Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 21, 2017 1:11 pm
Trump brings Churchill bust back to Oval Office
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/ ... al-office/
by seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 21, 2017 1:15 pm
The inevitable Trumputin divorce
Why it is not meant to be for Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
A billboard by a pro-Serbian movement shows the image US President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the town of Danilovgrad, Montenegro [EPA]A billboard by a pro-Serbian movement shows the image US President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the town of Danilovgrad, Montenegro [EPA]
byRoman Dobrokhotov
Roman Dobrokhotov is a Moscow-based journalist and civil activist. He is the editor-in-chief of The Insider.
After the inauguration of Donald Trump, media attention will be fixed on his first steps towards Russia. A lot has been said already about the difficult choice Trump faces after the hacking scandal: on the one hand, he promised voters he will improve relations with Moscow; on the other, any overture towards the Kremlin will be interpreted as a confirmation of the rumours about the alleged influence Russian President Vladimir Putin has over him. But little has been said about the dilemma that Putin himself faces, and that one is even more difficult.
On the one side, Trump's victory was an unexpected gift for the Kremlin, and it seems no one is trying to hide the fact. Russian state media are going out of their way to compliment the newly elected US president and smear his opponents.
NATO troops in Poland raise US-Russia tensions
For example, Russia's Channel One news reports portray Trump as a defender of the working class, who is harassed by deceitful media and attacked by paid demonstrators, and who will finally rescind an "unpopular" healthcare reform and defend the country against migrants. In other words, the Kremlin's propaganda defends the US president with such dedication, as if he were the Russian president.
One can understand why this is so. After all, many painful political issues are at stake. The main one is, of course, the repeal of the sanctions, which are harming not so much the Russian economy, as individuals in Putin's closest circle.
Another important issues is Ukraine. The Kremlin hopes to have Crimea recognised as Russian territory and not to have any weapon systems installed on Ukrainian territory. Of course, there are also expectations about the resolution of the Syrian question: Moscow hopes that Trump's administration won't demand that Assad steps down.
The Kremlin is happy about Trump's statements on NATO and it hopes that its expansion will stop and military deployment close to Russian borders will be curbed.
But there is another side to this coin: Trump's presidential victory could be a headache for Vladimir Putin as well.
The past 10 years, and especially since 2014, all internal Russian propaganda has been built on the concept of the external enemy - the West led by the US. The whole world believes that Russia is fighting in the Donbass region against Ukraine, but Russian media says Russia is fighting in Ukraine against the US. The whole world thinks that in Syria,Russia is defending Bashar al-Assad. But Russian media reports that in Syria Russia is resisting Washington's attempt to spread chaos through the armed groups it controls.
Looking for a new villain
The US is the answer to all painful questions. If the opposition in Russia organises marches, of course, it is the US which wants to destabilise Russia by paying activists to protests.
An economic crisis in the country? No, the problem is not corruption and ineffective governance, it is Western sanctions! And if a law banning "homosexuality propaganda" is being voted on, then that is justified with protecting society from the "corrupting influence of the West".
In fact, there is not one problem which the sharp-tongued Russian TV hosts cannot link to the US. For example, if you get detained without any reason, even beaten up in the police station, you wouldn't blame it on Washington. But it can always be pointed out that after all, in America the police would shoot you on the spot for even the slightest resistance.
OPINION: America was a 'stan' long before Trump
It may be possible to avoid this difficult situation by switching attention to other Western countries. To a certain extent, this has already happened: if 10 years ago, the attitude of Russians towards Europe was positive overall, today it is much more negative - even if Europe still fairs better than the US. State TV channels portray Europe as sinking in an economic crisis, suffering under the oppression of migrants, who invade the rights of citizens and promote debauchery - the Kremlin's media love to use the word "Gayropa" on these occasions.
In any case, Europe will not fit into the role of the new enemy. That is because this same propaganda regime was portraying Europe as a helpless and weak-willed marionette of the US. Then, of course, there needs to be another political figure embodying this enemy. Russians used to decorate their car bumpers with stickers insulting Obama. Who is going take his place? Angela Merkel? Theresa May? No, it won't work.
