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

[Peter Lemkin]

What a f***ing lame and disingenuous, dissembling, devisive, high school-level speech. At the Inauguration there were 600,000 people. At Obama's there were 1,800,000.

Well, we are truly f***ed now...and fascist by the Mussolini definition [though it was mostly so under previous Presidents - and increasingly so]. I predict a destruction of what is left of the polity, freedoms, liberties, peace, rights, democracy, constitutionality, financial security in the next few weeks and months. I didn't feel this depressed when W became President. This is worse by a huge factor. I'm sick.::face.palm::

Trumpf asked to have tanks and missile launchers rolling down the streets of D.C. [like in N. Korea] in his parade ; however, this was vetoed by D.C. authorities ONLY because it would destroy the roads. ::bigguns:: ::

"Toto, I don't think we are in Kansas anymore....."

....tear gas in the streets of Washington now....and police stopping legal peaceful demonstrations. Hello Policestate USA!

[Peter Lemkin]

White House website scrubbed
One of the first things that marked the transition to the Trump presidency was an overhaul of the White House website, removing any mention of climate policy or legislation to protect minorities, including everyone from Native Americans to the LGBT community.
In place of the copious policy details outlined by the Obama administration were six vague descriptions of items like "America First Energy Plan" and "Making Our Military Strong Again."
"Peace through strength will be at the center of that foreign policy," according to Whitehouse.gov.
First steps
Trump spokesman Sean Spicer announced that one of the new president's first actions as president will be to create a national day of patriotism, in addition to the Fourth of July, Patriots' Day, and the two US holidays that celebrate its armed forces Memorial Day and Veterans' Day. In fact in some states, there is already a holiday called Patriots' Day celebrating the start of the Revolutionary War.
Shortly after the Trump family entered the White House, Congress began confirming the new president's cabinet picks. Defense Secretary James Mattis quickly became the first of Trump's nominees to be approved, by a margin of 98-1. New homeland security secretary, retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, was also confirmed by the Senate. Kelly has spoke of his support for Trump's proposed border wall between the US and Mexico.
Once in the Oval Office, the president signed his first executive order, easing regulations associated with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. The move came despite the fact that Trump said in a Republican debate last year that he did not like executive orders, saying "nobody really knew" that "such a thing" existed in the US. With the exception of William Henry Harrison, who died 31 days into his first term, every president since George Washington has signed executive orders.
Trump also ordered an immediate regulatory freeze for all government agencies, although Spicer did not elaborate what that would entail when it was announced.
Photos of the president's office showed a few subtle changes from its previous occupant. A bust of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr had been replaced by a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and red drapes had been replaced with golden ones.
"It was a beautiful day," Trump told reporters in a brief statement. :: ::

[Peter Lemkin]

ACLU Announces Legal Action On Trump Conflicts Of Interest

The American Civil Liberties Union has announced a plan to fight the Trump administration, starting with litigation on Thursday designed to get government offices to hand over materials regarding possible conflicts of interest. From the organization's press release:
"The first legal action, filed yesterday, is a Freedom of Information Act request asking several government agencies to turn over all documents relating to President Trump's actual or potential conflicts of interest to his business and family connections. The request seeks legal opinions, memoranda, advisories, and communications from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the Office of Government Ethics, the General Services Administration, and the office of Personnel Management from November 9, 2016, to January 20, 2017. The request includes email and all other communication to and from the presidential transition team."

[Peter Lemkin]

John Pilger Writes:

On the day President Trump is inaugurated, thousands of writers in the United States will express their indignation. "In order for us to heal and move forward...", say Writers Resist, "we wish to bypass direct political discourse, in favour of an inspired focus on the future, and how we, as writers, can be a unifying force for the protection of democracy."
And: "We urge local organizers and speakers to avoid using the names of politicians or adopting 'anti' language as the focus for their Writers Resist event. It's important to ensure that nonprofit organizations, which are prohibited from political campaigning, will feel confident participating in and sponsoring these events."
Thus, real protest is to be avoided, for it is not tax exempt.
Compare such drivel with the declarations of the Congress of American Writers, held at Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1935, and again two years later. They were electric events, with writers discussing how they could confront ominous events in Abyssinia, China and Spain. Telegrams from Thomas Mann, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out, reflecting the fear that great power was now rampant and that it had become impossible to discuss art and literature without politics or, indeed, direct political action.
"A writer," the journalist Martha Gellhorn told the second congress, "must be a man of action now... A man who has given a year of his life to steel strikes, or to the unemployed, or to the problems of racial prejudice, has not lost or wasted time. He is a man who has known where he belonged. If you should survive such action, what you have to say about it afterwards is the truth, is necessary and real, and it will last."
Her words echo across the unction and violence of the Obama era and the silence of those who colluded with his deceptions.
That the menace of rapacious power - rampant long before the rise of Trump - has been accepted by writers, many of them privileged and celebrated, and by those who guard the gates of literary criticism, and culture, including popular culture, is uncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Not for them the responsibility to speak out, regardless of who occupies the White House.
Today, false symbolism is all. "Identity" is all. In 2016, Hillary Clinton stigmatised millions of voters as "a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic - you name it". Her abuse was handed out at an LGBT rally as part of her cynical campaign to win over minorities by abusing a white mostly working-class majority. Divide and rule, this is called; or identity politics in which race and gender conceal class, and allow the waging of class war. Trump understood this.
"When the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."
This is not an American phenomenon. A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that "for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life".
No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among today's insistent voices of consumer-feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described "the arts of dominating other people... of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital".
There is something both venal and profoundly stupid about famous writers as they venture outside their cosseted world and embrace an "issue". Across the Review section of the Guardian on 10 December was a dreamy picture of Barack Obama looking up to the heavens and the words, "Amazing Grace" and "Farewell the Chief".
The sycophancy ran like a polluted babbling brook through page after page. "He was a vulnerable figure in many ways ... But the grace. The all-encompassing grace: in manner and form, in argument and intellect, with humour and cool ... [He] is a blazing tribute to what has been, and what can be again ... He seems ready to keep fighting, and remains a formidable champion to have on our side ... ... The grace ... the almost surreal levels of grace ..."
I have conflated these quotes. There are others even more hagiographic and bereft of mitigation. The Guardian's chief apologist for Obama, Gary Younge, has always been careful to mitigate, to say that his hero "could have done more": oh, but there were the "calm, measured and consensual solutions..."
None of them, however, could surpass the American writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the recipient of a "genius" grant worth $625,000 from a liberal foundation. In an interminable essay for The Atlanticentitled, "My President Was Black", Coates brought new meaning to prostration. The final "chapter", entitled "When You Left, You Took All of Me With You", a line from a Marvin Gaye song, describes seeing the Obamas "rising out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity". The Ascension, no less.
One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression and reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, who expanded America's favourite military pastime, bombing, and death squads ("special operations") as no other president has done since the Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday - reported the New York Times - he personally selected those who would be murdered by mostly hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the "terrorist target". A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama's drones killed 4,700 people. "Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that," he said, but we've taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda."
Like the fascism of the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent media whose description now fits that of the Nuremberg prosecutor: "Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically... In the propaganda system... it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.
Take the catastrophe in Libya. In 2011, Obama said Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew... that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."
This was the known lie of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. It became the media story; and Nato - led by Obama and Hillary Clinton - launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that "most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten".
Under Obama, the US has extended secret "special forces" operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world's population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa. Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom's "soldier to soldier" doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa's proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master's black colonial elite whose "historic mission", warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of "a capitalism rampant though camouflaged".
It was Obama who, in 2011, announced what became known as the "pivot to Asia", in which almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to "confront China", in the words of his Defence Secretary. There was no threat from China; the entire enterprise was unnecessary. It was an extreme provocation to keep the Pentagon and its demented brass happy.
In 2014, the Obama's administration oversaw and paid for a fascist-led coup in Ukraine against the democratically-elected government, threatening Russia in the western borderland through Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, with a loss of 27 million lives. It was Obama who placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia, and it was the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any administration since the cold war - having promised, in an emotional speech in Prague, to "help rid the world of nuclear weapons".
Obama, the constitutional lawyer, prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in history, even though the US constitution protects them. He declared Chelsea Manning guilty before the end of a trial that was a travesty. Although Manning is to be released in May, Obama has refused to quash the outrageous sentence under which he suffered seven years of inhumane treatment, which the UN said amounted to torture. He has pursued an entirely bogus case against Julian Assange. He promised to close the Guantanamo concentration camp and didn't.
Following the public relations disaster of George W. Bush, Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls "leadership" throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee's decision was part of this: the kind of cloying reverse racism that beatified the man for no reason other than he was attractive to liberal sensibilities and, of course, American power, if not to the children he kills in impoverished, mostly Muslim countries.
This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded, especially "liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics," as Luciana Bohne put it. "When Obama walks into a room," gushed George Clooney, "you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere."
William I. Robinson, professor at the University of California, and one of an uncontaminated group of American strategic thinkers who have retained their independence during the years of intellectual dog-whistling since 9/11, wrote this last week:
"President Barack Obama... may have done more than anyone to assure [Donald] Trump's victory. While Trump's election has triggered a rapid expansion of fascist currents in US civil society, a fascist outcome for the political system is far from inevitable.... But that fight back requires clarity as to how we got to such a dangerous precipice. The seeds of 21st century fascism were planted, fertilized and watered by the Obama administration and the politically bankrupt liberal elite."
Robinson points out that "whether in its 20th or its emerging 21st century variants, fascism is, above all, a response to deep structural crises of capitalism, such as that of the 1930s and the one that began with the financial meltdown in 2008... There is a near-straight line here from Obama to Trump... The liberal elite's refusal to challenge the rapaciousness of transnational capital and its brand of identity politics served to eclipse the language of the working and popular classes... pushing white workers into an 'identity' of white nationalism and helping the neo-fascists to organise them".
The seedbed is Obama's Weimar Republic, a landscape of endemic poverty, militarised police and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a "market" extremism which, under his presidency, prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street.
Perhaps his greatest "legacy" is the co-option and disorientation of any real opposition. Bernie Sanders' specious "revolution" does not apply. Propaganda is his triumph.
The lies about Russia - in whose elections the US has openly intervened - have made the world's most self-important journalists laughing stocks. In the country with constitutionally the freest press in the world, free journalism now exists only in its honourable exceptions.
The obsession with Trump is a cover for many of those calling themselves "left/liberal", as if to claim political decency. They are not "left", neither are they especially "liberal". Much of America's aggression towards the rest of humanity has come from so-called liberal Democratic administrations - such as Obama's. America's political spectrum extends from the mythical centre to the lunar right. The "left" are homeless renegades Martha Gellhorn described as "a rare and wholly admirable fraternity". She excluded those who confuse politics with a fixation on their navels.
While they "heal" and "move forward", will the Writers Resist campaigners and other anti-Trumpists reflect upon this? More to the point: when will a genuine movement of opposition arise? Angry, eloquent, all-for-one-and-one-for all. Until real politics return to people's lives, the enemy is not Trump, it is ourselves.
17 January 2017

