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Author Topic: The Anti-Democratic Elite Fix Was IN From The Very Start of the USA  (Read 5559 times)

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AGelbert

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U.S. Capitalism Was Born in the Destruction of the Commons

LAURA FLANDERS, TRUTHOUT

It's said that European capitalism came out of the destruction of feudalism, but U.S. capitalism was born in the destruction of the commons. Lately, there's been a resurgence of interest in rebuilding the commons in the U.S., according to authors Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh. The process of "commoning" goes beyond mere redistribution and reorganization, they say -- it involves building a ground of resistance, from Standing Rock to the 2018 midterms.

Watch the Video and Read the Interview →



« Last Edit: July 08, 2021, 11:40:31 am by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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The Far Right Takeover of America is Almost Complete-- What Happens When Fanatical Extremists Capture All of a Country’s Institutions? Bu Umair Haque
https://eand.co/the-far-right-takeover-of-america-is-almost-complete-67e9810d846b

AGelbert

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The Far Right Takeover of America is Almost Complete-- What Happens When Fanatical Extremists Capture All of a Country’s Institutions? Bu Umair Haque
https://eand.co/the-far-right-takeover-of-america-is-almost-complete-67e9810d846b

Yep. 

I read the post and even that seems too hopeful. Mueller ain't gonna do NADA to prevent more and more Fascist Police State mayhem.

Quote
America being among the ten worst places to be a woman, the worst place in the rich world to be a mother or a child or a retiree, and many, many more places on dismal lists of worsts. Why is that?

Because of Oligarchic corruption.

Quote
... you can’t capture the three branches of government if social institutions are working properly. Institutions such as the press, academia, media, and so on. And yet here too, American institutions failed, and failed catastrophically.
The above is a conditional statement. The social institutions in the USA have had there ethical ups and downs, but beneath the principled ethical facade has always lurkered the power of money to foster inequality for the express purpose of allowing the monied parasites to lawlessly act with impunity (i.e. Oligarchy).

Quote
PAUL JAY: There’s this fundamental belief, religious belief, that America’s foreign policy since World War II has been a fight for freedom.

GORE VIDAL: Well, it never was. And the belief that we’re a democracy. That means you know nothing about the Constitution. The people who made the Constitution hated democracy. Some of them put up with it better than others. Jefferson was pretty good on the subject. The others just loathed it.
Quote
GORE VIDAL: The Federalist Papers are very clear. Whenever one of the founding fathers, and one of the people who was inventing the Constitution, they start to get apoplectic at the mention of Athens, the mention of Pericles, the mention of democracy. They go on and on about mobs, and we don’t want this, and we don’t want that. We’re an oligarchy of the well-to-do. We were at the very beginning, when the Constitution was made, and we’re even more so now.
http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/who-can-you-trust/911-gt-september-11-2001-gt-u-s-fascist-coup/msg12054/#msg12054

Gore Vidal did not want to go further down that (unexamined life) rabbit hole, but I routinely do. As long as everything has a price in the currency of the realm, money will corrupt any and all institutions that benefit (even if originally an oligarchic facade, but that obtained some democracy fostering teeth along the way) of we-the-people, aling with most citizens of the realm. The problem is the Capitalist worship of materialism, as Chris Hedges has often pointed out.

The following is, IMHO, a naive statement:
Quote
American media was hopelessly out of its depth.

This statement assumes good intentions by the media that were thwarted by ignorance and/or incompetence. I disagree. The Media is a rigidly controlled propaganda arm of Fascist USA. They know exactly what they can push and what they are told to use to head the herd off in the wrong direction. They are not incompetent. They are bought and paid for.
Quote
And so here we are. The far right takeover of America is almost complete. Fanatical extremists of a kind unseen since Nazi Germany have taken over almost every single last American institution, from government to public sphere.

True.
Quote
Bang! Soon enough, it was game over. By 2019 — now — the following institutions had all fallen to the fanatical extreme right. The executive. The judiciary. The legislature. The press. The public sphere. What was left?

