The long nightmare has just begun: Inauguration of a fraud.

exminister

exminister

Well-known member
annabenedetti said:
And I realize nothing will come of this. The Trumpediment will lurch on, America's place in world leadership will continue to diminish, world stability will continue to erode, the GOP will continue to choose power over conscience, and the MAGA base will continue to chant "fake news!" and "lock her up!"
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Well, it was a good run.


"In his farewell Presidential address, George Washington advised American citizens to view themselves as a cohesive unit and avoid political parties and issued a special warning to be wary of attachments and entanglements with other nations."

He essentially told us what would bring this country down. Look at our foreign attachments and involvements. Washington didn't like parties because it would cause divisiveness. What do we have today? Party over country. We have forgotten to look at all fellow citizens as one of us. He stepped down after 8 years as a model to avoid the cult of personality. That's certainly the shallowness of American politics today. The way to back out from this would take so much effort that I don't think Americans will make such a sacrifice, but part of me is hopefully that this corruption and narcissism will cause such a revulsion it might wake us up before a dictator takes over.



https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=15
 
annabenedetti

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
Putin wanted to upend the US political system. Comey’s testimony shows he succeeded.
Comey says Russia has “tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act.”

Republicans and Democrats are already fighting over whether Thursday’s historic hearing with ousted FBI Director James Comey was a bad day for President Donald Trump (because Comey directly accused him of lying) or a good one (because Comey repeatedly conceded that Trump wasn’t personally under investigation).

But there was one undisputed winner from the hearing, even if his name was never explicitly mentioned: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Comey, echoing other top US intelligence and law enforcement officials, repeatedly stressed that Moscow had systematically interfered in the 2016 elections with an eye toward shaking Americans’ confidence in the integrity of their own democratic system and weakening Washington’s standing on the world stage.

The fact that Thursday’s hearing was even held — with the surreal spectacle of Comey openly attacking the integrity and honesty of a sitting US president — shows that Putin succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

It’s worth stepping back from the hearing itself and the narrow, though hugely important, question of whether Trump obstructed justice when he told Comey to end the FBI’s probe into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. The question of whether Trump broke the law, or committed impeachable offenses, will be endlessly debated in the days, weeks, and months to come.

But it’s important not to lose sight of how much Russia has already achieved, with the scandal over its possible dealings with the Trump campaign paralyzing the White House, throwing the entire US political system into chaos, and preventing Washington from being able to focus on pressing international issues like the crisis in North Korea and the brutal civil war in Syria,let alone domestic issues like health care and tax reform.

. . . .
 
annabenedetti

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
I keep remembering this quote I saved:

"Raise your hand if you're a late Cold War kid continually re-surprised by some American conservatives' new affinity for an ex-KGB strongman."
 
annabenedetti

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
A shocking state of affairs – how crises are exploited by politicians and corporations

Post 1 of 3

Shock. It’s a word that has come up again and again since Donald Trump was elected in November 2016 – to describe the poll-defying election results, to describe the emotional state of many people watching his ascent to power, and to describe his blitzkrieg approach to policymaking. A “shock to the system” is precisely how his adviser Kellyanne Conway has repeatedly described the new era.

For almost two decades now, I’ve been studying large-scale shocks to societies: how they happen, how they are exploited by politicians and corporations, and how they are even deliberately deepened in order to gain advantage over a disoriented population. I have also reported on the flipside of this process: how societies that come together around an understanding of a shared crisis can change the world for the better.

Watching Donald Trump’s rise, I’ve had a strange feeling. It’s not just that he’s applying shock politics to the most powerful and heavily armed nation on earth; it’s more than that. In books, documentary films and investigative reporting, I have documented a range of trends: the rise of superbrands, the expanding power of private wealth over the political system, the global imposition of neoliberalism, often using racism and fear of the “other” as a potent tool, the damaging impacts of corporate free trade, and the deep hold that climate change denial has taken on the right side of the political spectrum. And as I began to research Trump, he started to seem to me like Frankenstein’s monster, sewn together out of the body parts of all of these and many other dangerous trends.

Ten years ago, I published The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, an investigation that spanned four decades of history, from Chile after Augusto Pinochet’s coup to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, from Baghdad under the US “Shock and Awe” attack to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The term “shock doctrine” describes the quite brutal tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock – wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters – to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy”.

cont'd...
 
annabenedetti

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
Post 2 of 3

Though Trump breaks the mould in some ways, his shock tactics do follow a script, one familiar from other countries that have had rapid changes imposed under the cover of crisis. During Trump’s first week in office, when he was signing that tsunami of executive orders and people were just reeling, madly trying to keep up, I found myself thinking about the human rights advocate Halina Bortnowska’s description of Poland’s experience when the US imposed economic shock therapy on her country in the midst of communism’s collapse. She described the velocity of change her country was going through as “the difference between dog years and human years” and she observed that “you start witnessing these semi-psychotic reactions. You can no longer expect people to act in their own best interests when they’re so disoriented they don’t know – or no longer care – what those interests are.”

From the evidence so far, it’s clear that Trump and his top advisers are hoping for the sort of response Bortnowska described, that they are trying to pull off a domestic shock doctrine. The goal is all-out war on the public sphere and the public interest, whether in the form of antipollution regulations or programmes for the hungry. In their place will be unfettered power and freedom for corporations. It’s a programme so defiantly unjust and so manifestly corrupt that it can only be pulled off with the assistance of divide-and-conquer racial and sexual politics, as well as a nonstop spectacle of media distractions. And, of course, it is being backed up with a massive increase in war spending, a dramatic escalation of military conflicts on multiple fronts, from Syria to North Korea, alongside presidential musings about how “torture works”.

Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires tells us a great deal about the administration’s underlying goals. ExxonMobil for secretary of state; General Dynamics and Boeing to head the department of defence; and the Goldman Sachs guys for pretty much everything that’s left. The handful of career politicians who have been put in charge of agencies seem to have been selected either because they do not believe in the agency’s core mission, or do not think the agency should exist at all. Steve Bannon, Trump’s allegedly sidelined chief strategist, was open about this when he addressed a conservative audience in February. The goal, he said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (by which he meant the government regulations and agencies tasked with protecting people and their rights). “If you look at these cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.”

Much has been made of the conflict between Bannon’s Christian nationalism and the transnationalism of Trump’s more establishment aides, particularly his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. And Bannon may well get voted off this gory reality show entirely before long (or maybe, given current legal troubles, it will be Kushner). Given these palace intrigues, it’s worth underlining that when it comes to deconstructing the state, and outsourcing as much as possible to for-profit corporations, Bannon and Kushner are not in conflict but in perfect alignment.

Under the cover of this administration’s constant cloud of chaos – some deliberately generated by Trump, much of it foisted upon him by his incompetence and avarice – this shared agenda is being pursued with methodical and unblinking focus. Trump and his cabinet of former corporate executives are remaking government at a startling pace to serve the interests of their own businesses, their former businesses and their tax bracket as a whole. For instance, within hours of taking office, Trump called for a massive tax cut, which would see corporations pay just 15% (down from 35%), and pledged to slash regulations by 75%. His tax plan includes a range of other breaks and loopholes for very wealthy people like the ones inhabiting his cabinet (not to mention himself). The healthcare plan he has backed will cause approximately 23 million people to lose coverage, while handing out yet more tax breaks to the rich.

cont'd...
 
annabenedetti

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
Post 3 of 3

The main pillars of Trump’s political and economic project are: the deconstruction of the regulatory state; a full‑bore attack on the welfare state and social services (rationalised, in part, through bellicose racial fearmongering and attacks on women for exercising their rights); the unleashing of a domestic fossil-fuel frenzy (which requires the sweeping aside of climate science and the gagging of large parts of the government bureaucracy); and a civilisational war against immigrants and “radical Islamic terrorism” (with ever expanding domestic and foreign theatres).

In addition to the obvious threats this entire project poses to those who are already most vulnerable, it’s a vision that can be counted on to generate wave after wave of crises and shocks. Economic shocks, as market bubbles – inflated thanks to deregulation – burst; security shocks, as blowback from anti-Islamic policies and foreign aggression comes home; weather shocks, as our climate is further destabilised; and industrial shocks, as oil pipelines spill and rigs collapse, which they tend to do when the safety and environmental regulations that prevent chaos are slashed.

All this is extremely dangerous. Even more so is the way the Trump administration can be relied upon to exploit these shocks to push through the more radical planks of its agenda.
A large-scale crisis – whether a terrorist attack or a financial crash – would likely provide the pretext to declare some sort of state of exception or emergency, where the usual rules no longer apply. This, in turn, would provide the cover to push through aspects of the Trump agenda that require a further suspension of core democratic norms – such as his pledge to deny entry to all Muslims (not only those from selected countries), his Twitter threat to bring in “the feds” to quell street violence in Chicago, or his obvious desire to place restrictions on the press. A large enough economic crisis would offer an excuse to dismantle programmes such as social security, which Trump pledged to protect but which many around him have wanted gone for decades.

Here is what we need to remember: Trump, extreme as he is, is less an aberration than a logical conclusion – a pastiche of pretty much all the worst trends of the past half-century. Trump is the product of powerful systems of thought that rank human life based on race, religion, gender, sexuality, physical appearance and physical ability – and that have systematically used race as a weapon to advance brutal economic policies since the earliest days of North American colonisation and the transatlantic slave trade. He is also the personification of the merger of humans and corporations – a one-man megabrand, whose wife and children are spinoff brands, with all the pathologies and conflicts of interest inherent in that. He is the embodiment of the belief that money and power provide a licence to impose one’s will on others, whether that entitlement is expressed by grabbing women or grabbing the finite resources from a planet on the verge of catastrophic warming. He is also the product of a business culture that fetishises “disruptors” who make their fortunes by flagrantly ignoring both laws and regulatory standards.

Most of all, he is the incarnation of a still-powerful free-market ideological project – one embraced by centrist parties as well as conservative ones – that wages war on everything public and commonly held, and imagines corporate CEOs as superheroes who will save humanity. In 2002, George W Bush threw a 90th birthday party at the White House for the man who was the intellectual architect of that war on the public sphere, the radical free-market economist Milton Friedman. At the celebration, then US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld declared: “Milton is the embodiment of the truth that ideas have consequences.” He was right – and Donald Trump is a direct consequence of those ideas.
 
exminister

exminister

Well-known member
annabenedetti said:
Though Trump breaks the mould in some ways, his shock tactics do follow a script, one familiar from other countries that have had rapid changes imposed under the cover of crisis. During Trump’s first week in office, when he was signing that tsunami of executive orders and people were just reeling, madly trying to keep up...
Click to expand...

But what we are finding that while 45 acts like the Executive Orders are done deals they are not. The deal with Saudia Arabia for the 110B I just learn is not real. Another "hope" from Trump. All his EOs are only letters of intent to Congress. This is from a guy who doesn't play well with others except those who kiss his ever widing butt. He cannot get things done and always has been just a wind bag, ever the liar. He is horrible at making deals. He only knows how to intimidate and people get tired of that. He has a hard time getting people to work in his swamp. I think our Constitution may get heavily battered because of him but I am hopeful Americans will wake up from this destructive nightmare. People in Kansas are. Time will tell.
 
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