[Peter Lemkin]

TRUMP IS PRESIDENT TIME TO UNDERSTAND CONFLICT OF INTEREST LAWS

What Is the Emoluments Clause?


Ethics experts believe that Donald Trump and his various business dealings in the US and abroad will test the nation's conflict of interest laws like no other president before him.
The Emoluments Clause of the Constitution has played a particularly large role in the discussions of whether Trump would need to sell his company (which he did not do), set up a true blind trust (which he also did not do) or take other steps to ensure that he does not run afoul of the law.
But what is the Emoluments Clause? Watch this short video featuring Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyers under President Barack Obama and George W. Bush, respectively.

[Peter Lemkin]

THE WOMENS MARCH ON WASHINGTON was spectacular, powerful, uplifting, revolutionary. Up to 750.000 people came - maybe more! Great speeches and song. While there were famous old voices, I was stunned by some of the young voices ready to take up where the old radicals of the 60s and 70s left off! Trumpf was told in plain language his evil plans will not be allowed to move forward, and the People, especially the Woman will resist! I went to a smaller sister demo here in Prague [about 60 international and about 600 US sister demos occurred today]. Total number of persons must be in the few millions.

I really suggest anyone who's lost hope and wants to get it back to watch the five hours of the March's speakers on several places on the internet. Here is but one https://www.democracynow.org/ or here are many https://www.startpage.com/do/search?quer...ge=english

The revolution begins against hate, injustice, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, war, profits before people, intolerance, hubris, oligarchy, imperialism, classism (and more) NOW! Perhaps the travesty of Trumpism will rekindle the last few embers of revolutionary spirit into a bonfire of action and change - real change - not the spare change of Obama.

Based on the numbers the Women's March in D.C. alone, this is the largest mass demonstration in US History, and many hundreds of thousands more than attended the Inaugeration. ::bowtie:: ::

Even the Tweetster-in-Chief is too stunned to tweet about this mass uprising of his 'little and nasty women and others'

[Lauren Johnson]

I attended a March in our little city. I'm guessing 1500, which is pretty amazing! Many young mothers. They are out fighting for their kids. You piss off a mother and you have made an enemy.

[Peter Lemkin]

The police had ordered the march stop at the Washington Monument, but they have such large numbers, they are pushing past Police lines NOW and heading toward the White House! ::coolrock:: Sleep well Donald!

Great speeches from so many - I'll try to find some of them transcribed and post tomorrow. I feel some hope for the first time in a long time...if this can be the beginning and not a 'one off', Trumpf won't last the year - and I'm serious about that.

While the rally and march went on, our new Emperor [with no clothes] was at CIA HQ making the most disgusting childish and egotistical statements....telling them that he was sure they had all voted for him and that they were on the same 'team' and would soon be screaming for him to not be supporting them so much.....the Trumpf is a failed Presidency at day one. President Donald Trump to CIA: I love you, I respect you, there's nobody I respect more than CIA staff.::face.palm::::

[Peter Lemkin]

Trumpf has been caught in a really big LIE he can not get out of. He stated on camera that his inauguration crowd was the largest in US history. Photos clearly show this a LIE, and that the crown in D.C. for the Women's march the next day was larger. The crowd for Obama was also larger by about three times. Expect nothing but wall-to-wall lies to feed his ego and pockets from this thug. His politics aside for the moment, this is just a dishonest person who creates his own reality show as he goes through life....all smoke and mirrors.

Conservative media estimates now believe that over one million people, mostly women attended in D.C. alone, with over a million in other US cities - perhaps two....for a total of three million or more in the USA alone and perhaps half a million worldwide.

[Peter Lemkin]

On November 6, 2018, 33 senate seats, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, and 14 governorship's will be up for re-election - get moving. Let's make this Neanderthal dink in the White House power as small as his fingers/humanity are short.