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

[Peter Lemkin]

Granted not all had a deep political analysis - but despite that, the resistance to what Trumpf and his cronies/crooks/bigots/and other criminals who care not for the People - they got it and they said it loud!





























some of the best speeches I haven't yet found individually. Youtube is interested only in posting those of known celebs. However, on the full five and a half hour versions I posted you can find all the more political speeches from activists of various sorts.

[Peter Lemkin]

Would-be protesters heading to the Women's March on Washington have said they were denied entry to the United States after telling border agents at a land crossing in Quebec their plans to attend the march.

Montrealer Sasha Dyck was part of a group of eight who had arranged online to travel together to Washington. Divided into two cars, the group six Canadians and two French nationals arrived at the border crossing that connects St Bernard de Lacolle in Quebec with Champlain, New York, on Thursday.
The group was upfront about their plans with border agents, Dyck said. "We said we were going to the women's march on Saturday and they said, Well, you're going to have to pull over'."
What followed was a two-hour ordeal. Their cars were searched and their mobile phones examined. Each member of the group was fingerprinted and had their photo taken.
Border agents first told the two French citizens that they had been denied entry to the US and informed them that any future visit to the US would now require a visa.
"Then for the rest of us, they said, You're headed home today'," Dyck said. The group was also warned that if they tried to cross the border again during the weekend, they would be arrested. "And that was it, they didn't give a lot of justification."
Dyck described it as a sharp contrast to 2009, when the research nurse made the same journey to attend Barack Obama's inauguration. "I couldn't even get in for this one, whereas at the other one, the guy at the border literally gave me a high five when I came in and everybody was just like, welcome'. The whole city was partying; nobody was there to protest Obama the first time."
UK national Joe Kroese said he, a Canadian and two Americans were held at the same border crossing for three hours on Thursday.
The group had travelled from Montreal, where 23-year-old Kroese is studying, and had explained to border agents that they were considering attending the Women's March but had yet to finalise their plans.
After being questioned, fingerprinted and photographed, Kroese and his Canadian companion were refused entry because they were planning to attend what the border agent called a "potentially violent rally", he said. The pair was advised not to travel to the United States for a few months, and Kroese was told he would now need a visa to enter the US.
After an attempted crossing late Thursday, Montreal resident Joseph Decunha said he was also turned away. He and the two Americans he was with told the border agent that they were planning to attend the inauguration and the women's march.

The group was brought in for secondary processing, where the border agent asked about their political views, Decunha told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "The first thing he asked us point blank is, Are you anti- or pro-Trump?'"
After being fingerprinted and photographed he was told that his two friends could enter the US, but that he could not. "They told me I was being denied entry for administrative reasons. According to the agent, my travelling to the United States for the purpose of protesting didn't constitute a valid reason to cross," Decunha said.
He described the experience particularly the questions he fielded about his political beliefs as concerning. "It felt like, if we had been pro-Trump, we would have absolutely been allowed entry."

[Peter Lemkin]

Felony Riot' Charges Against Inauguration Protesters Signal a Dangerous Wave of Repression

Posted on Jan 22, 2017

By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet

Riot police face off with protesters demonstrating against President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Friday as the inauguration proceedings take place. (Jose Luis Magana / AP)

