes that the Heritage Foundation along with all the other personalities I’ve mentioned here are just innocently trying to ‘get rid of things that are unnecessary’, send that person to me, because I have a bridge to sell them — and it’s on the moon.

Conclusion

Particular factions among the American ruling class are seeking to enhance their structural power, or to turn a phrase, they are seeking to make themselves great again, by weakening the efficacy of checks or dissents against their power domestically in an environment in which they have total power over all branches of the government and are receiving virtually no criticism from their own constituency on any economic issues. This would place them in the best command position imaginable, which would allow them the ability to then turn their focus to foreign policy and trade policy.

Everything that the American ruling class is doing to pacify and constrict the power of their own constituents at home, is a preparation and a prerequisite for them being able to efficiently conduct a trade war against European, Asian, and Latin American states.

Enacting a tariff regime as a necessary centre-piece of the trade war is an action which will raise the cost of inputs for all American manufacturers. One of the ways that they will offset that cost will be to enable American companies to act in cost-cutting ways that disregard the interests of American workers and families without having to worry about being subjected to lawsuits brought by those workers and families.

Passing H.R.985 and H.R.720, as well as appointing Judge Neil Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court and abolishing the Legal Services Corporation, are four key actions that are part of the process of them ‘moving the ball down the playing field’ in that regard.

Evidence has been presented here which illustrates that the entire edifice of ‘Make America Great Again’ is going to be constructed atop a foundation of socio-economic retrogression and misery.