There is also another reason for Europe not fitting into the role of enemy No 1. The European Union is not really a state, but a group of counties which have different relations with the Kremlin. In the Czech Republic, Serbia, Hungary, Moldova and Bulgaria, Moscow has found some understanding. Relations with Italy are not that bad either. In Austria "our" candidate lost, but in France there will be two loyal candidates for the presidential elections - Marine Le Pen and Francois Fillon. And in Germany, there is space to challenge Merkel. In other words, the way Moscow sees it - not all is lost in Europe, and it is too early to demonise it.
'Nigeria with snow'
The US is Russia's perfect enemy because the Cold War "feud" made Russia in the eyes of its citizens as equally powerful as the US. After all, anti-American propaganda is not a Putin invention; it was a cornerstone of Soviet ideology. The rhetoric of anti-American slogans today is cut-and-pasted from Soviet propaganda. Having Russians remember an era when their country was a superpower competing with the US is very convenient for Putin as the Russian economy has shrunk to only 1.7 percent of the world's, and loyal allies willing to recognise Crimea as Russian territory are difficult to come by.
Without a conflict with the US, Russia would lose its power status and recede to the poor outskirts of Europe, a "Nigeria with snow", as Sergey Brin, the Moscow-born founder of Google, once described it.
The Reckoning: From Obama to Trump - Empire
In other words, while the Putin-Trump honeymoon may have been enjoyable, present circumstances are pressing for the break-up of this union. Just as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's perfect Brangelina union hit the rocks, so Trumputin is destined to end. But this will be to the benefit and relief of both sides. Sooner or later, Trump will start talking about corruption and dictatorship in Russia, while Putin's media will soon discover that Trump is a Wall Street "insider", a swindler and overall an illegitimate president who won fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.
It's possible this will not happen immediately. Trump will justify the revoking of the sanctions with the opportunity to get Russia to downsize its nuclear arsenal - a quite convenient for Russia, which can't afford to maintain a huge arsenal in times of economic crisis. Moscow, itself, hinted at this to Trump so lifting sanctions doesn't look like a one-sided concession.
It is clear that both sides will continue to make overtures for a while. After all this is reminiscent of George Bush, who looked into Putin's eyes and "got a sense of his soul", and Obama, who was trying to "restart" relations. In both cases love only lasted a short while.
Sooner or later, the lovers will be forced to realise that they are more Montague and Capulet than Romeo and Juliet .
Roman Dobrokhotov is a Moscow-based journalist and civil activist. He is the editor-in-chief of The Insider.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinio ... 12295.html
by seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 21, 2017 11:06 pm
by barracuda » Sun Jan 22, 2017 1:57 am
by SonicG » Sun Jan 22, 2017 11:52 am
Trump CIA Pick Leaves Door Open to Waterboarding, More Spying on Americans
Mike Pompeo appeared to reverse course again on harsh interrogation techniques—causing Human Rights Watch to call for him to be stopped in the Senate.
Some Democrats want to delay the confirmation vote for President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, after Rep. Mike Pompeo left the door open to returning to harsh interrogation techniques, and collecting massive amounts of American data.
In newly released written answers to lawmakers’ queries, the Kansas Republican says if confirmed, he’ll ask if the CIA feels current interrogation techniques are producing results—and if not, he’ll consider asking for changes. He also says if CIA officers tell him that recent legal limits on data collection, passed after the Snowden leaks, are making it harder for them to do their jobs, he’ll recommend changes there too.
The answer on interrogating detainees appears to be Pompeo’s third position on the matter in as many years. In 2014, he spoke up in favor of harsh interrogation. In his confirmation hearing, he said he’d never ask his officers do something like that. Now, in his written answers, he’s holding the door ajar for re-introducing the controversial methods.
Harsh interrogation of detainees—along with the collection of American’s data even if they aren’t involved in a crime—are legislative third rails for Democrats, but are unlikely to derail Pompeo’s eventual confirmation with a full Senate vote scheduled for Monday. But they mark the start of battles to come, as the Trump administration seeks to roll back legislation his supporters say has tied their hands in the fight against terrorists.