More than 200 people who were mass-arrested at the Washington, D.C. protests against the inauguration of Donald Trump have been hit with felony riot charges that are punishable by up to 10 years in prison and quarter-million-dollar fine. Those picked up in the sweepincluding legal observers and journalistshad their phones, cameras and other personal belongings confiscated as evidence, a lawyer confirmed to AlterNet.
Demonstrators warn that the crackdown signals a new wave of repression against the protesters, whose mass mobilization was met with riot police violence, National Guard and Department of Homeland Security deployments, heavy surveillance and law enforcement snipers positioned on rooftops.
"These charges are absolutely horrifying. They are just trying to stop any resistance to the Trump administration," Samantha Miller, an organizer with the Disrupt J20 Collective, told AlterNet. "Many of these demonstrators were showing rage and fear of what's coming. It's going to take a lot more than asking nicely to create change and stop the threats from the Trump administration."
The vast majority of the roughly 230 people who were kettled and mass-arrested at the anti-capitalist bloc during Friday's protests have been charged under the felony riot act, said Mark Goldstone, a National Lawyers Guild-affiliated attorney who has defended protesters in Washington, D.C. for more than 30 years. Washington, D.C. authorities put this number at 217. Goldstone confirmed to AlterNet that legal observers and journalists were among those detained in the sweep, explaining that, throughout his career in Washington, D.C., he has never seen mass charges of this kind.
Jeffrey Light, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who provided legal support to the Disrupt J20 Collective, agreed with this assessment. "I have been representing protesters for 13 years now, and I have never seen felony rioting charges in Washington, D.C. It is not one of the standard laws that they tend to use. This is unusual. It is rare to use that charge."
"Across the board, all phones and cameras are being held as evidence, and they are also detaining gloves and cell phone chargers as evidence," said Light. "They are giving people their wallets back generally, but that's it. It is extremely troubling."
According to a class-action lawsuit filed by Light on Friday, those picked up in the sweep and hit with felony riot charges already endured abuse at the hands of the police. "Our class action lawsuit charges that the police were rounding up everyone on the street without warning and putting them under arrest and using excessive force," said Light. "There were a number of weapons we haven't seen Washington, D.C. police use in recent memory, flash bang grenades and tear gas. In addition to chemical irritants, they were assaulting people with batons. They were beating people."
Those kettled by police were forced to wait for hours in the street and on school buses, many of them going untreated for injuries, say supporters. "They are trying to set a tone to chill further demos of this nature, and I don't think it's going to work," Bob Hayes, a Washington, D.C. resident who is helping coordinate legal support, told AlterNet. "They are trying to put pressure on individuals to collaborate with the investigations."
Light emphasized that, while the riot felony charges are new, the mass arrests are not. Acting DC Police Chief Peter Newsham, who oversaw this weekend's crackdown, was the assistant police chief who presided over another mass arrest more than a decade ago. In the fall of 2002, the Metropolitan police department mass arrested hundreds of people at a World Bank protest in Washington, D.C.'s Pershing Park and hogtied them for up to 24 hours while in detention, before dropping all charges. In a 2015 settlement, the city was forced to pay $2.2 million to nearly 400 protesters.
Newsham, who ordered the mass arrests in 2002, oversaw the police crackdown against inauguration protesters.
Friday's crackdown came as mass protests erupted across Washington, D.C. and the world, overshadowing the inauguration of Donald Trump, who rose to power on a tide of white nationalism and fascism. On Friday morning, social movements including the Movement for Black Lives and groups centering Muslim, Jewish and immigrant resistance, converged at 14 different "security" checkpoints, to shut down, slow and disrupt the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. "We stand in solidarity with everyone who challenges oppression in all of its forms, everywhere around the world, in favor of dignity, self-determination, and defending our collective well-being," reads a statement from the anti-capitalist, anti-fascist bloc circulated ahead of Friday's protests.
Those arrested in Washington, D.C. faced an outpouring of public support. Ryan Harvey, an activist and musician with Firebrand Records, told AlterNet that hundreds gathered outside the jail on Saturday to show their support for those being released. "Every time people came out, the crowd would cheer and chant," with the term "anticapitalista" an oft-repeated refrain. "For many, it was like a surprise birthday party, and their faces lit up. Street medics were on-scene, and many supporters brought food, clothes, coffee, tea and water."
Harvey emphasized that the support is important because it "defends the rights of these people to fight against fascism" and "combats the narrative that there is something more problematic about their protest than their is about the inauguration."
Washington, D.C. residents say that the state violence on display this weekend extends far beyond the individuals hit with felony riot charges.
"A mother carrying her toddler was pepper sprayed in the face," said Miller. "An elder from Standing Rock was sprayed in her face. A woman with crutches tried to intervene, and she was sprayed."
"We faced the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard, riot police, surveillance, snipers on rooftops, and Trump supporters," Darakshan Raja, founder of the Muslim American Women's Policy Forum and co-director of the Washington Peace Center, told AlterNet. "Just to walk around and see that, have them watch you as a target."
"For weeks, the alt right' has been attacking us," Raja continued. "They have sent death threats to the protesters of J20, attacked our organizations, reported us for false things to the city government, harassed all our partners, including the spaces we are housed. Their violence against us can't be lost in this moment."

