USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!!

[Magda Hassan]

Rumor: Trump considering notorious neocon John Bolton for Sect of State. I tend to discount this one. But Trump is a well trusted friend of Israel.

Just looks like another neo-liberal line up from what I can see. Nothing new or different. Kock brothers seem to be behind most.

[Paul Rigby]

Why Trump Will SMASH Hillary

Published on 23 May 2016

[video=youtube_share;LibRNYJmZ-I]http://youtu.be/LibRNYJmZ-I[/video]

[Peter Lemkin]

The Election was Stolen Here's How
by Greg Palast

Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.

Starting in 2013 just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOPcontrolled states.

The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report,
"The GOP's Stealth War on Voters," 8/24/2016.

Crosscheck in action:
Trump victory margin in Michigan: 13,107
Michigan Crosscheck purge list: 449,922

Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257
Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824

Trump victory margin in North Carolina: 177,008
North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: 589,393

On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including "Caging," "purging," blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to "provisional" ballots that will never be counted.

Trump signaled the use of "Crosscheck" when he claimed the election is "rigged" because "people are voting many, many times." His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million "potential" double voters1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor. Here's a sample of the list


Those accused of criminal double voting include, for example, Donald Alexander Webster Jr. of Ohio who is accused of voting a second time in Virginia as Donald EUGENE Webster SR.

---

Note: Watch the four-minute video summary of Crosscheck. The investigation and explanation of these methods of fixing the vote can be found in my book and film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits (2016).

---

No, not everyone on the list loses their vote. But this was not the only racially poisonous tactic that accounted for this purloined victory by Trump and GOP candidates.

For example, in the swing state of North Carolina, it was reported that 6,700 Black folk lost their registrations because their registrations had been challenged by a group called Voter Integrity Project (VIP). VIP sent letters to households in Black communities "do not forward." If the voter had moved within the same building, or somehow did not get their mail (e.g. if their name was not on a mail box), they were challenged as "ghost" voters. GOP voting officials happily complied with VIP with instant cancellation of registrations.

The 6,700 identified in two counties were returned to the rolls through a lawsuit. However, there was not one mention in the press that VIP was also behind Crosscheck in North Carolina; nor that its leader, Col. Jay Delancy, whom I've tracked for years has previously used this vote thievery, known as "caging," for years. Doubtless the caging game was wider and deeper than reported. And by the way, caging, as my Rolling Stone co-author, attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tells me, is "a felony, it's illegal, and punishable by high fines and even jail time."

There is still much investigation to do. For example, there are millions of "provisional" ballots, "spoiled" (invalidated) ballots and ballots rejected from the approximately 30 million mailed in. Unlike reporting in Britain, US media does not report the ballots that are rejected and tossed outbecause, after all, as Joe Biden says, "Our elections are the envy of the world." Only in Kazakhstan, Joe.

While there is a great deal of work to do, much documentation still to analyze, we'll have to pry it from partisan voting chiefs who stamp the scrub lists, Crosscheck lists and ballot records, "confidential."

But, the evidence already in our hands makes me sadly confident in saying, Jim Crow, not the voters, elected Mr. Trump.


What about those exit polls?
Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections. Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting. Exit polls solve the problem.

But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their "errors." In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton.

So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong?

Answer: they didn't. The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate. That's because exit pollsters can only ask, "How did you vote?" What they don't ask, and can't, is, "Was your vote counted."

In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as "spoiled" because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses. Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore. The exit polls included those 181,173 people who thought they had voted but their vote didn't count. In other words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not what Katherine Harris chose.

In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated (including an enormous pile of "provisional" ballots) by Ohio's GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Again, the polls reflected that Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters. But the exit polls were "wrong" because they didn't reflect the ballots invalidated by Blackwell.

Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US State Department refused the recognize the Ukraine election results because the official polls contradicted the exit polls.

And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling stationyet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologizewhen they should be screaming, "Fraud! Here's the evidence the vote was fixed!"