The delay of the CIA vote and others drew a rebuke from President Trump, who called on “members of the Senate to fulfill their constitutional obligation and swiftly confirm the remainder of my highly qualified cabinet nominees,” in a statement after his Defense and Homeland Security chiefs were sworn in Friday evening.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 22, 2017 11:58 am
NEWS & POLITICS
Congratulations, America! You've Elected an Actual Fascist President
It finally happened here—but there's still time to save the best of our country.
By Chauncey DeVega / Salon January 21, 2017
America’s increasingly abnormal politics have now surrendered to dystopia.
Donald Trump, a serial liar, narcissist, failed businessman, political con artist, adulterer, professed grabber of women’s genitals without their permission, man who does not read, ignoramus, admirer and fan of despots and dictators, encourager of vigilante violence against innocent people, actor in a porn video, person who does not pay his employees, member of the Vladimir Putin fan club, racist landlord, preferred candidate of neo-Nazis and other fringe racists, professional wrestling villain, and candidate who incites violence against his political opponents, is now the 45th president of the United States of America.
Donald Trump is also a fascist authoritarian in the American mold and leader of the world’s most powerful and influential “democracy.”
Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, the American news media desperately avoided using such language to describe Donald Trump. They did this because of material self-interest and advertising revenues, as well as an inability to accept how Trump had gamed obsolete journalistic norms of “fairness,” “balance” and “objectivity.”
In doing so, the American news media facilitated Trump’s rise to power. They labeled Trump as a “populist” who was “unconventional.” The American news media kept suggesting that Trump would “pivot” for the general election in order to win more “mainstream” and “centrist” voters. There were some bold voices who said that Trump had “authoritarian tendencies.” But very few commentators had the courage to plainly state that Donald Trump was a fascist — even though the evidence was growing then and is now insurmountable.
Consider the following.
Donald Trump does not believe in freedom of the press.
Donald Trump threatens his political enemies with violence and/or prison.
Donald Trump uses ethnocentrism, bigotry, nativism and racism to mobilize his voters.
Donald Trump does not believe in standing norms of democratic governance or tradition.
Donald Trump is a misogynist.
Donald Trump is obsessed with “strength” and his own “virility.”
Donald Trump promises “law and order.”
Donald Trump is a militant nationalist.
Donald Trump traffics in conspiracy theories and lies.
Donald Trump admires authoritarians and political strongmen.
Donald Trump’s most recent press conference was modeled on the way Vladimir Putin manipulates Russia’s news media.
Donald Trump has surrounded himself with a cabal that consists of family members and self-interested Cabinet appointees, who — like him — stand to enrich themselves through the agencies they are supposed to administer in the public interest.
Ultimately, the American news media were and are like the troglodytes in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” comforted by the dark because their eyes would be hurt by the light of the truth. Or, to borrow from a more contemporary example, the media did not want to face the situation Morpheus explains to Neo in “The Matrix”: “Standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth.”
The anxiety about calling Donald Trump a fascist was also enabled by many liberals and progressives who were desperate to appear fair-minded by being politically generous to their conservative and Republican foes. Such people maintain an erroneous belief that there is some type of continuum or symmetry between today’s Republicans and the policies offered by Democrats.
Because liberals and progressives belong to a centuries-long tradition with origins in the Enlightenment, they are unprepared to deal with the primitive thinking and irrationality that drives Donald Trump’s political movement and contemporary conservatism more generally. In reality, the Republican Party abandoned any semblance of normal politics beginning with their assaults on Bill Clinton in the 1990s. This long decline culminated with the Republican reaction to Barack Obama and now the rise of Trump.
In New York magazine, Jonathan Chait offers a classic example of this dangerous liberal reasoning:
It is impossible to know what course American democracy will take under Trump’s presidency. The fears of authoritarianism may prove overblown, and Trump may govern like a normal Republican.
This assumes there is something called a “normal Republican,” and that Trump is something else. But Trump won more votes than any Republican presidential candidate in history. Research shows that authoritarian attitudes have increased among the American public over the last 20 years, especially among Republicans. The Republican Party is the country’s largest white identity organization: It mobilizes anti-black and anti-brown animus for political gain. Since at least the 1960s, conservatism and racism have been functionally identical in this country. Trump leveraged those forces to maximum effect in order to defeat Hillary Clinton and win the White House.