[Peter Lemkin]

Revolt Is the Only Barrier to a Fascist America

Posted on Jan 22, 2017

By Chris Hedges

On the verge: Donald Trump waits to assume power at the kickoff of the inauguration process in Washington on Friday. (Patrick Semansky / AP)

This is a transcript of a talk Chris Hedges gave at the Inaugurate the Resistance rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.

The ruling elites, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s, or by what [political scientist] Samuel P. Huntington called America's "excess of democracy," built counter-institutions to delegitimize and marginalize critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism. They bought the allegiances of the two main political parties. They imposed … obedience to the neoliberal ideology within academia and the press. This campaign, laid out by Lewis Powell in his 1971 memorandum titled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," was the blueprint for the creeping corporate coup d'état that 45 years later is complete.
The destruction of democratic institutions, places where the citizen has agency and a voice, is far graver than the ascendancy to the White House of the demagogue Donald Trump. The coup destroyed our two-party system. It destroyed labor unions. It destroyed public education. It destroyed the judiciary. It destroyed the press. It destroyed academia. It destroyed consumer and environmental protection. It destroyed our industrial base. It destroyed communities and cities. And it destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that provides a living wage, cursed to live in chronic poverty or locked in cages in our monstrous system of mass incarceration.
This coup also destroyed the credibility of liberal democracy. Self-identified liberals such as the Clintons and Barack Obama mouthed the words of liberal democratic values while making war on these values in the service of corporate power. The revolt we see rippling across the country is a revolt not only against a corporate system that has betrayed workers, but also, for many, liberal democracy itself. This is very dangerous. It will allow the radical right under a Trump administration to cement into place an Americanized fascism.
"Ignorance allied with power," James Baldwin wrote, "is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
It turns out, 45 years later, that those who truly hate us for our freedoms are not the array of dehumanized enemies cooked up by the war machinethe Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians or even the Taliban, al-Qaida and ISIS. They are the financiers, bankers, politicians, public intellectuals and pundits, lawyers, journalists and businesspeople cultivated in the elite universities and business schools who sold us the utopian dream of neoliberalism.
We are entering the twilight phase of capitalism. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public. Our casino capitalism has merged with the gambling industry. The entire system is parasitic. It is designed to prey on the desperateyoung men and women burdened by student loans, underpaid workers burdened by credit card debt and mortgages, towns and cities forced to borrow to maintain municipal services.
Casino magnates such as Sheldon Adelson and hedge fund managers such as Robert Mercer add nothing of value to society. They do not generate money but instead redistribute it upwards to the 1 percent. They use lobbyists and campaign contributions to built monopoliesthis is how the drug company Mylan raised the price of an "EpiPen," used to treat allergy reactions, from $57 in 2007 to about $500and to rewrite laws and regulations. They have given themselves the legal power to carry out a tax boycott, loot the U.S. Treasury, close factories and send the jobs overseas, gut social service programs and impose austerity. They have, at the same time, militarized our police, built the most sophisticated security and surveillance apparatus in human history and used judicial fiat to strip us of our civil liberties. They are ready should we rise up in defiance.
These mandarins are, if we speak in the language of God and country, traitors. They are parasites. Financial speculation in 17th-century England was a crime. Speculators were hanged. The heads of most of [today's] banks and hedge funds and the executives of large corporations, such as Walmart and Gap, that run sweatshop death traps for impoverished workers overseas deserve prison far more than most of the poor students of color I teach within the prison system, people who never had a fair trial or a chance in life.
When a tiny cabal seizes powermonarchist, communist, fascist or corporateit creates a mafia economy and a mafia state. Donald Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists and deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner's novels. The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slave-holding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended familywhich includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestialityare fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.
"The usual reference to amorality,' while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment," the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. "Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips."
"Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force," Howe wrote. "They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds."
What comes next, history has shown, will not be pleasant. A corrupt and inept ruling elite, backed by the organs of state security and law enforcement, will unleash a naked kleptocracy. Workers will become serfs. The most benign dissent will be criminalized. The ravaging of the ecosystem propels us towards extinction. Hate talk will call for attacks against Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, feminists, intellectuals, artists and dissidents, all of whom will be scapegoated for the country's stagnation. Magical thinking will dominate our airwaves and be taught in our public schools. Art and culture will be degraded to nationalist kitsch. All the cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to view the world from the perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and compassion, will be replaced by a grotesque and cruel hypermasculinity and hypermilitarism. Those in power will validate racism, bigotry, misogyny and homophobia.
Our only hope now is an unwavering noncooperation with the systems of corporate control. We must rebuild … democratic institutions from the ground up. We must not be seduced into trusting the power elites, including the Democratic Party, whose seven leading candidates to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee demonstrated the other night at George Washington University that they have no interest in defying corporate power or backing democratic populism. We must also acknowledge our own failures on the left, our elitism, arrogance and refusal to root our politics locally in our communities. Rosa Luxemburg understood that unless we first address the most pressing economic and physical needs of the destitute we will never gain credibility or build a resistance movement. Revolt, she said, is achieved only by building genuine relationships, including with people who do not think like us. Revolt surges up from below, exemplified by the water protectors at Standing Rock.
Politics is a game of fear. Those who do not have the ability to make power elites afraid do not succeed. The movements that opened up the democratic space in Americathe abolitionists, suffragists, labor movement, communists, socialists, anarchists and civil rights and labor movementsdeveloped a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality and democracy are just that. Only when power is threatened does it react. Appealing to its better nature is useless. It doesn't have one.
We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutionsthe press, labor unions, third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities and a liberal wing of the Democratic Partythat were capable of responding to outside pressure from movements. They did so imperfectly. They provided only enough reforms to save the capitalist system from widespread unrest or, with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, from revolution. They never addressed white supremacy and institutional racism or the cruelty that is endemic to capitalism. But they had the ability to ameliorate the suffering of working men and women. This safety valve no longer works. When reform becomes impossible, revolution becomes inevitable.
The days ahead will be dark and frightening. But as Immanuel Kant reminded us, "if justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning." We fight for the sacred. We fight for life. It is a fight we must not lose. To be a bystander is to be complicit in radical evil.
Revolt is a political necessity. It is a moral imperative. It is a defense of the sacred. It allows us to live in truth. It alone makes hope possible.
The moment we defy power, we are victorious. The moment we stand alongside the oppressed, and accept being treated like the oppressed, we are victorious. The moment we hold up a flickering light in the darkness for others to see, we are victorious. The moment we thwart the building of a pipeline or a fracking site, we are victorious. And the moment those in power become frightened of us, we are victorious.
I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I do know these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