Now there's a new trope to explain away the exit polls that gave Clinton the win. Supposedly, Trump voters were ashamed to say they voted for Trump. Really? ON WHAT PLANET? For Democracy Now! and Rolling Stone I was out in several swing states. In Ohio, yes, a Black voter may have been reluctant to state support for Trump. But a white voter in the exurbs of Dayton, where the Trump signs grew on lawns like weeds, and the pews of the evangelical mega churches were slathered with Trump and GOP brochures, risked getting spat on if they even whispered, "Hillary."

This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren't enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guysand they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away studentsthe list goes on. It's a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.

[Ken Garretson]

Defying the Politics of Fear

Posted on Nov 6, 2016

By Chris Hedges

Voting one's conscience is crucial for a civic life grounded in courage. (Eric Gay / AP)

Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday evening at a rally in Philadelphia for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka. Watch Hedges' full speech on our YouTube channel.
No social or revolutionary movement succeeds without a core of people who will not betray their vision and their principles. They are the building blocks of social change. They are our only hope for a viable socialism. They are willing to spend their lives as political outcasts. They are willing to endure repression. They will not sell out the oppressed and the poor. They know that you stand with allof the oppressedpeople of color in our prisons and marginal communities, the poor, unemployed workers, our LGBT community, undocumented workers, the mentally ill and the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans whom we terrorize and murderor you stand withnone of the oppressed. They know when you fight for the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. They know this is the cost of the moral life, a life that is not abandoned even if means you are destined to spend generations wandering in the wilderness, even if you are destined to fail.
I was in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania in 1989 during the revolutions, or in the case of Romania an interparty putsch. These revolutions were spontaneous outbursts by an enraged population that had had enough of communist repression, mismanagement and corruption. No one, from the dissidents themselves to the ruling communist parties, anticipated these revolts. They erupted, as all revolutions do, from tinder that had been waiting years for a spark.
These revolutions were led by a handful of dissidents who until the fall of 1989 were marginal and dismissed by the state as inconsequential until it was too late. The state periodically sent state security to harass them. It often ignored them. I am not even sure you could call these dissidents an opposition. They were profoundly isolated within their own societies. The state media denied them a voice. They had no legal status and were locked out of the political system. They were blacklisted. They struggled to make a living. But when the breaking point in Eastern Europe came, when the ruling communist ideology lost all credibility, there was no question in the minds of the public about whom they could trust. The demonstrators that poured into the streets of East Berlin and Prague were aware of who would sell them out and who would not. They trusted those, such as Václav Havel, who had dedicated their lives to fighting for open society, those who had been willing to be condemned as nonpersons and go to jail for their defiance.
Our only chance to overthrow corporate power comes from those who will not surrender to it, who will hold fast to the causes of the oppressed no matter what the price, who are willing to be dismissed and reviled by a bankrupt liberal establishment, who have found within themselves the courage to say no, to refuse to cooperate. The most important issue in this election does not revolve around the personal traits of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It revolves around the destructive dynamic of unfettered and unregulated global capitalism, the crimes of imperialism and the security and surveillance apparatus. These forces are where real power lies. Trump and Clinton will do nothing to restrict them.
It is up to us to resist. We must refuse to be complicit, even in the act of voting, with the fossil fuel industry's savaging of our ecosystem, endless wars, oppression of the poor, including the one in five children in this country who is hungry, the evisceration of constitutional rights and civil liberties, the cruel and inhumane system of mass incarceration and the state-sponsored execution of unarmed poor people of color in our marginal communities.
Julien Benda reminds us that we can serve two sets of principles. Privilege and power or justice and truth. The more we make compromises with those who serve privilege and power the more we diminish the capacity for justice and truth. Our strength comes from our steadfastness to justice and truth, a steadfastness that accepts that the corporate forces arrayed against us may crush us, but that the more we make compromises with those whose ends are privilege and power the more we diminish our capacity to effect change.
Karl Popper in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" writes that the question is not how do you get good people to rule. Popper says this is the wrong question. Most people attracted to power, he writes, have "rarely been above average, either morally or intellectually, and often [have been] below it." The question is how do we build forces to restrict the despotism of the powerful. There is a moment in Henry Kissinger's memoirsdo not buy the bookwhen Nixon and Kissinger are looking out at tens of thousands of anti-war protesters who have surrounded the White House. Nixon had placed empty city buses in front of the White House to keep the protesters back. He worried out loud that the crowd would break through the barricades and get him and Kissinger. And that is exactly where we want people in power to be. This is why, although he was not a liberal, Nixon was our last liberal president. He was scared of movements. And if we cannot make the elites scared of us we will fail.
The rise of Donald Trump is the product of the disenchantment, despair and anger caused by neoliberalism and the collapse of institutions that once offered a counterweight to the powerful. Trump gives vent to the legitimate rage and betrayal of the white underclass and working poor. His right-wing populism, which will grow in virulence and sophistication under a Clinton presidency, mirrors the right-wing populism rippling across much of Europe including Poland, Hungary, France and Great Britain. If Clinton wins, Trump becomes the dress rehearsal for fascism.