In short, Donald Trump is a normal Republican. Pretending otherwise is what led the chattering classes to underestimate Trump’s appeal to the angry, authoritarian-minded white voters who elected him.
Donald Trump is a fascist. It’s not an easy thing to say. Own those words. Acknowledge the truth of the situation that America (and the world) now faces.
What to do now?
Protest marches are great. Now plan for what comes after the cathartic release.
Run for office on the local and state level. Practice political consumerism: Refuse to spend money at stores, banks, and other businesses that work with Trump, his administration or his enterprises. Target Republican officials with phone calls and emails. Let them know that if they support Trump there will be negative consequences at the ballot box.
Borrow from the obstructionist strategy that Republicans used against Barack Obama. Turn the metaphorical map upside down and practice political Aikido.
Learn from those groups and individuals who have been actively fighting fascism. Donald Trump and his movement are not normal. Do not make the mistake of treating them like they are. There is no room for negotiation or compromise.
America is your country. Donald Trump and his supporters represent the tyranny of minority opinion. Consequently, they are the worst example of the will, spirit and character of the American people.
Now is the time to reclaim the United States’ fundamental character before the world, and recapture the most noble sense of American exceptionalism. Shouting “Not in my name!” is a fine beginning, but not an ending. Resistance to Donald Trump and everything he represents must be the new normal. Anything less is not acceptable.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politi ... -president
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 22, 2017 12:03 pm
The Government Secrets Trump Is About to Discover
From spy planes to cyberattacks to the private lives of foreign leaders, the president gets access to more confidential material than anyone else on the planet. Now, it’s all in Donald Trump’s hands.
By GARRETT M. GRAFF January/February 2017
When Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, outgoing president Harry Truman informed him of an important secret: Days before the election the United States had tested the world’s first hydrogen bomb in the Pacific. The nation now possessed a weapon roughly a hundred times as powerful as any before—and almost nobody else knew.
Eight years later, when Eisenhower handed the keys to John F. Kennedy, his administration passed along its own secret: America had a covert plan underway to invade Cuba. Kennedy let the Bay of Pigs mission proceed, and the result was a fiasco that would take the world to the brink of nuclear war.
The president of the United States has more access to official secrets than any other human being in the country—and the potential to know more about the world than anyone else on the planet. And on January 20, the person being handed access to all of those secrets will be Donald J. Trump.
While much attention has been focused on Trump’s access to the nuclear launch codes and the President’s Daily Brief—the classified intelligence report delivered inside a locked briefcase each morning to the Oval Office—those represent only a tiny sliver of the massive top-secret universe that Trump personally will suddenly be privy to. He will have the ability to see inside the most sensitive and covert programs run by the United States and its allies around the world; he will have access to surveillance tools, covert payrolls and personal secrets about foreign leaders. He will know about blacked-out special forces raids and UFO-like spy planes, the next-generation cyberattacks that would come in the opening minutes of a new war, and the dozens of secret classified procedures and laws written down by his presidential predecessors. He’ll even be first in line for some mundane but important things: As president, Trump will be one of just four senior officials to learn sensitive market-moving economic data from the Labor Department up to 12 hours before it is released publicly.
The United States has invested trillions of dollars to ensure that its president can know more than anyone else on Earth—knowledge meant to be deployed to the country’s advantage in trade negotiations, military posturing and a thousand other ways big and small. Given Trump’s behavior so far, it seems almost assured that he will deploy and weaponize those same secrets in “unpresidented” ways, to win personal fights and minor PR battles. Already, before taking office, he has tweeted out claims about his meetings with intel agencies, asserted that he knows information the rest of the government doesn’t and tried to embarrass and undermine rivals or critics through insinuation. And that’s all before he has learned any of what President George W. Bush once called “the good stuff.”