Not much, my friends, not much. And that is the point. The extreme right wing takeover of America is almost complete, finito, over and done with. There is very little standing in the way now. By my reckoning, one last barely functioning institution. An election. Will it matter — or will apathy and fear carry the day? You be the judge of that.
Umair is right about where we are. My quibble is with the timing of the takeover. The Constitution was written by and for a tiny group of wealthy, landed white men. All the rights that came forth from the subsequent Bill of Rights were for them, not for anybody else. The courts have been playing the game of pretending otherwise, while, in practice, consistently looking the other way at lawless oligarchic behavior, ever since.

Umair mentions the failure to connect the dots by too many. Here is a man who has totally connected the dots:


September 2016

Quote
Bob McIlvaine 👍👍👍 is the father of Robert McIlvaine Jr., who was murdered on 9/11. In an attempt to discover how his son died, Bob attended all but one of the 9/11 Commission Hearings. He has since has been very outspoken about the need for the truth about 9/11. Bob has appeared in documentaries and news stories that call into question the official account of the 9/11 attacks.

CONNECTING THE DOTS OF 9-11

How I learned that peace may never be achieved

by Robert McIlvaine

Since Bobby’s death on 9-11, I have been on a journey to find the truth of how and why he died and who really killed him. I was not satisfied, from the beginning, with the official story of his death. I also feared that violence around the world would escalate as a result of this horrendous act.

In 2002, I joined September 11th Families For Peaceful Tomorrows, a group of activists whose name was inspired by a Martin Luther King statement: “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows,” In the early part of the new decade we marched hand in hand for peace in Washington and New York, hoping that 9-11 would not be justification for increased war efforts. I’ll never forget the moment when I was arrested on the Capitol lawn, proudly carrying a banner stating, “Not In My Son’s Name,” which referred to the use of 9-11 by Bush to further any war efforts.

Later, at the World Conference on Victims of Violence in Bogata, Columbia, I told Bobby’s story to a packed audience of survivors of various atrocities. I was honored to have the opportunity to share my pain and grief with those who truly understood the price of violence.

Back in the United States, I regularly attended the 9-11 Commission Hearings, patiently listening to testimony while hoping to find answers to an official story that continued to make little sense. Instead, I felt frustrated with the inability of the Commission to discover anything new or enlightening. Witnesses, including Condoleezza Rice, were not accountable to the Commission or the American people. Ms Rice, to my dismay, filibustered her way through each of the questions posed by the Commissioners. I returned home very discouraged.

In 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing, I was asked to join Peaceful Tomorrows on a march from Nagasaki to Hiroshima, honoring those who have died in war. I walked beside the Hibakusha, survivors of the attack. They showed amazing pride, never taking on the role of victim, though many were treated as outcasts by their own people. The Hibakusha‘s courage impressed in me the need to continue my quest for peace and truth.

I returned home, deciding that if the US government was not going to give me the real answers to 9-11, then I’d find them myself. Why, I wondered, was it so hard to go against the government’s version of a story that did not make sense? I wanted to know why the media always seemed as far from a “free press” as one could imagine, often ignoring obvious breakthroughs in information. Why, also, did peace seem even farther away than before 9-11, frustrating the peace community? Our children died that horrible day and it was now being used as fodder for more escalation, more deaths.

My quest for truth took me to both the traditional history sources as well as books written by outstanding authors who questioned the “company line” and sought deeper answers than what was offered in the news or in press conferences. As I searched, I recalled quotes by Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt, initially read years ago by me when their dire warnings meant very little to a young college student studying history.

Eisenhower, in a famous speech in 1961, warned of the dangers of “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”

Kennedy, later that year, warned of a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence-on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.”

Fascinated with these predictions by such stellar leaders, I began to probe further, seeing patterns, taking a harder look at the circumstances leading to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I looked farther back in history, reading about Operation Gladio and the Gulf of Tonkin in a different, more knowledgeable light.

Was 9-11 another false flag; I was beginning to see the truth. I wondered if Presidents truly had any power to wage peace. Were special interests groups with unimaginable wealth and power, who were often referred to as “Shadow Government,” controlling the decisions of war?

After more continued research, I learned that these clandestine operatives would never allow control of the government to the people. They would instead rely on disinformation (weapons of mass destruction is a perfect example), fabrication of injustices, and the spreading of propaganda to justify their aggressive acts. Could these elite few be responsible for the upheavals in so many countries when it appeared to the general public that we were in those countries to “promote democracy”?