A bankrupt liberal class, as was true in Yugoslavia when I covered the war and as was true in Weimar Germany, is the great enabler of fascism. Liberals, in the name of the practical, refuse to challenge parties that betray workingmen and women. They surrender their values for political expediency. Our [failure] to build a counterweight to the Democratic Party after it abandoned the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was our gravest mistake.
Hillary Clinton embodies the detested neoliberal establishment. She can barely fend off one of the most imbecilic and narcissistic candidates in American history. Matched against a demagogue with brains and political skill, she would lose. If we do not defy the neoliberal order, championed by Clinton and the Democratic Party elites, we ensure the conditions for a terrifying right-wing backlash, one that will use harsh and violent mechanisms to crush the little political space we have left.
The tactic of strategic voting begs the question "Strategic for whom?" Our money-drenched, heavily managed elections are little more than totalitarian plebiscites to give a veneer of legitimacy to corporate power. As long as we signal that we are not a threat to the established order, as long as we participate in this charade, the neoliberal assault will continue towards its frightening and inevitable conclusion.
Alexis de Tocqueville correctly saw that when citizens can no longer participate in a meaningful way in political life, political populism is replaced by a cultural populism of sameness, resentment and mindless patriotism and by a form of anti-politics he called "democratic despotism." The language and rituals of democracy are used to mask a political system based on the unchallenged supremacy of corporate power, one the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls "inverted totalitarianism."
We must build structures of open defiance to the corporate state. It may take as long as a decade for us to effectively confront corporate power. But without a potent counterweight to the neoliberal order we will be steadily disempowered. Every action we take, every word we utter must make it clear that we refuse to participate in our own enslavement and destruction. The rapid disintegration of the ecosystem means resistance cannot be delayed.
Our success will be determined not by the number of votes we get in this or any other election but by our ability to stand unequivocally with the oppressed. The enemies of freedom throughout history have always charged its defenders with subversion. The enemies of freedom have often convinced large parts of a captive population to parrot back mind-numbing clichés to justify their rule. Resistance to corporate power will require fortitude, an ability to march to the beat of our own drum.
No revolutionary abandons, no matter what the cost, those he or she defends. We cannot betray those murdered by police in our marginal communities. We cannot betray the courageous dissidentsJulian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and the great revolutionary Mumia Abu-Jamal. They have not betrayed us. We cannot betray the dissidents in North Dakota who are defying a fossil fuel industry that is orchestrating the sixth great mass extinction, melting the polar ice caps and raising carbon emissions to over 400 parts per million. We cannot betray the 2.3 million men and women locked in cages across this nation for years and decades. We cannot betray the Palestinians. We cannot betray the Iraqis and Afghans whose lives we have destroyed by state terror. If we betray them we betray ourselves.
We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules. Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state. Our job is to destroy it. "We think we are the doctors," Alexander Herzen told anarchists of another era. "We are the disease."
The state seeks to control us through fear, propaganda, wholesale surveillance and violence. [This] is the only form of social control it has left. The lie of neoliberalism has been exposed. Its credibility has imploded. The moment we cease being afraid, the moment we use our collective strength as I saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 to make the rulers afraid of us, is the moment of the system's downfall.
Go into the voting booth on Tuesday. Do not be afraid. Vote with your conscience. Vote Green. If we win 5 percent we win. Five percent becomes the building block for the years ahead. A decade ago Syriza, the ruling party in Greece, was polling 4 percent. And after you vote, join some movement, some protest, some disruption, Black Lives Matter, the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, an anti-fracking demonstration. Courage is contagious. Revolutions begin, as I saw in East Germany, with a few Lutheran clergy holding candles as they marched through the streets of Leipzig in East Germany. It ends with half a million people protesting in East Berlin, the defection of the police and the army to the side of the protesters and the collapse of the Stasi state. But revolutions only happen when a few dissidents decide they will no longer cooperate, when they affirm what we must all affirm, when, as Havel said, they choose to live in truth.
We may not succeed. So be it. At least those who come after us, and I speak as a father, will say we tried. The corporate forces that have us in their death grip will destroy our lives. They will destroy the lives of my children. They will destroy the lives of your children. They will destroy the ecosystem that makes life possible. We owe it to those who come after us not to be complicit in this evil. We owe it to them to refuse to be good Germans. I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