[Magda Hassan]

Very bad signs Peter but all this apparatus has been put in place years before Trump even ran for office. Naturally he will use it but who gave him the means?

[Peter Lemkin]

Payments from foreign powers to Trump firms violate constitution lawsuit




Impending suit by a legal watchdog accuses newly inaugurated president of violating US constitution's emoluments clause
[URL="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/23/payments-from-foreign-powers-to-trump-firms-violate-constitution-lawsuit#img-1"]
[/URL]
Trump's businesses does deals with countries including China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said. Photograph: Rex/ShutterstockReuters in Washington DC
Monday 23 January 2017 08.12 GMT

A US legal watchdog is to file a lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump ofviolating the US constitution by allowing his businesses to accept payments from foreign governments.

The lawsuit, brought by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, will allege that the constitution's emoluments clause forbids payments to Trump's businesses. It will seek a court order on Monday forbidding Trump from accepting such payments, said Deepak Gupta, one of the lawyers working on the case.
Trump does business with countries including China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, the group noted in a statement.
"When Trump the president sits down to negotiate trade deals with these countries, the American people will have no way of knowing whether he will also be thinking about the profits of Trump the businessman," it said.
A Trump representative referred questions to a law firm representing the president on ethics matters.
"We do not comment on our clients or the work we do for them," said the representative of the firm, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.
The case is part of a wave of litigation expected to be filed against Trump by liberal advocacy groups. It will be filed in a Manhattan federal court, Gupta said, and attorneys for the plaintiffs will include Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer in George W Bush's White House.
"This is purely harassment for political gain," he told the newspaper.Trump's son Eric, an executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, told the NYT on Sunday that the company had taken more steps than required by law to avoid any possible legal exposure, such as agreeing to donate any profits collected at Trump-owned hotels that come from foreign government guests to the US Treasury.