As I continued my reading I recalled a quote by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister: “You tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people eventually come to believe it.” He went on to say that the truth “is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”

Sadly, I came to a conclusion best said by Woodrow Wilson and unfortunately, true today. “We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world, no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”

From hours and hours of research, I have learned that the truth of 9-11 as well as the truth regarding who really holds the power in this country and throughout the world, are not in our best interests to know, according to those elite few who choose to control our destiny.

Unfortunately, peace and the truth are not part of that destiny.


I posted this bit of hope, in regard to Sanders, recently on disqus:

EVERY TIME I post on Daily Kos (which is not frequent, believe me), I am ruthlessly attacked.

Two years ago, some Daily Kos Mueller cheerleader said that, with Mueller, Trump's treason would begin to be exposed. I replied that Trump's treason would begin to be BURIED by Mueller. It has been buried. Qui bono, eh?

About a week ago I posted how 👹 Pelosi, her "health" insurance operative 😈Wendell Primus and DCCC  😈 Cheri Bustos are out to sabotage Medicare for All.

Boy, did they go nuts with with prissy claims I was being "inflammatory and "divisive" (see Orwell).

President Carter stated a few years ago that, "The USA is ruled by an Oligarchy." All that said, I do think that the people here or in any other country, regardless of how powerful the evil bastards running the government are, DO have the power to overthrow tyranny.

THAT is why I am rooting for Sanders. IF he is allowed to win the election, it means the oligarchs are scared shitless of we-the-people and are planning on using Sanders as a POTUS pressure relief valve. They will need to bring a sandwich if they think they can bend Sanders the way they bent Obama.

At any rate, with President Sanders, and a Democratic Party ruled Senate and House (of course), we-the-people will have some relief from the continued onslaught of fascist based, penury imposing inequality now crushing us.

Sanders is also the only one out there who really understands the FACT that, we either get off of polluting fossil fuels or we, including those "mysterious oligarchs" who cannot see past their profit over people and planet STUPID noses, are all dead.
« Last Edit: April 17, 2019, 06:09:14 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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When Will America Fall - Like the Roman Empire?
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Thom Hartmann Program
Published on May 13, 2019

The fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE is well known. Less well known, is whether the US will fall this century.

Edward J Watts book ‘Mortal Republic’ covers the Roman Republic and how Rome fell into tyranny and discusses with Thom whether the American Empire will decline.

The historian covers the Roman Empire fall and the possible decline of the American Empire.


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Category News & Politics
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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Join me in another rousing chorus of, "Both sides are equally bad."

Moderate Democrats’ Delusions of ‘Prudence’ Will Kill Us All

By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz



Earlier this month, the weather report for the Arctic Circle was partly cloudy with a high of 84 degrees.

Earlier this year, a United Nations report found that “potentially devastating temperature rises of 3 to 5 [degrees Celsius] in the Arctic are now inevitable even if the world succeeds in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement.” At the moment, no nation on Earth is on track to meet its emissions targets under that accord. And any temperature rise above what’s already inevitable would pose a severe risk of melting the methane-infused Arctic permafrost, thus releasing 283 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — a development that, when combined with the disappearance of heat-deflecting ice, would rapidly accelerate global warming and all but doom human civilization.

Meanwhile, the government of the world’s lone superpower remains dominated by a political party that regards climate change as something between an afterthought and a “Chinese hoax.” The GOP vigorously opposed the Paris agreement, and is in the process of repealing just about every measure the Obama administration took to uphold it. In fact, the Republican White House is so committed to a new rule that would keep economically inefficient — and ecologically ruinous — coal-fired power plants in operation, it is ignoring an EPA report that estimates such a policy would result in 1,400 additional premature deaths in the U.S. every year. For their part, Senate Republicans are so contemptuous of the notion that the climate crisis demands ambitious government action, they have turned the Green New Deal into a punching bag, and insisted that any new infrastructure package must consist largely of environmental deregulations.