and his most recent article. dark stuff

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/its_...k_20161111

[Lauren Johnson]

It appears Trump was shepherded into being the POTUS. The biggest clue is that exit polling vs official vote count favored Hillary during the primaries and Trump in the general election. Case closed. Saying the Republicans did it is something of a cover story. Who gets to be President is above any political party's pay grade. Think something more like a three letter agency or a continuity of government program -- or a continuity of the JFK assassination cabal program.

It is also instructive to see the instantaneous organized "grass roots" protests and riots as another attempt at a color revolution in which the ruling elites lead the revolution that destroys them.

[Michael Barwell]

The DNC knobbled Sanders in favour of Clinton. Sanders could've beaten Trump easily, I think, as they would both've been riding the 'reform' moo-cow. The media & 'the big machine' bigged-up Clinton with a Cold War-type hard-on, & what with ppl being generally dissatified with in-house & 'orthodox' politicing (from 9-11 & 2003's Iraq onwards - look at Afghan; look at ISIL; all this bullshit scarifying frantic crap on every single news program for 15 sodding years turning some neurotic & some stressed & anxious for to be saved from the madness), they simply feel that they're having the piss taken, and they are. Not so much 'DNC' as D'n'C's - daft, & rhymes with punts. It's hawkish arrogance, self-righteousness & hubris that's to thank for Trump. (& just to be clear, 'cos I'll be getting this later-on; there's no sleight or veiled msg here, shitehounds - it's your bullshit narrative to reference me to Trump, not mine, & I don't accept it - everything u say's shit anyway; suck it).

It's about an eagerness to bellow-icose, not mellow-icose.

>wibble<

[Peter Lemkin]

Thanks for pointing out Hedges' latest. I think it excellent [as are all of his writings IMHO] and needs to be here, as well.

It's Worse Than You Think

Posted on Nov 11, 2016

By Chris Hedges http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/its_...id=0&data=

New York City police officers guard Trump Tower, President-elect Donald Trump's Manhattan home. (Richard Drew / AP)

Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump's base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.
READ: Revenge of the Deplorables'
Our capitalist democracy ceased to function more than two decades ago. We underwent a corporate coup carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties. There are no institutions left that can authentically be called democratic. Trump and Hillary Clinton in a functioning democracy would have never been presidential nominees. The long and ruthless corporate assault on the working class, the legal system, electoral politics, the mass media, social services, the ecosystem, education and civil liberties in the name of neoliberalism has disemboweled the country. It has left the nation a decayed wreck. We celebrate ignorance. We have replaced political discourse, news, culture and intellectual inquiry with celebrity worship and spectacle.
Fascism, as historian Gaetano Salvemini pointed out, is about "giving up free institutions." It is the product of a democracy that has ceased to function. The democratic form will remain, much as it did during the dictatorships in the later part of the Roman Empire, but the reality is despotism, or in our case, corporate despotism. The citizen does not genuinely participate in power.
"It is very similar to late Weimar Germany," Noam Chomsky told me with uncanny insight when I spoke with him six years ago. "The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists, but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.
"The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen," Chomsky went on. "Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like [Joseph] McCarthy or [Richard] Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest, this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says I have got an answer: We have an enemy'? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens, it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don't think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate, it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election."
The repression of dissents will soon resemble the repression under past totalitarian regimes. State security will become an invasive and palpable presence. The most benign forms of opposition will be treated as if they are a threat to national security. Many, hoping to avoid the wrath of the state, will become compliant and passive. We, however, must fight back. We must carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, as many have done in streets around the country since the election. But we must also be aware that the democratic space allotted to us in our system of inverted totalitarianism has become much, much smaller.
Trump, with no democratic institutions left to restrain him, will accelerate the corporate assault, from privatizing Social Security to exonerating militarized police forces for the indiscriminate murder of unarmed citizens, while he unleashes the fossil fuel industry and the war industry to degrade and most probably extinguish life on earth. His administration will be populated by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, men and women characterized by profound intellectual and moral impoverishment, as well as a stunning ability to ignore reality. These ideologues speak exclusively in the language of intimidation and violence.
Half the country lives in poverty. Our former manufacturing centers are decayed wrecks. Our constitutional rights, including due process and habeas corpus, have been taken from us by judicial fiat. Corporations and the billionaire class carry out legal tax boycotts. Police gun down unarmed citizens in the street. The military, under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, is empowered to carry out the extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens within the United States, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in our black sites. We are the most spied upon, watched, eavesdropped, photographed and monitored population in human history. When the government watches you 24 hours a day, you cannot use the word "liberty." That is the relationship between a master and a slave. And governments that wield this kind of surveillance power swiftly become totalitarian. Trump and his cronies have been handed by bankrupt elites the legal and physical mechanisms to instantly transform America into a brutal police state.


Rudy Giuliani; Newt Gingrich, who advocates stripping U.S. citizens of their citizenship if they are deemed to be terrorists; retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and John Boltonthese men will not exhibit legal or moral restraint. They see the world through the Manichaean lens of good and evil, black and white, patriot and traitor. Politics have been transformed, as philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote of fascism, into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic experience for the fascist, Benjamin warned, is war.
State terror and state violence, familiar to poor people of color in our internal colonies, will become familiar to all of us. Racism, nationalism, misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, intolerance, white supremacy, religious bigotry, hate crimes and a veneration of the hypermasculine values of military culture will define political and cultural discourse. The ruling elites will attempt to divert the growing frustration and rage toward the vulnerableundocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, homosexuals, feminists and others. White vigilante violence will be directed at those the state demonizes with little or no legal ramifications. New enemies, at home and abroad, will be manufactured. Our endless wars in the Middle East will be expanded, perhaps to include a confrontation with Russia.
There were some, such as Ralph Nader, who saw this dystopia coming. They desperately tried to build a viable third party and empower citizen movements to give the dispossessed working class a vision and hope. They knew that the longer corporate power had a stranglehold on the economic and political system, the more we seeded the ground for an American fascism.
The elites put up numerous obstaclesrefusing to let Nader or later, Jill Stein, into the debates, making ballot access difficult or impossible, turning campaigns into long, money-drenched spectacles that cost billions of dollars, and skillfully using the politics of fear to intimidate voters. But the elites were aided by a bankrupt liberal class. In presidential election after presidential election, especially after Nader's success in 2000, so-called progressives succumbed to the idiotic mantra of the least worst. Those who should have been the natural allies of third parties and dissident movements abjectly surrendered to the Democratic Party that, like the Republican Party, serves the beast of imperialism and makes war on the poor, the working class and the middle class. The cowardice of the liberal class meant it lost all credibility, much as Bernie Sanders did when he sold his soul to the Clinton campaign. The liberal class proved it would stand and fight for nothing. It mouthed words and ideas it did not truly believe. It bears significant responsibility for the phenomena that created Trump. It should have had the foresight to abandon the Democratic Party after President Bill Clinton passed the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, to build parties and institutions that defended the interests of the working class. If it had stood up for working men and women, it might have prevented them being seduced by protofascists.
The rot of our failed democracy vomited up a con artist who was a creation of the mass mediafirst playing a fictional master of the universe on a reality television show and later a politician as vaudevillian. Trump pulled in advertising dollars and ratings. Truth and reality were irrelevant. Only when he got the nomination did the mass media see their Frankenstein as a threat, but by then it was too late. If there is one vapid group that is hated even more than the liberal class, it is the corporate press. The more it attacked Trump, the better Trump looked.
Trump is emblematic of what anthropologists call "crisis cults." A society in terminal decline often retreats into magical thinking. Reality is too much to bear. It places its faith in the fantastic and impossible promises of a demagogue or charlatan who promises the return of a lost golden age. The good jobs will come back. The nation will again be prosperous. The decrepit cities will be rebuilt. America will be great again. These promises, impossible to achieve, are no different from those peddled to Native Americans in the 1880s by the self-styled religious prophet Wovoka. He called on followers to carry out five-day dance ceremonies called the Ghost Dance. Native Americans donned shirts they were told protected them from bullets. They were assured that the buffalo herds would return, the dead warriors and chiefs would rise from the earth and the white men would disappear. None of his promises was realized. Many of his followers were gunned down like sheep by the U.S. army.
We face the most profound crisis in human history. Our response is to elect a man to the presidency who does not believe in climate change. Once societies unplug themselves from reality, those who speak truth become pariahs and enemies of the state. They are subject to severe state repression. Those lost in the reverie of the crisis cult applaud the elimination of these Cassandras. The appealing myths of magical thinking are pleasant opiates. But this narcotic, like all narcotics, leads to squalor and death.

