The dismantling of the US.

Michael Kempster

I'm increasingly pessimistic. I went through the Post, the Guardian and the Times, as is my habit, and didn't find anything that says anything new,. So I'll say it myself, and apologize for going on at length. I've said all this before, and so have many of you:

1. The federal intervention in Portland, against the wishes of the people, the mayor and the governor, employing entirely extrajudicial, unconstitutional and illegal methods, is equivalent, quite literally, to the Brown Shirts of 1930s Germany, a clear and present danger to what passes for democracy in this country. I cannot imagine better grounds for impeachment. We have Barr's word that such interventions will expand. There's nothing to stop them from interfering with exercise of the franchise. Wait for it.

2. Trump et al.'s handling of the covid-19 epidemic is political, scientific and medical malpractice of the worst sort. Trump is in fact decreasing the amount of data available at a time when it is crucially necessary, and undermining scientific and medical expertise at every turn. He and his acolytes--every Republican who fails to object--will kill people by perhaps hundreds of thousands, further destroy the economy, and further divide a country desperately needing to be reunited before a common enemy.

3. Trump is dividing the country at a time when guns are everywhere, conspiracy theories abound and are gaining traction, where racism is being defended and challenged. It is only a matter of time before lives are lost, worsening the division, at a time when unity of purpose is crucial.

4. Trump has systematically undermined American alliances and relations with its allies abroad, at precisely the time when defense against a common enemy, covid-19, should provoke a unified response, He has courted one repressive regime after another, undermining the cause of human rights.

5. Trump et al. have systematically been looting the government, rearranging the government and the economy to serve the fantastically rich at the expense of the lower and middle classes, at a time when the covid-19 epidemic requires, again, a unified program for relief of those most impacted,.

6. Trump et al. have been putting children in cages., They have caused untold anxiety and worse in even legal, much less undocumented, immigrants, many of whom are crucial to American economic health from farm workers to computer scientists, and have done their best to shut the USA to immigration.

7. Trump et al. have denied and actively worsen perhaps the single greatest problem faced by the human race, climate change.

8. Trump et al. will do everything possible to disenfranchise those opposing them in the November elections. Everything possible. They are capable of anything.

I could go on. Racism, anti-intellectualism, differential treatment of red and blue states, anti-environmental actions, court packing, more. It's only going to get worse. Trump must be defeated in November,. Millions of lives are at stake.

The important difference between rhetoric and compliance-gaining and how to recognize the techniques.

‘Demagogue for president’: Historian details Donald Trump’s 6 weird tricks for authoritarian rule

Quickly about the net

Australia... pics of one hell of an incoming cyclone.

Parenting with puppies.

White House says no Death Star.

All Arab dictators will fall.

Fox News refuses to accept warmer 2012.

Gun groups predict failure of ban.

Lacking a whole hell of a lot more than just polish

QUESTION: Is there anything you would have done differently?

YOO: These memos I wrote were not for public consumption. They lack a certain polish, I think – would have been better to explain government policy rather than try to give unvarnished, straight-talk legal advice. I certainly would have done that differently, but I don’t think I would have made the basic decisions differently.

Scott Horton of Harper's:

Yesterday the Obama Administration released a series of nine previously secret legal opinions crafted by the Office of Legal Counsel to enhance the presidential powers of George W. Bush. Perhaps the most astonishing of these memos was one crafted by University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo. He concluded that in wartime, the President was freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights with respect to anything he chose to label as a counterterrorism operations inside the United States.

Horton concludes his article:

We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it.

A president should have nearly dictatorial powers

True or false?

McCain's Communication Director thinks it's a good idea....

The Constitution says no:

The structure of government in the United States is laid out in the Constitution. The Constitution describes three co-equal branches of government:

• The national, or federal, legislature is called the "Congress." It is made up of elected officials from each state. These officials are responsible for enacting the laws.
• The executive branch, headed by the President, is responsible for running the government and enforcing the laws that Congress enacts.
• The Judicial branch is responsible for interpreting the laws and settling formal disputes between people or between people and the government.

Way to start out on the right foot there, John.

Straight talking directly into dictatorships

Led by McCain's straight talking lobbyist staffers:

Just a reminder

Of what we're dealing with:

I think this explains why Bush has been so incompetent as president of a democracy

Remember when he said a dictatorship would be a lot easier?:



Blame it on his DNA. Remember his grandfather Prescott Bush? The BBC history radio Document ran this in July of this year:

Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American businessmen. [snip]

The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.

Tripped over this information while Googling Prescott Bush. I'll blame Sorghum Crow for mentioning him in comments! How much do you bet we won't hear a peep about this in our mainstream media?

Update: Sorghum Crow has the picture.

While Bush pretends to build democracies, Al-Maliki branches out

And visits Syria:

DAMASCUS -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki is due in Damascus Monday, on his second visit to a US foe this month after a trip to Syria's main regional ally Iran.

It is Maliki's first visit to Syria since he became premier, early last year, although he was based in Damascus in the 1990s when in exile during the rule of executed dictator Saddam Hussein.

Maliki will be accompanied on the three-day visit by his ministers of oil, trade, the interior, and water resources, his office in Baghdad said.

Syria and Iraq only restored diplomatic ties last November, 26 years after they were broken under Saddam over Syria's support for Iran in its eight-year war with Iraq.