America’s most powerful political party is also growing increasingly hostile to democratic values — and evermore insulated from popular rebuke by its own revisions to election law and the structural biases of America’s system of government. On the state level, Republicans have implemented a wide variety of voting rules designed to depress the political participation of Democratic-leaning constituencies. And when a Democrat nevertheless wins a gubernatorial election in a purple state, the GOP has taken to using their heavily gerrymandered state legislative majorities to preemptively strip the governor’s office of its traditional powers. These same anti-democratic tendencies are manifest at the federal level. The last two Republican administrations have launched investigations into the (nonexistent) crisis of mass voter fraud, in an ostensible bid to rationalize suppressive voting rules. And both Mitch McConnell and the Trump administration have refused to recognize the Democratic Party’s right to govern — the former by nullifying Barack Obama’s authority to appoint Supreme Court justices; the latter by refusing to comply with the (Democrat-controlled) House’s subpoenas.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has abetted the GOP’s assaults on democratic rule by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, approving unlimited corporate spending in American elections, vetoing an Arizona law that attempted to limit the influence of such spending by providing candidates with public funds, and hobbling public-sector unions, one of the only institutions with the capacity to serve as a countervailing weight to the power of (overwhelmingly Republican-aligned) corporate-interest groups.

This synergy between conservative domination of the anti-majoritarian judiciary and Republican efforts to entrench anti-majoritarian rule over the elected branches of government threatens to trigger a feedback loop nearly as dire for U.S. democracy as melting permafrost would be for the global climate: As the Supreme Court makes it easier for Republicans to disenfranchise hostile voters and dilute the influence of those who retain the ballot, Republicans become better able to replenish and expand their grip on the judiciary.

The threat that the GOP could soon entrench the rule of a reactionary, predominantly white minority isn’t an idle one. Thanks to Senate malapportionment, the decline of ticket-splitting in an era when all politics is national, and the political polarization of urban and rural areas (a nearly ubiquitous phenomenon across Western democracies that shows few signs of abating any time soon), Republicans currently enjoy a historically large structural advantage in the upper chamber, one that is poised to grow even more formidable in the years to come. By 2040, half the U.S. population is expected to reside in eight diverse, largely urban states, while another 20 percent of the populace will be concentrated in the next eight most populous states. This will leave the remaining, overwhelming white, and nonurban 30 percent of the American population with 68 votes in the U.S. Senate. In a political culture where Democratic presidents are no longer allowed to appoint Supreme Court justices unless their party also controls the upper chamber, GOP domination of the Senate will translate into GOP domination of the judiciary, even if the conservative movement boasts an ever-smaller fraction of public support (as research on the political views of millennials and Gen-Zers suggests that it will).

All of which is to say: There’s a reasonable argument that America’s capacity to address the existential threat posed by climate change — and arrest its descent into plutocracy — depends on the Democratic Party regaining full control of the federal government, and promptly enacting a series of (small-d) democratic reforms such as federal voting-rights protections and statehood for overwhelming nonwhite territories like Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Washington D.C., before secular trends allow a reactionary minority to lock up the Senate and judiciary for a generation.

There are many obstacles to such a beneficent development. A major one is the tendency of moderate Democrats to mistake their own myopic complacency for heroic prudence. Greg Weiner, a political scientist and onetime aide to former moderate Democratic senator Bob Kerrey, gives vivid expression to this unfortunate frame of mind, in a column published by the New York Times Wednesday.

In an op-ed titled “It’s Not Always the End of the World,” Weiner scolds Democrats and Republicans alike for grossly exaggerating the stakes of partisan conflict in the contemporary United States. Against the catastrophism embraced by the likes of Donald Trump and Barack Obama, Weiner champions the lost art of political “prudence,” which Abraham Lincoln once practiced so well:

Prudence is a capacity for judgment that enables leaders to adjust politics to circumstances. In extraordinary times, prudence demands boldness. In mundane moments, it requires modesty. Lincoln, the foremost exemplar of prudence in American political history, can instruct today’s voters in both ends of that continuum.

In 1838, an ordinary historical moment, a 28-year-old Lincoln warned the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., that the greatest danger to American liberty would arise from leaders seeking greatness in times that did not require it … A quarter-century later, as Lincoln prepared a bold stroke that helped define his own legacy — the Emancipation Proclamation — his annual message to Congress spoke of historical circumstances more grandly: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

Those poles of Lincoln’s politics — modesty in ordinary times and boldness when required — illustrate the essence of prudence. The gateway to prudence is accurately gauging the character of one’s moment in history.