[Peter Lemkin]

Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

By Isaac Chotiner





Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during his victory speech at his primary-night rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, Feb. 9, 2016.

Jim Bourg/Reuters, Paneikon

Donald Trump's overwhelming victory in Tuesday night's New Hampshire primary makes him, according to both betting markets and many analysts, the favorite to win the Republican nomination. Trump has been written off as an entertainer and circus clown, but he has been tagged with another, much more serious label: fascist. Trump's campaign has stirred bigoted feelings in the electorate and played to voters' worst fears and prejudices. And so far, it's working. Two-thirds of New Hampshire Republicans, according to exit polls, favored Trump's ban on Muslim immigration.

ISAAC CHOTINERIsaac Chotiner is a [B]Slatecontributor. [/B]

To discuss Trump's rise and its historical echoes, I called Robert Paxton, a leading authority on the history of fascism. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and an expert on Vichy France, Paxton has written numerous books on European history. We discussed the ways in which Trump is and is not a fascist, whether Trump believes what he says, and why now, of all times, so many Americans seem to be embracing him. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Isaac Chotiner: As a historian of fascism, what do you make of Trump's rise?

Robert Paxton: Well, it's astonishing and depressing because he's totally foreign to any of the skills that are wanted in a president of the United States. What we call him is another matter. There are certainly some echoes of fascism, but there are also very profound differences.

Start with the echoes.

First of all, let me preface it by saying that I'm very, very reluctant to use the word fascism loosely, because it's almost the most powerful epithet you can use. I guess child molester might be a little more powerful but not much.

Nazi maybe, but that's just a version of fascism.

It's the same thing. It's enormously tempting. Anyway, the echoes you can deal with on two levels. First of all, there are the kinds of themes Trump uses. The use of ethnic stereotypes and exploitation of fear of foreigners is directly out of a fascist's recipe book. "Making the country great again" sounds exactly like the fascist movements. Concern about national decline, that was one of the most prominent emotional states evoked in fascist discourse, and Trump is using that full-blast, quite illegitimately, because the country isn't in serious decline, but he's able to persuade them that it is. That is a fascist stroke. An aggressive foreign policy to arrest the supposed decline. That's another one. Then, there's a second level, which is a level of style and technique. He even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out, and also the bluster, the skill at sensing the mood of the crowd, the skillful use of media.