[Magda Hassan]

Now Trump is not going to release his taxes as he previously said. Wikileaks has put out another call for some one to leak them. They have been calling for them since before the election. And once received and verified they will publish. Not winning any friends in the new administration.

[Peter Lemkin]

Very bad signs Peter but all this apparatus has been put in place years before Trump even ran for office. Naturally he will use it but who gave him the means?

I quite agree....the apparatus that Trumpf will use has been built up since WW2 - and some from even before that. He is but the endpoint in a long 'trail of tears' from a half-ass system to the final stages of a police state and ever-bloming fascism - LONG time in the making. My worry, however, is that soon under him, in response to opposition in the streets he will declare martial law or some such evil. From there on out things become a lot more difficult and deadly. His administration will use much less restraint. If Obama had hundreds of drone strikes, Trumpf will use thousands...if one is a whisleblower and caught now, it will be even worse than under Obama.....and so on....

This is a HUGE change for the negative; not just a little more change in the direction we've long been going. IMO. First we have to deal with the visible government - then to deal with the hidden structures [which most don't even see nor know about]. With Trumpf they will be much more visible, however.

The Women's March was very hopeful, and if that could be kept up as local action for a year or more, Trumpf would be unable to do as much as planned and in two years the Congress could have most of his supporters removed. No, Trump is not the first big problem - he is the end game of a process - but sad to see its day 'dawn'.

Much work to do - and it will not be easy nor fun! At least the next period of time will not be dull! Not dull at all!

[David Guyatt]

I know this will sound incredibly cynical and passe, and I had considered not saying it. But it's relevant, I think.

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.

Carl Jung
Collected Works 9ii
AION
Paragraph 126

I've just checked the para in Aion 9ii and it's actually a fairly lengthy para - as they tended to be in Jung's day - but for me it is telling and highly relevant to what we see unfolding.

Today, as never before, humanity is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.

I'll get my coat.

[Magda Hassan]

Payments from foreign powers to Trump firms violate constitution lawsuit




Impending suit by a legal watchdog accuses newly inaugurated president of violating US constitution's emoluments clause
[URL="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/23/payments-from-foreign-powers-to-trump-firms-violate-constitution-lawsuit#img-1"]
[/URL]
Trump's businesses does deals with countries including China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said. Photograph: Rex/ShutterstockReuters in Washington DC
Monday 23 January 2017 08.12 GMT

A US legal watchdog is to file a lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump ofviolating the US constitution by allowing his businesses to accept payments from foreign governments.

The lawsuit, brought by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, will allege that the constitution's emoluments clause forbids payments to Trump's businesses. It will seek a court order on Monday forbidding Trump from accepting such payments, said Deepak Gupta, one of the lawyers working on the case.
Trump does business with countries including China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, the group noted in a statement.
"When Trump the president sits down to negotiate trade deals with these countries, the American people will have no way of knowing whether he will also be thinking about the profits of Trump the businessman," it said.
A Trump representative referred questions to a law firm representing the president on ethics matters.
"We do not comment on our clients or the work we do for them," said the representative of the firm, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.
The case is part of a wave of litigation expected to be filed against Trump by liberal advocacy groups. It will be filed in a Manhattan federal court, Gupta said, and attorneys for the plaintiffs will include Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer in George W Bush's White House.
"This is purely harassment for political gain," he told the newspaper.Trump's son Eric, an executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, told the NYT on Sunday that the company had taken more steps than required by law to avoid any possible legal exposure, such as agreeing to donate any profits collected at Trump-owned hotels that come from foreign government guests to the US Treasury.

How is this different to the Clinton Foundation and Saudi and Qatari and other donations and pay for play?