Mueller the Politician
by
Mueller has proven himself quite the politician.
I was hoping that the indictments would bring some sort of resolution to the investigation and force all the evidence to become public. But no, this investigation is not meant to be conclusive, it is — like Orwell’s description of war — meant to be continuous.
By issuing indictments to individuals that are unlikely to ever come to trial Mueller has dodged the responsibility of presenting any additional evidence — a perfect sleight of hand.
A relatively small number of Facebook ads were used, many after the election, but no one from the investigation claims it had any impact. We are supposed to imagine it did. The Russian meme bombers may or may not be connected to the Russian government but Mueller provides no evidence. The indictments are little more than unconvincing accusations in keeping with the rest of the Russian narrative as eminent historian Jackson Lears has so thoroughly demonstrated.
Can anyone argue that the Russians had anything close to the influence of the corporate media when they gave Trump $2 billion worth of free coverage? Or when DNC operatives worked with their media allies to elevate Trump before the primaries even started? No contest. The electoral process is awash in $Billions skimmed from the global economy but that disappears from view in face of the foreign foe.
By shifting the grounds from hacking, collusion and intervention to what is essentially campaigning — the use of information, speech and propaganda by those seeking to influence the outcome — Mueller continues the war on “Fake News.” Clinton used the same tactic from the first days of the new Cold War. Not to worry about free speech, the secret police will tell us what is true and what is not.
The First Amendment was designed to protect the people from the power of government. It is our right and our right alone to evaluate and judge information. Anything else is tyranny. And make no mistake, these indictments target domestic dissent smearing Black Lives Matters, Berners and the Green Party as unwitting collaborators with the Russians.
Mueller’s recent move covers himself, hides the investigation’s lack of substance and lays the ground work for more. Mueller is achieving the true goals of an inquisition: enforcing political discipline and conformity at home and promoting war preparations abroad. This inquisition diverts us from a terrible truth: American democracy was destroyed by our own hands. The corporate empire killed American democracy.
In fact, there are plenty of people, both Republicans and Democrats, that could be indicted for election fraud and conspiracy right here in the good ole’ USA. Much of the evidence is not in question and has been documented by Mark Crispin Miller, Greg Palast, Election Justice USA, and Code Red. Hackable voting machines, gerrymandering, crosscheck, and purging voter rolls are just a few examples. These crimes gets no traction for two big reasons.
First, it might lead to the kind of election reform that would make it impossible to rig the system. That would force candidates and parties to actually compete in the arena of policy and platform. They might have to offer something positive to the American people instead of relying on cloak and dagger, lesser of two evils and other fear-based tactics to compel people to vote for parties that no longer represent them.
As Ann Garrison recently argued in Black Agenda Report:
If the Democrats wanted to inspire trust in Hillary’s three million vote margin or in any future electoral outcomes, they would call for junking all the electronic voting machines and instituting secure, nationally uniform methods of casting and counting ballots: paper ballots counted by hand and safely stored to make recounts possible. They would thereby propose to preclude any future election hacking by Russians, Republicans, or other potential miscreants, including their fellow Democrats. They would turn more attention to ending voter suppression than to $100,000 worth of Facebook ads generated by a troll farm.
Second, any investigation of US election fraud would disarm the war party — which now includes the corporate Democrats and Republicans — by diluting the propaganda they need to command ever bigger budgets that keep the wheels of perpetual war turning.
The war party is led by the former Republican foreign policy establishment known as the neoconservatives. Whatever their bloody and criminal past, the “neocons,” like their figurehead G.W. Bush, have been rebranded as Democrats.
And the neocons are just the most recent incarnation of a longstanding bi-partisan consensus that has conducted overt war and covert operations to topple governments, intervene in elections, extract resources, and assassinate foreign leaders. The costs of war, the sheer tonnage of bombs and bullets, the millions of dead on all sides, the 650 major military bases, the dangerous and provocative military buildup on Russia’s borders, makes the words and memes dropped on us by Russians, or anyone else, look like the feeble attempts of rank amateurs struggling to compete in a game we have mastered.
How can we be outraged at intervention in our election when it is the US that routinely undermines the self-determination of other nations? We can be outraged at Russians or Chinese, but only from the perspective of militarized nationalism that neocons thrive on. Or, from inside the illusion of “humanitarian war” that has been a part of America’s imperial rhetoric ever since White Man’s Burden eased our minds for crushing the Philippines 1899-1902. And always, and ultimately, from the sanctity of our founding myths: that we are chosen, an exceptional nation that only makes war with “God on Our Side.”
Why would Mueller attack a system that he is so much a part of? Mueller has been a loyal member of the machine enabling wars, silencing whistleblowers and permitting torture since he was appointed to head the FBI by George W. Bush. Mueller dutifully repeated lies that bought us the war in Iraq.
So the inquisition will roll on as it is intended to do. How else can we explain that a year’s worth of investigation has produced no electronic evidence of collusion despite having the world’s largest surveillance system at its disposal? The scene of the alleged crime — the DNC computers and servers — have yet to be inspected; Seth Rich’s computers — the same; two key witness, Julian Assange and Craig Murray have never been interviewed by the investigation. The inquisition is not interested in evidence it is not interested in!
Our job however is to resist being drawn into the bottomless pit of palace politics and to organize a real resistance to empire, war and corporate power. For that we obviously cannot rely upon Mueller, the FBI or any political elites. Either we the people do it or it doesn’t get done.
posted by Satish Sharma at
08:05
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