I read an absolutely astonishing account of Trump arriving for a political speech, somewhere out West I think, and his audience was gathered in an airplane hangar, and he landed his plane at the field and taxied up to the hangar and got out. That is exactly what they did in 1932 for Hitler's first election victory. No one had ever seen a candidate arrive by plane before; it was absolutely dazzling, the impression given, the decisiveness of power, of authority, of modernity. I suppose it was accidental, but wow, that is an almost letter-perfect replay of a Hitler election tactic. And the capacity of Trump to enlist working-class voters against the left is exactly what Hitler and Mussolini were able to do. There are definitely echoes.

Do you think that Trump is consciously using fascist tropes, or do you think that he's just sort of stumbled into this?

I doubt it's conscious. I don't think he's a bookish man. I'm sure he's never read a book about Hitler or Mussolini.

He'll read your books after this interview.

Perhaps.

When people like you and me watch Trump, I think we tend to assume he is a bullshitter who doesn't have deeply held positions and is acting to a degree.



I think a lot of people would say, Well, Hitler and Mussolini, they believed what they were doing. Fascists generally believe what they're doing. In fascism, do you think that there was more bullshit and politicking than people assume?

Totally. One of the reasons I wrote my book was that I was so tired of people interpreting fascism as the application of a program. When you read Hitler's program, his 21 points, when the party was founded in 1920, and when you read Mussolini's first program in 1919, it had very little to do with what they eventually did. Mussolini, particularly, came from the left, and his first program included things like the vote for women, the abolition of a monarchy. It was more his style than the details of the program. The details of the program were constantly changing. They say whatever seems to suit the mood of the moment.Mein Kampf is taken as a model that [Hitler] carried outwell, in Mein Kampf, he wants to make peace with the British. They are full of inconsistencies, they were very opportunistic, totally opportunistic, and there was a high degree of change in their programs.

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

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Trump is the Stalking Horse for the latest Coup: Oil,9/11, the Deep State, and Wall St.

By dale ruff
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9-11 Commendation Bar- The Central Intelligence Agency
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Image: 9/11 Commendation for Central Intelligence AgencyDonald Trump, who campaigned as a man of the people and an outsider with very independent politically incorrect foreign policy views, and who finished second in the popular vote, has already made it clear he is in the neo-con camp....................or they in his. He selected James Woolsey, as his foreign policy advisor. Woolsey was CIA chief, was the first to accuse Saddam of complicity in 9/11, hours after the attack, and he is a member of the Project for the New American Century, which wrote the blueprint and rationale for invading 7 ME nations, leading through Iraq and Damascus to Iran, and suggesting we need "a new Pearl Harbor" to mobilize public support for these wars.
9/11, produced by Dick Cheney with the help of the CIA, was this Pearl Harbor, needed to mobilize public support for all out war and a total spy state: welcome 1984, now as farce in the comic impersonator born as Donald Trump.

World Trade Center American flag (Photo Page)
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Trump says 9/'11 is a lie (as do the members of the 9/11 Commission),but he has chosen a member of the Deep State, with CIA background (the CIA stonewalled the Commission, had contacts with the hijackers, etc), and of course, since the CIA is Wall St,. he also sits on the board of several investment banks and has a lucrative consultant role (wink wink) with global management firm Booz Allen, with Woolsey assigned to help the fascist monarchy in UAE, which is a key violator of human rights and a funder of terrorism, per the Clinton leaked email, to build their spy network (NSA like)He is a spook/spokesman, the public face of the Deep State, the living merging of the Deep State and Wall Street. (Jefferson:"Banks are even more dangerous than standing armies." In Woolsey the two have merged and will soon occupy the White house, with Trump serving, as Reagan did, as the salesman for the Deep State, keeping it folksy.
So either the Deep State has infiltrated the rogue Trump circle to make sure he stays on script (they murdered JFK when he went off script)......................OR




Trump is in bed with the Deep State, and Woolsey is his liaison to the deeper levels, the CIA and below, as well as to investment banking community, with its revolving door with the CIA leadership.
Either way, it debunks the idea Trump is independent of outside or dark influence such as the corruption of money (not Donald: he has no interest in money).: he is either a tool or a member in good standing, showing his true colors for those who know how to google and/or have a good memory concerning his key foreign policy advisor.....