What is the good stuff, and how might Trump use it? Many of the specifics are cloaked in deep shadow—that’s obviously the point—but thanks to decades of dogged reporting, lawsuits and historical archives, we do know a significant amount about the types of secrets a president learns. It’s anyone’s guess what Trump might do to embarrass intransigent foreign leaders, or what late-night or early-morning tweetstorms might erupt from the White House if he senses hypocrisy from an ally—or what will happen when a president whose family will still control his complex business empire has access to important geopolitical developments or early market data.
The Kill List
One of the relatively new powers of the presidency is the ability to sign off on strikes from Predator and Reaper drones run by the CIA and the Pentagon. While political assassination is forbidden by Executive Order 12333, Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush have enjoyed wide latitude in designating suspected terrorists for lethal strikes in areas like Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan. The exact process for such “kinetic” attacks, never publicly revealed in depth and not beholden to any judicial oversight, will be explained carefully to the new president. We’ll never know who exactly will be named to the new administration’s “kill list,” and we may never know what happens to them. But Trump will: After such attacks, the president and vice president are also among the select group of government officials who can, if they choose, watch the high-tech videos of the drone strikes themselves. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney regularly watched such “kill videos” during their morning intelligence briefings. As president, Trump will also have sway over the opaque process itself, so he could well tweak or expand the lethal authorities of the commander in chief without any public disclosure that the rules have changed.
Covert Action
Whereas most people tend to think of classified information as broad categories like Confidential, Secret and Top Secret—the three levels of security clearance that individuals are typically granted—the nation’s most sensitive secrets occupy their own category of “Special Access Programs” of “Sensitive Compartmented Information,” labels colloquially known as “beyond top secret.” These SAPs include information like specific National Security Agency technological surveillance and hacking capabilities, as well as ongoing intelligence projects and joint operations with allies. In one of his early such briefings, Obama was told of the joint U.S.-Israeli efforts to disable the Iranian nuclear program through cyberattacks like the Stuxnet malware. Eight years later, the NSA’s elite hacking unit, as well as its British and Israeli counterparts, has an even broader suite of tools and operations underway, both spying and sabotage. And the United States doesn’t spy on just its enemies: Leaks from Edward Snowden revealed that U.S. intelligence regularly listened to the telephone calls and read emails of foreign officials, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and top overseas business leaders—transcripts and documents that Trump could routinely access if he so desired.
Secret Agents
Those beyond-top-secret files would also include details about which foreign officials are on the payroll of agencies like the CIA or the Drug Enforcement Administration. These payments can run into the millions and last for years; President Jimmy Carter was shocked to discover that the CIA had been paying King Hussein of Jordan six and seven figures annually for nearly two decades to ensure his cooperation with American interests. Presidents have traditionally refrained from asking the identities of specific sources, but that’s just a custom: If Trump asks for a briefing on the clandestine payroll, the agency would almost certainly comply. The DEA, whose drug-fighting efforts give it a broad global footprint, also works closely with foreign governments and deploys its own powerful surveillance tools. WikiLeaks, for instance, exposed how Panama’s leader pressured the agency in 2009 to use its wiretapping program, codenamed Matador, to uncover who was “sleeping with his wife.” (The agency demurred.)
The whole point of these laws and procedures is to grant the president power the public doesn’t even know he has—and might not know until it’s unveiled in a crisis.
The Nukes
In addition to the “nuclear football”—the briefcase carried close to the president by a military aide that contains the nation’s nuclear war plans—the president will automatically gain access to what’s known as “Q clearance” information from the Department of Energy. This includes the operational details of the nation’s nuclear weapons program: its weapons stockpiles, damage estimates, technological specifications and the procedures for securing and launching the nation’s nuclear triad—the bombers, submarines and silo-based ICBMs that can rain nuclear destruction on the nation’s enemies in as little as 30 minutes.