These paragraphs do a rather poor job of establishing Weiner’s own capacity to distinguish history’s “ordinary times” from its “mundane moments.” Was the “greatest danger to American liberty” in 1838 really politicians who demanded bold reforms in an era that required none? Or was it, perhaps, the slaveocracy that condemned more than 1 million Americans to lifetimes of forced labor, family separations, ****, and physical abuse? And was Lincoln’s complacency about eliminating slavery, until the moment when abolition became militarily expedient for the Union Army, a mark of extraordinary prudence or an all-too-ordinary moral failure?

Weiner is no more discerning when he turns his gaze from antebellum America to Donald Trump’s. “There is no question that Mr. Trump’s political style is aberrant,” Weiner writes. “But what if, all things considered, the needs of the moment are ordinary?”

In his ensuing argument for the mundanity of our republic’s present challenges, Weiner never acknowledges the existence of climate change, voter suppression, Trump’s ongoing war on the rule of law, or any of the other maladies catalogued above. Here is the entirety of Weiner’s argument for why those who regard our present moment as one defined by crisis are deluding themselves:

Yet for all the polarization in our politics, Mr. Trump and many of his Democratic challengers agree on the core claim that we live in the throes of a historical crisis. They concur that economic dislocation has ravaged the middle class: many of them might have uttered Mr. Trump’s inaugural proclamation of “American carnage.” All speak of constitutional crises — Mr. Trump of the excesses of the administrative state, Democrats of his violations of longstanding norms.

 

But the erosion of the middle class is not an acute ailment: It is a gradual, nearly half-century phenomenon that is susceptible only to gradual solutions as well. As for the supposed collapse of American government promulgated by the bureaucracy, the truth is much less dramatic: The administrative state is the product of an eight-decade consensus dating to the New Deal, not an emergent calamity. It can be unwound, but 80 years of practice will not yield to sudden solutions.

Even if we stipulate that Weiner has accurately — and comprehensively — identified our republic’s crises as each party defines them, his argument would be uncompelling. It can be simultaneously true that the middle class has been in decline for a half century, and that we’ve now reached a moment of crisis in that long descent. Weiner could perhaps marshal empirical evidence for complacency about the middle class’s present state. But instead, he has rested his case on the claim that “a social problem that has been gradually deepening over a period of many years cannot possibly become a crisis in the present moment”; by this logic, it would have been “imprudent” for anyone to warn of an impending Civil War in 1860, as tensions between the North and South over the expansion of slavery into the Western territories was a “nearly half-century phenomenon” at that time.

But, of course, Weiner ignores the principal reasons for the left’s catastrophism, while badly misconstruing those behind the right’s. It is not the threat of malignant bureaucracy that led former Trump White House senior adviser Michael Anton to describe 2016 as the “Flight 93 Election,” but rather “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty,” which was rendering the electorate “more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”

Weiner’s column isn’t without its merits. His observation that presidential candidates and the political press have to engage in reckless hyperbole to get noticed are fair (there is a reason why the headline to this column is a bit shouty). And “the rhetoric of catastrophe,” as he calls it, certainly has had a malign influence on America’s civic life in recent years. Nor is he wrong to accuse the Democratic Party of engaging in such threat inflation on many occasions.

But in its blithe elision of the primary threats facing our polity and planet, Weiner’s column epitomizes the self-congratulatory complacency of the moderate Senate Democrats, who are more scandalized by the thought of the filibuster’s abolition than the climate’s ruination. If Team Blue can somehow wrest Senate control from Mitch McConnell in 2021, we will not need “modesty” from lawmakers like Jon Tester and Joe Manchin; rather, we will need them to display uncharacteristic boldness, by voting to diminish their own small states’ overrepresentation in the Senate and for sweeping action to mitigate the climate crisis.

Such is the minimum required by prudence in our time.

« Last Edit: July 08, 2021, 11:42:17 am by AGelbert »

AGelbert

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Join me in another rousing chorus of, "Both sides are equally bad."


