In the aftermath of the Jan 6 Trumpist putsch at the Capitol, the world reeled - not just at the spectacle of the Capitol building overrun by deranged armed insurrectionists, but also at the manifest incompetence of the Capitol Police.
The Capitol Police command $460m/year, 10% of Congress's total budget. They had ample warning that murderous, anti-democratic revolutionaries were converging on the Capitol. They had a long track-record of over-responding to protests with overwhelming shows of force.
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Given the track-record, the budget and the warnings, could we truly attribute the failure to contain the insurrectionists to incompetence? Did the shots of police officers taking selfies with members of a lynch mob mean that the force was complicit with the traitors?
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Now, six officers have been suspended and 29 more are under investigation for collaborating with the rioters. They join the nationwide active-duty military and police officers who have faced consequences for their role in the mob violence.
Last week, @propublica published a chilling, brilliant investigation by @jbsapien and @js_kaplan sourced from 19 current and former Capitol Police officers who are furious and bewildered at the failure of their command.
They describe scenes of absolute carnage and chaos, of rioters who were so aggressive and violent that officers suspected that they were high on meth, of protesters fumbling their own firearms and trying to grab pistols off officers' hips.
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They describe leaders who were given actionable intelligence about the coup attempt, but directed their focus to paranoid fantasies about antifa counter-demonstrators, and who broke with the procedures used against BLM protests, standing down officers who could have helped.
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They describe officers who were told to leave behind weapons and armor, who then feared for their lives as they were overrun, who were denied access to riot helmets and sustained serious head-injuries.
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The anemic response by Capitol Police to surges and incursions almost didn't happen at all, it seems: officers who joined the lines and fought the rioters did so in defiance of their orders to sit pat - orders that were not rescinded because their commanders were MIA.
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The officers' account reveals an organization always up for beating paralyzed wheelchair users seeking better health care, or to gas and brutalize Black Lives Matter protesters, but were unprepared (and whose leaders were unwilling) to respond to right-wing terror groups.
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The last word in the Propublica report goes to officers who describe the collapse of their confidence in their leadership: "I don’t trust the people above me to make decisions to bring me home safe."
There was never any question as to whether Trump would implement Project 2025, the 900-page brick of terrifying, unhinged policy prescriptions edited by the Heritage Foundation. He would *not* implement it, because he *could* not implement it. No one could. It's impossible.
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This isn't a statement about constitutional limits on executive authority or the realpolitik of getting bizarre and stupid policies past judges or through a hair-thin Congressional majority. This is a statement about the incoherence of Project 2025 itself.
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Running a business is risky: you can't be sure how many customers you'll have, or what they'll ask for. Guess wrong and you'll either have too few workers for the crowd, or you'll pay workers to stand around. This is true even when your "business" is a "hospital."
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Capitalists hate capitalism. Capitalism is defined by risk - the risk of competitors poaching your customers and workers. Capitalists secretly dream of a "command economy" where others must arrange their affairs to suit the capitalists' preferences, taking on their risk.
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Postmortems and blame for the 2024 elections are thick on the ground, but amidst all those theories and pointed fingers, one explanation looms large and credible: the American housing emergency. If the system can't put a roof over your head, that system needs to go.
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American housing has been in crisis for decades, of course, but it keeps getting worse...and worse...and *worse*. Americans pay more for worse housing than at any time in their history.
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After 9/11, we were told that "no cost was too high" when it came to fighting terrorism, and indeed, the US did blow *trillions* on forever wars and regime change projects and black sites and kidnappings and dronings and gulags that were supposed to end terrorism.
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Back in the imperial core, we all got to play the home edition of the "no price is too high" War on Terror game. New, extremely invasive airport security measures were instituted.
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The Canadian national identity involves a lot of sneering at the US, but when it comes to oligarchy, Canada makes America look positively amateurish.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The Biden administration disappointed, frustrated and enraged in so many ways, including abetting a genocide - but one consistent bright spot over the past four years was the unseen-for-generations frontal assault on corporate power and corporate corruption.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The three words that define this battle above all others are "unfair and deceptive" - words that appear in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act and other legislation modeled on it, like USC40 Section 41712(a).
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