Spy Satellites and Secret Aircraft
Beyond the secrets buried in missile silos, Trump will also receive briefings—if requested—on the constellation of spy satellites and detection technologies that watch the Earth from above, many of which are run by the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence agency so secretive that its very name and existence were classified from its creation in 1960 until 1992. According to people who have been briefed on such technologies, the nation’s spy satellite capabilities, while not quite at the read-the-newspaper-over-your-shoulder level implied by movies like Enemy of the State, are vastly more advanced than the public realizes. There are also a number of classified aircraft with unique capabilities (including a growing number of drones) whose existence has never been acknowledged; one such helicopter, a stealth version of the Black Hawk, was only made public when it crashed during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Such aircraft are often tested at Nevada’s Area 51—where conspiracy theorists claim the government holds its fleet of captured UFOs—and experts estimate that there are upward of a dozen aircraft that the United States has never publicly acknowledged, the modern successors of earlier secret programs like the U-2, the SR-71 spy plane and the B-2 stealth bomber. (And, if the government does have a secret set of UFOs captured from Roswell and other close encounters, Trump might be soon learning that, too.)
Secret Law
In 2015, when Obama released his new hostage policy—known as Presidential Policy Directive No. 30—close watchers of the administration realized the last publicly announced PPD had been No. 28, which meant that sometime between January 17, 2014, and June 24, 2015, he had signed yet another directive whose very existence was classified. Whatever it is, PPD 29 is one of dozens of secret presidential national security orders, some of which stretch back decades. Each president has called these documents something slightly different, but collectively they deal with high-level strategic and policy decisions around national security and, more recently, homeland security. While the subject matter or title of most such documents are made public upon signing, or declassified rather quickly, dozens remain classified even years or decades later. From the titles, we know that most classified directives appear to deal with nuclear weapons, continuity of government, the war on terror or relationships with foreign countries, but we have no idea what some of these documents are even about. Together, these represent an increasingly broad body of “secret law” opaque to the outside world, including Congress. The whole point of these laws and procedures is to grant the president power the public doesn’t even know he has—and might not know until it’s unveiled to us in the midst of a crisis, either real or invented.
Counterterrorism Reports
The two most recent occupants of the Oval Office received regular briefings on unfolding domestic terror threats and potential suspects; in the wake of 9/11, Bush met every morning with FBI Director Robert Mueller to review an Excel-like spreadsheet of possible plots known as the “threat matrix.” Obama, for his part, often devoted Tuesday afternoons to what the White House called “Terror Tuesdays,” reviewing unfolding investigations and larger strategic questions. Both presidents were regularly informed about individual terror plots; Bush even tracked individual suspects day to day. Given Trump’s campaign obsession with the Islamic State, terrorism and immigration—and his habit of self-congratulation when horrific attacks unfold around the world—it’s not hard to imagine him personally dictating raids and arrests and then announcing them via Twitter.
World Leaders’ (and Americans’) Personal Lives
One of the favorite presidential perks in decades past was reading the FBI surveillance reports on other politicians and prominent Americans, collected and delivered to the White House by an eager-to-please J. Edgar Hoover. While, in theory, the FBI no longer serves up personal secrets for prurient entertainment or political blackmail, presidential aides do get to review the results of background investigations for classified clearances. Moreover, intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA regularly provide the White House and high-level diplomats with information on the drug habits, sexual preferences, financial shenanigans, criminal associations, allegations of corruption or family squabbles of other world leaders, foreign business figures or other prominent individuals. WikiLeaks, for example, made public a U.S. diplomatic cable hinting at Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi’s relationship with his “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse.
These reports lead to interesting moments across the negotiating tables: For instance, the president will know whether, the night before an Oval Office grip-and-grin, a Middle Eastern prince spent the previous evening carousing with call girls in Georgetown (a frequent enough occurrence in Washington). Historically, such information has been kept tightly held, but given Trump’s flair for the theatrical and his proclivity for scorched-earth tactics with his opponents—to say nothing of his friendship with National Enquirer publisher David Pecker—perhaps we’ll soon be learning a lot more about our allies and foes around the world.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... nce-214665
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 22, 2017 12:36 pm
Translating Trump’s inaugural Speech from the original German
By Juan Cole | Jan. 21, 2017 |
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, like the candidate himself, was a chain of falsehoods, saber-rattling and scary Neofascist uber-nationalism. But it could be difficult to follow because so much of it seemed stolen from the mass politics of the 1930s in central and southern Europe. So here is a plain English translation of some key passages.
Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning because today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people.