By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz



I am no longer sure that after the Civil War there were two sides to American politics, when the Madisonians got folded, spindled and corporate power mutiliated by the Hamiltonian Robber Barons.

I now believe that, towards the end of the 19th century, the 50 originial "investors" in Brown Brothers Harriman (Rockefeller was one of them) became the hidden U.S. OILIGARCHY. These heinous oligarchs spawned a couple of generations of equally despicable oligarchs. By controlling the "both sides" political food fight, these slaves of avarice and/or ambition have run this freak show ever since. 

You know, people say that Maximilien Robespierre said there are no innocents. That is not accurate. He said that, ONLY those who were innocent deserved mercy. That is no excuse for terrorism, of course, but I think his logic is sound.

February of the Year of our Lord 1794:

SNIPPET 1:
Quote
But as the essence of the republic or of democracy is equality, it follows that the love of country necessarily includes the love of equality.

It is also true that this sublime sentiment assumes a preference for the public interest over every particular interest; hence the love of country presupposes or produces all the virtues: for what are they other than that spiritual strength which renders one capable of those sacrifices? And how could the slave of avarice or ambition, for example, sacrifice his idol to his country?

Not only is virtue the soul of democracy; it can exist only in that government. ...

SNIPPET 2:
Quote
. . . Indulgence for the royalists, cry certain men, mercy for the villains! No! mercy for the innocent, mercy for the weak, mercy for the unfortunate, mercy for humanity.

Society owes protection only to peaceable citizens;

read more:

https://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/robespierre/1794/terror.htm

The modern Robber Barron Oligarchs now have something their 19th Robber Baron ancestors did not: robots. Human (cheap/slave) labor was needed a century ago to ruthlessly create and preserve Robber Barron Dynasties. Human labor is still somewhat cheaper than robots, but that is rapidly changing. Robots now build robots that can repair robots. Are you getting the picture?

I am. These Oligarchs do not want to lower their carbon footprint to keep climate change from wiping humanity out. So, they figure allowing climate change to wipe out 95% of humanity while they "ride it out" is "worth it". In fact, they see a large reduction in the human population as a huge positive factor because they believe it will help the biosphere recover from damage caused by a large human population.

They are wrong, but what do I know?

Shape of things to come song video
« Last Edit: June 01, 2019, 10:50:20 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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Are we the First Country to Go Backwards?
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Thom Hartmann Program
Published on Jul 10, 2019

Are we watching Democracy move backwards?

Tucker Carlson's remarks about Rep Ilhan Omar definitely indicate that America could be the first developed country to move backwards away from democracy

But into what and how can we stop the Republicans, Trump and Tucker Carlson from dragging us away from the democracy so many have built over the years?

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He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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The Illinois Holocaust Denier Who Ran for Congress in 2018 Is Doing It Again
Arthur Jones got 26% of the vote when he ran two years ago.



By Tess Owen
Dec 3 2019

The Chicago-area Holocaust denier who got 26% of the vote when he ran for Congress two years ago wants to give it another shot.

Arthur Jones, 71, filed paperwork Monday declaring his candidacy for the 3rd House District Republican primary in Illinois. Jones, who believes the Holocaust was an “international extortion racket” and has been affiliated with various Nazi organizations throughout his career, was the only Republican on the ballot in 2018 — and 56,350 people voted for him, despite his views being widely publicized before the election.

His “America First” campaign peddled bizarre anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, for example, that the Mexican government was orchestrating a covert takeover of southern U.S. as part of a plot to establish a new homeland called “Aztlan.” Other campaign issues included making English an official language and banning poor people, specifically people receiving public assistance, from owning guns.

Jones was one of a handful of openly white nationalist or anti-Semitic candidates who ran for federal office in 2018, which experts saw as further evidence of a newly-emboldened far-right movement that had emerginged from the shadows.

Those far-right extremists ran as Republicans, which put the GOP in an awkward position. The Illinois GOP disavowed Jones’ campaign — but failed to come up with a suitable candidate to run against himJones in the primary.

This year, things will be different. Jones is up against not one but two Republicans in the March primary. Jones’ candidacy — and the fact he was able to participate in the general election — got a lot of attention in 2018, but his run was by no means his first foray into politics. He’s run for office in Illinois nearly every election cycle since 1984, and each time until 2018, tried and failed to compete with at least one other Republican in the primary.