Ronald Reagan with Dick Cheney (Photo Page)
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So this may be the third Presidency run by the CIA, including Reagan, with Casey's 6 illegal/secret wars and arming bin Laden as Reagan snoozed), Bush I who had been head of the CIA, and now Trump, as evidenced by the CIA/banker Woolsey forming policy (Trump being clueless). Watch as the PNAC agenda continues with an aggressive move on Iran, as Woolsey was a key critic of the Iran Nuke Deal (no nukes involved but , you know.....fear mongering. Just like "a new Pearl Harbor."

Trump bets blast Dow to new high, bank sector hits 2008 levels Those who predicted the victory of Trump and support him 3% of the time, now predict that the Iran deal, which is working perfectly, will be sabotaged, fear mongered (nukes! nukes!), and perhaps even repealed. This will also help Trump repay his largest donor, Sheldon Adelson, flipping his early position of "neutrality" to robust support for right-wing Israeli policies such as more illegal settlements, end of the 2-state solution, and accompanied by glee from Netanyahu.
In Defense Industry Stocks Surge Following Donald Trump Victory
The Intercept: Naomi Klein lays out in detail how this Amerian Century war on the Middle East was based on creating a shock so profound that radical changes could be made, enormous new powers assumed, and rights stripped, while the public reeled in fear and confusion. After 9/11, Bush's approval leaped to 92% and "defense" stocks skyrocketed. It worked!
So, that's the plan, and Woolsey is there to direct it. Trump may be the Prince but Woolsey is now his Machiavelli.
Is Trump the ultimate snake oil salesman for the neo-con PNAC script....or is he the clueless, blustering buffoon Woolsey was sent to control? Woolsey is not the only one who plays this role but clearly, Bush chose a neo-con with Deep State ties. We have entered the era of serial coups, with elections being both a nuisance and a distraction. Bush had his handler in Cheney, who was selected by.....Cheney) but Woolsey is close to Trump and is filling his vacuous mind with neo-con poison (Iran is secretly building nukes, Syria is using CW, etc.) Trump, being ignorant, will believe lies Woolsey knows not to be true but useful to advance the PNAC agenda of total destabilization of all but the fascist monarchies and fascist Israel in the Middle East, a combined hubris and a disease that can only be cured (paraphrasing Cortez) by oil. We are the aliens seeking a cure for our lust for fossil fuels, slaying the natives by getting them to slay each other.
In Oil edges higher after shock Trump victory for U.S. presidency

Oil prices edged higher on Wednesday. Trump has criticized the West's nuclear deal with Iran, that has allowed Tehran to increase crude oil. The candidate who got the least votes (from the public) is the beneficiary of a coup in which the Deep State is represented by a "populist outsider." This B-TV star soon will occupy the White House, in a complete takeover of the Public State by the Deep State. The Bush coup was a neo-con failure (unless you agree their goal was destabilization of Egypt, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen.....) but exactly in line with the PNAC manifesto, which Trump's chief advisor on foreign policy was part of designing and implementing, tying Saddam to 9/11 within hours, right on script, setting up the Big Lie to justify invading and destroying Iraq and move on to Syria, then the ultimate target Iran, with huge fossil fuel reserves:
"The US Energy Information Administration estimated Iran's proved gas reserves as of the start of 2013 as 1,187 trillion cubic feet (33.6 trillion cubic metres).,[SUP][3][/SUP] rendering it 1st in the world, surpassing Russia's."
The Iran "Nuke" Deal "crippled Iran" to punish it for helping in the defense of the Palestinians, a crime per neo-con doctrine.

1 IG cover sappers capping a burning oil well. Basra, Iraq. 03-04-2003 MOD 45142639 (Photo Page)
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"Iran is one of the most hydrocarbon-rich areas in the world..." That' why.
.
This is the CIA, Wall St, Big Oil, and at the center, James Woolsey, spokesman for the Dark Forces which with Trump has either found a champion or a chump.........

Hayden and Woolsey walking CIA photo (Photo Page)
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CIA photo: Hayden and Woosey walking.
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