You may be confused, as an English speaker. Trump, a billionaire real estate developer and serial grifter who founded a phony university that defrauded thousands, has appointed a cabinet of billionaires and multi-millionaires, the wealthiest and most elite cabinet in American history, which even includes the CEO of petroleum giant Exxon-Mobil.
How, you might ask, can he represent this coup by the super-rich as ‘giving’ power ‘back to’ ‘the people’? The people wouldn’t even be allowed on the grounds of the gated communities where Trump’s officials live.
The confusion arises from thinking in English instead of 1930s German. “Das Volk” or the people was a mystical conception for the German far right. It comprised the German people as an organic whole, uniting great landlord and lowly peasant. The great German corporations, too, were said to be expressions of “the people” (Hence the German automobile company Volkswagen, now led by perfectly nice people but not so much in the 1930s). The phrase comes into focus if you understand “the people” as “white Protestants and some lately admitted ethnic Catholics” who are united across social class (though of course led by their billionaire betters), and who stand in contrast to the cosmopolitans, the mixed-race people, infiltrating minorities, the socialists and others bent on diluting “the people” and subverting its prosperity and power by kowtowing to foreigners.
Trump also used the typical 1930s diction of the traitor within:
“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.”
The traitors to das Volk, the people, are the intellectuals and persons with an international outlook, and socialists secretly working for an international cabal, and the peacemakers and diplomats– who were seen as weak and feckless. There are also religious and ethnic groups who polluted the integrity of the bodily fluids of the White body politic; for Trump these especially include Mexican-Americans and Muslims, though some people around him think that high-placed liberal Democratic Jews are manipulating the Fed against American interests. Obama was one of these infiltrators, the faux American born in Kenya who is secretly a Muslim or maybe a Muslim-Communist. These treasonous bureaucrats and artists and thinkers and soft businessmen ultimately make a pretty penny and gain social prestige and power by betraying the helpless Volk and reducing them to weakness and poverty. They may even be in the pay of foreign Powers.
The Volk are helpless before these traitors unless the natural leaders within the White community take charge and reestablish the mystical union between working class whites and corporate whites. The policy? Economic protectionism and monopoly capital inside one country. The enemy? International competitors like Chinese firms.
“But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
The United States has 5% of the world’s population. But its gross domestic product (GDP), at $18.5 trillion, is 22.5% of the GDP of the entire world in nominal terms! The US economy is the largest in the world and is substantially larger than that of its nearest competitor, China (at $11.5 trillion), which, however, has about 4 times as many people as the United States. That is, on a per person basis, Chinese are positively poverty-stricken compared to Americans. Trump has taken the most flourishing economy in the world, which admittedly has large internal inequalities, and made it an economic graveyard by his gloomy rhetoric. (He in fact intends to increase the inequalities). Only by proclaiming a crisis and obscuring the US success story and US prosperity can he hope to convince das Volk that they need a great leader to restore them to their previous glory. Note that abandoned factories are highlighted here, mostly caused by mechanization and robotification of labor so that the big corporations don’t need as many American workers. The actual blight on the landscape of oil spills and mercury dumps and coal-fired plants– the pollution caused by corporate malfeasance– is not mentioned, since, of course, the corporations are The People.
Crime, too, has dramatically fallen in the United States in the past 20 years, but Trump wants people to believe the opposite. Again, only if there is a crisis of brown and black crime will das Volk be willing to surrender their rights to the Great White Trump.
By the way, those gangs he alleges are laying waste to our cities? He isn’t talking about skinheads or white supremacists or neo-Nazis. They, of course, are an essential part of das Volk, perhaps even the shock troops of The People.
Likewise, US education is not the vast wasteland Trump depicts. The US ranks in the middle of industrialized countries on math and reading. But much of the shortfall is because of the lack of funding for schools in poor districts (since local schools are funded by local taxes, the school system reflects America’s vast class and racial inequalities). Trump’s idea of fixing these schools is not to pump Federal money into the poorer districts to even the playing field but to privatize the school system so that the poor can’t even afford schooling at all. That is the kind of thing Betsy DeVoss, who wants to use the government to indoctrinate children into extremist forms of Christianity, promotes.