In primaries where Jones ran against other Republicans, he was able to take home anywhere between 2% and 33% of the vote, depending on the number of opponents he was facing.

Jones won’t be the only extremist on the ballot next year. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, a far-right street-fighting gang, is running as a Republican in Florida’s 27th Congressional District.

And the GOP finds itself with still more unconventional candidates, with several supporting the bizarre, pro-Trump conspiracy theory known as QAnon on upcoming ballots. Four GOP candidates running for Congress in Minnesota, Florida, California and Texas have shared QAnon messaging online.
« Last Edit: November 06, 2021, 10:58:47 pm by AGelbert »

Surly1

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Another day, another nazi. Black people are insufficiently grateful for the opportunity to provide target practice to racist cops. But Barr's remarks are going over just fine with the owners.

William Barr Says Those Who Don’t Show More Respect To Cops May Not Get Police Protection

William Barr Says Those Who Don’t Show More Respect To Cops May Not Get Police Protection

U.S. Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday that if some communities don’t begin showing more respect to law enforcement, then they could potentially not be protected by police officers.

The country’s top cop made the questionable remarks while giving a speech at the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in Policing

“But I think today, American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers,” Barr said. “And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves ― and if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for clarification on who specifically Barr was referring to when he mentioned “communities” and what he meant by people finding themselves without police protection.

But American Bridge, a liberal super PAC that first flagged the comments, said the attorney general was referring to communities of color that have historically had a contentious relationship with law enforcement due to police brutality, mass incarceration and racial profiling.

“The Attorney General isn’t being subtle and that shouldn’t surprise us considering this administration’s record,” American Bridge spokesperson Jeb Fain told HuffPost in a statement. “When it comes to communities of color, he sees justice and equal protection under the law as subject to conditions. 

“Barr’s words are as revealing as they are disturbing ― flagrantly dismissive of the rights of Americans of color, disrespectful to countless law enforcement officers who work hard to serve their communities, and full of a continuing disregard for the rule of law.”

The attorney general has proved before that he does not support the more humane criminal justice reform that’s coming to states, counties and local jurisdictions across the country. Since taking over as attorney general in February, Barr has maintained the “tough on crime” approach that President Donald Trump has adopted.

In August, Barr told the Fraternal Order of Police ― the country’s largest police organization ― that there should be “zero tolerance for resisting police.” The attorney general gave an emotionally charged speech going after local prosecutors he accused of making police officers’ jobs more difficult because of their more progressive approaches to criminal cases.


AGelbert

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The 2020 Anti-Democratic GOP Fix
« Reply #39 on: December 04, 2019, 10:24:34 pm »

Dec 3 2019 By Tess Owen


Arthur Jones got 26% of the vote when he ran two years ago.

Looks like a typical 😈 kraut NAZI to me. I'm sure 🦀 Trump will support him.


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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 ;D ;D ;D

We sure have.

AGelbert

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Has America Always Been Tyrannical?
« Reply #41 on: February 03, 2020, 07:24:37 pm »

Has America Always Been Tyrannical?
1,690 views•Feb 3, 2020


Thom Hartmann Program
205K subscribers

Donald Trump is leading America down the road to tyranny, Thom Talks to listeners who have always seen a tyranical side to American Democracy

Has America Always been tyranical to some populations, and if these callers are right, what can we do about it,

Its not enoguh to just stop Trump, the tradition of tyranical rule in America needs to be stopped, let us know how we can do this in the comments.

⭐ Join our Membership and Support the Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/user/thomhartmann
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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June 23, 2021

Protecting our elections

Although it was no surprise that the Senate failed to consider the For the People Act last month, it was still tragic 🤦‍♂️. So what now? Supporters of voting rights in Congress are focusing on four sets of provisions to protect our elections. The alternative is to allow 🐘 state 😈 legislatures to distort the federal balance of powers between state and national government, a balance that is being transformed through state legislatures’ distortion of congressional elections.