The rapprochement paved the way for a week-long visit to Syria in January by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, another formerly-Damascus-based exile, who secured a promise from his opposite number, Bashar Al Assad, to work to "eradicate terrorism."

The United States had been strongly critical of the role in Iraq of both Iran and Syria since its 2003 invasion.

But Maliki's Shiite-led government has friendly relations with Iran and, earlier this month, the prime minister drew White House criticism after he held cordial meetings with Iranian officials.

What does the Bush administration's irritation over al-Maliki's outreach to Iran and Syria actually mean when Bush and Cheney really like dictatorships rather than democracy?

Laura Rozen of War and Piece:

The WP's Peter Baker missed a few important insights in its piece on why Bush's democracy vision has stalled. The two biggest: Bush's vision of overturning tyranny and bringing democracy to Iraq has been dashed in massive sectarian bloodshed, loss of life, turmoil, insurgency, uncertainty and heartbreak and a massive devotion of US resources that might have gone to promoting grand things lots of places, and secondly, that in many targeted countries, promoting democracy would mean allowing Islamist groups, some designated as terrorist groups by the Bush administration, to prevail. The piece left out so many big examples of the contradictions -- Musharraf/Pakistan, Saudi Arabia whose corrupt royal family is so close to the White House and Cheney's office, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt -- of where Bush has decided he isn't quite sure he really wants democratic realities to be realized, and he just may prefer the tyrant, as Cheney openly does in Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. While the piece would seem to promote a few voices blaming the stalling of Bush's grand vision on the bureaucrats in the U.S. government, it also tried to save itself from total ingratiation with the White House by naming responsible the office of the vice president's "little-girl crush on strongmen." But how did it miss how corrupted and stalled and conflicted is the vision at the very top of the U.S. government -- with the president himself -- and the realities the president has found himself confronting? Bush is now using all the Sunni tyrants, the autocrats, royals and propped up, hardly a two of them democratically elected, to counter Iran, for instance. Bush have a hard time with the policy? Congress may be interested to know due to the $30 billion in military aid to those states it's being asked to approve by the Bush White House.

The U.S. government may be in serious trouble if and when Pakistan's military dictator falls. Same the hideously corrupted Saudi royal family, so personally close with Bush and Cheney. They don't seem to have too much use for democracy when it comes to their friends, the corrupt autocrats. It's hard to understand how the piece skipped such big glaring points and contradictions, as if Bush's pure longing for democracy in the world had not been sabotaged by nothing so much as conflicts of interest going to the very top, and U.S. national security interests defined by the very top. How would we know if Bush were really serious about democracy? If he told Riyadh to stuff it. That's never going to happen, so we can rest assured that Bush is quite content to live with the art of the possible, with a very high degree of realism, and any griping about the bureaucrats is something journalists should know better than to accept as more than a wink-nod excuse for the president's own decisions to compromise his vision of promoting democracy.

I don't know... I don't think Bush ever tried to smear democracy around the world. I think saying that gave him an excuse to activate wars to protect our freedoms, to pervert the Constitution, to deny Americans their civil liberties, to amass more power for the White House.

I really never have gotten the sense Bush gives a fuck about democracy.

Withdrawing consent

Brings down governments, makes dictators flee, makes the common man powerful. This non-violent action is more powerful than tanks and bullets:

In the mid-1980's a popular movement sprang up to oust the corrupt Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. As the resistance gained momentum, two key military officers defected from the government and sequestered themselves inside a Manila military base. What followed was an amazing example of nonviolent struggle as hundreds of thousands of ordinary Filipinos took to the streets to protect the rebel officers from troops still loyal to Marcos.

"What the story of the Philippine revolution demonstrates is the power people can have when they withdraw consent."

And the mothers in Argentina who demanded to know what happened to their 'disappeared' children:

The women, whose number soon grew to several score, already sensed that they were testing a surface, without knowing what was beneath. Many others elsewhere in the world who had lived under dictators could have told them what was below: the mendacity of authoritarian control. In the clear air, life in Argentina proceeded as it always had. Given the façade of normalcy, the regime seemed unassailable. No one appeared eager to penetrate it, except now for these desperate women.

Not until two months later, after weekly demonstrations, were three mothers allowed to see the minister of the interior, a general who said he had a file with the names of people who had disappeared, that it contained names from even his friends' families. But he did not know who had taken them; he said "that there were para-military groups out there who couldn't be controlled," Rosario recalled. "He passed the responsibility to other people. Then he said that perhaps our sons had run away with a woman, that perhaps our daughters were working as prostitutes somewhere."

At that moment, it seems, the women's fear gave way to anger. "We told him that they were cowards, because even a cruel dictator like Franco had signed the death sentences with his own hand...We told him everything we felt and we told him that we would come back every week until they gave us an answer and that we would walk in the square every Thursday until we dropped." When the general told them public meetings were prohibited by the state of siege then in effect, they told him they would stay until he gave them an answer. Although they did not know it, these grieving women had declared war.

Non-violence, when used correctly, is more powerful and more persuasive than any weapon. People forget they have this power until they are shoved to the very edge of the abyss, when they realize the government they support is totally against them, when they realize they have nothing to lose. The citizens give the government power, they can take it away.

(Look at the movie: V for Vendetta for a recent reminder.)

(links from NTodd)