I could go on analyzing Trump’s lies and his Neofascist code words. But you get the picture. He and his billionaire cabinet are the natural leaders of the white Volk of Amerika, so much so that they are The People. Unlike the racialists of the 1930s, he will allow some individuals from the minorities along for the ride if they are ideologically aligned with the real Americans. He is going to kick out the cosmopolitan, half-breed traitors in the name of America First (not being a historian of the United States, it was only about a decade ago that I discovered how ugly this seemingly admirable phrase is). And he is going to run down all of America’s beauty and achievements and causes for pride so as to pull the wool over the eyes of The People and get them to back him in a new, authoritarian coup government for the United States– one where de facto most of the Bill of Rights are abolished except for the Second Amendment.
—–
Related video added by Juan Cole:
Democracy Now! “Cornel West on Donald Trump: This is What Neo-Fascism Looks Like”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpuCv3cc5_o
http://www.juancole.com/2017/01/transla ... ginal.html
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 22, 2017 2:46 pm
WikiLeaks: Send us Trump's tax returns so we can release them
BY REBECCA SAVRANSKY - 01/22/17 12:33 PM EST 258
WikiLeaks: Send us Trump's tax returns so we can release them
WikiLeaks on Sunday urged people to submit President Donald Trump's tax returns so the organization could release them.
"Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway stated today that Trump will not release his tax returns," WikiLeaks posted on Twitter.
"Send them to: https://wikileaks.org/#submit so we can."
WikiLeaks also blasted the president for declining to release his tax returns himself.
"Trump's breach of promise over the release of his tax returns is even more gratuitous than [Hillary] Clinton concealing her Goldman Sachs transcripts," the organization tweeted.
Kellyanne Conway, on Sunday said the president would not release his tax returns.
"We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care," Conway, a top Trump adviser, said on ABC's "This Week."
"They voted for him, and let me make this very clear: most Americans are — are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like."
A White House petition calling for the president to release his tax returns has received more than 100,000 signatures, the number it needs to warrant a response from the administration.
The petition was created Friday, shortly after Trump took the oath of office. It pushes the White House to "immediately release Donald Trump's full tax returns, with all information needed to verify emoluments clause compliance."
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... lease-them
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 22, 2017 3:16 pm
President Trump’s deleted tweets could violate Presidential Records Act
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.2952416
Anti-Trump protesters charged with ‘felony rioting’ face 10-year jail sentences
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 40071.html
by barracuda » Sun Jan 22, 2017 4:13 pm
SonicG » Sun Jan 22, 2017 8:52 am wrote:I really cannot bear to watch that...
by Elvis » Sun Jan 22, 2017 4:18 pm
barracuda » Sun Jan 22, 2017 1:13 pm wrote:SonicG » Sun Jan 22, 2017 8:52 am wrote:I really cannot bear to watch that...
That's too bad, because it was intriguing.
- This was a plea for help, or more directly, a request to not be killed.
- The request to not be killed was accompanied by a promise of money.
- The president intimated that the CIA would be give free reign to do as they pleased.
- He also intimated that he hopes they will get the chance to invade Iraq and take control of the oil fields.
- There was some real applause, but the vast majority of it was highly prompted by his claquers. Watch the people in front of the camera carefully. when they don't move during an applause session, the clapping is coming from Trump's retinue of lackeys.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 22, 2017 4:25 pm
:by JackRiddler » Sun Jan 22, 2017 6:23 pm
barracuda » Sun Jan 22, 2017 3:13 pm wrote:SonicG » Sun Jan 22, 2017 8:52 am wrote:I really cannot bear to watch that...
That's too bad, because it was intriguing.
- This was a plea for help, or more directly, a request to not be killed.
- The request to not be killed was accompanied by a promise of money.
- The president intimated that the CIA would be give free reign to do as they pleased.
- He also intimated that he hopes they will get the chance to invade Iraq and take control of the oil fields.
- There was some real applause, but the vast majority of it was highly prompted by his claquers. Watch the people in front of the camera carefully. when they don't move during an applause session, the clapping is coming from Trump's retinue of lackeys.
by barracuda » Sun Jan 22, 2017 6:44 pm
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