READ MORE
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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November 6, 2021 by C.J. Polychroniou 🗽, Truthout

SNIPPET:

C.J. Polychroniou: The U.S. has a long history of war-on-terror campaigns going all the way back to the spread of anarchism in late 19th century. During the Cold War era, communists were routinely labelled as “terrorists,” and the first systematic war on terror unfolded during the Reagan administration. Following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration renewed the war on terror by implementing a series of far-reaching policy initiatives, many of which, incidentally, went unnoticed by the public but also continued during the Obama and Trump administrations, respectively, which subverted democracy and the rule of law. Can you elaborate about the impact of war-on-terror policies in the dismantling of U.S. democracy?

Khury Petersen-Smith ✨: It’s true: The tactics and beliefs that the U.S. has deployed in the war on terror have deep roots that stretch well before our current time. I would argue that the U.S. has never been a democracy, and that a key reason is its basically permanent state of war, which began with its founding. New England settlers, for example, waged a war of counterinsurgency against Indigenous peoples here who resisted colonization in King Philip’s War. The settlers besieged Indigenous nations, considering communities of adults and children to be “enemies” and punishing them with incredible violence. This was in the 1670s.



In a different U.S. counterinsurgency, in the Philippines in the early 20th century, American soldiers used “the water cure,” a torture tactic comparable to the “waterboarding” that the U.S. has used in the war on terror. This was one feature of a horrific war of scorched earth that the U.S. waged as Filipino revolutionaries fought for an independent country after Spanish colonization. The U.S. killed tens of thousands of Filipino fighters, and hundreds of thousands — up to a million — civilians. There was also a staggering amount of death due to secondary violence, such as starvation and cholera outbreaks, and due to the U.S. declaration that civilians were fair game to target (as seen in the infamous Balangiga Massacre). It was during that episode in 1901 on the island of Samar, when an American general ordered troops to kill everyone over the age of 10. The designation of whole populations as the “enemy” — and therefore targets for violence — has echoes that reverberate in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and other places where the U.S. has fought the war on terror.

This is to say that there are different chapters in the history of U.S. empire, but there is a throughline of justifying military violence and the denial of human rights in defense of U.S. power and “the American way of life.” This history of wars informs those of the present.

In the 20th century, labeling various activities “terrorism” was one way of rationalizing the use of force. The U.S. did this especially with its allies in response to anti-colonial liberation movements. So the South African apartheid regime called anti-apartheid resistance “terrorism,” and the Israeli state did (and continues to do) the same to Palestinian resistance, however nonviolent. The U.S. has armed and defended these states, embracing and promoting the rhetoric of war against “terrorism.”

The flip side of “terrorism” — the blanket enemy against which all violence is justified — is “democracy” — the all-encompassing thing that the U.S. claims to defend in its foreign policy. But again, the 20th century saw the U.S. embrace, arm and wage war with and on behalf of anti-democratic, dictatorial forces on every continent. The decades of violence that the U.S. carried out and supported throughout Latin America in the latter part of the 20th century, in response to waves of popular resistance for social and economic justice, serve as a brutal chapter of examples.

All of these things helped constitute the foundation upon which the Bush administration launched the war on terror.

To answer your question more directly, military violence always requires dehumanization and the denial of rights — and this inevitably corrupts any notions of democracy. War, in fact, always involves an attack on democratic rights at large. When the U.S. launched the war on terror in 2001, the federal government simultaneously waged military campaigns abroad and passed legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act, issued legal guidelines and other practices that introduced new levels of surveillance, denial of due process, rationalization of torture and other attacks on civil liberties. These efforts especially targeted Muslims and people of South Asian, Central Asian, Southwest Asian and North African origin — all of whom were subject to being cast as “terrorists” or “suspected terrorists.”

It is worth noting that while Bush drew upon the deep roots of U.S. violence to launch the war on terror, there has been incredible continuity, escalation and expansion throughout it. Bush launched the drone war, for example, and President Barack Obama then wildly expanded and escalated it. President Donald Trump then escalated it further.

Full article on interview with scholar and activist Khury Petersen-Smith, Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, in which he discusses how U.S. imperialism has undermined democracy, both home and abroad, with the wars abroad even being tied to police brutality at home.
People Worldwide Name US as a Major Threat to World Peace. Here’s Why.
« Last Edit: November 07, 2021, 12:41:03 am by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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