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

[Magda Hassan]

The Democrat party is not progressive. Period. There can be what ever number of wings you want to call them but they are not in charge of the party and never will be. The Democratic party would rather lose elections than make any concessions to the working classes.

[Lauren Johnson]

The Democratic party would rather lose elections than make any concessions to the working classes.

Ya' think? ::willynilly::

They are firmly under the control of the Hillary/Obama networks. Think money, bribery, blackmail, pizza, etc.

[Richard Coleman]

The Return of American Race Laws

Presidential chief strategist Stephen Bannon, in his public comments and his films such as "Generation Zero," has embraced a historical determinism worthy of Karl Marx.

I'm not a marxist scholar, but isn't this a misreading of Marx's historical materialism? From http://www.isreview.org/issues/58/gasper...nism.shtml

[size=12][size=12][size=12] "One of the most common misconceptions about Marxism is that it is a deterministic theory that sees the course of history as preordained by economic and social forces. According to one recent commentator, for example, "In Marx's theory, the oppressed class does not need to hope for social justice as merely a tentative possibility, because the laws of history are on their side and guarantee the outcome." [/SIZE]

[size=12] Misinterpretations like this are often based on isolated quotations from Marx's writings taken out of context, such as the passage in the Communist Manifesto that declares, "the victory of the proletariat [is] inevitable." But this statement is simply a rhetorical flourish aimed at spurring on the Manifesto's readers, since a few pages earlier Marx and Engels had already pointed out that the class struggle has no predetermined result, and can end "either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." [/SIZE]
[/SIZE][/SIZE]

[Richard Coleman]

Tired of red, let's go blue.

Among other things [too many to cover here] Trump denied human-caused climate change. I don't see any progress with release of secret documents on anything under Trump. The FBI and other intelligence agencies that helped him get in need to be 'repaid'. It will not only be dangerous driving while Black, but driving or walking or breathing while progressive, gay, non-white, non-Christian, non flag waver, etc. The nation, already far-right has just moved a seismic shift to the ultra-right.

The people to blame for this are the DNC bosses who refused to let Bernie win as candidate, when he had clearly won!

That is absolutely false.

There is nothing the DNC did that prevented Bernie from appealing to minority voters who turned out in droves for Clinton in the primaries.

You think because some DNC staffer called Bernie a "doofus" that cost him the nomination?

Please!

No one wanted another Clinton warmed over - so no one really came out to support her or vote for her.

She's gonna win the popular vote!

Whaddaya mean no one voted for her?

She lost because the Sinister Six (Assange, Putin, Comey. CNN. MSNBC, Fox) abused the American people relentlessly over her fairly innocuous e-mails.

Trump tapped into discontent with the status quo.

Here's another media-driven myth.

Obama's approval rating is 55%.

What Americans are tired of is gridlock.

They tilted Republican in 2016 because the Sinister Six poisoned the well for the Democrats.

I think for all the wrong reasons, but never the less that is what happened.

I wouldn't even doubt that the White House is turned into a reality TV show - or the entire country.....

Which is why the corporate media rigged it for Trump.

They have turned The News into a highly profitable reality TV show.

Wrong. Trump won because the REPUBLICANS stole the election. See http://www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/
Also, I trust that by now you are aware of the massive fraud perpetrated by the DNC to Deny Bernie the nomination.

[Peter Lemkin]

The Return of American Race Laws

Racial profiling. Random police stops. Raids at homes and businesses. People of color pulled from vehicles at checkpoints. Seizures of individuals with no criminal records or who never committed a serious crime. Imprisonment without trial.

Is this really new though? All of this has been happening for decades. A culture of racism and a selection of police recruited from the lumpen proletariat of long standing. All the legislation and apparatus for a police state was kindly provided by the Nobel Peace Prize winner and the previous occupant. Due to the commitment to neo liberal economic policy now the middle classes can experience what poor people have long been subject to. There is a solution to this but it is not the Democrats who brought us here in the first place. Just like their respective sister parties did in Chile and Weimar Germany.

New? NO!, not at all new....but much more intense, aggressive....a 'final solution' in the offing. Both parties [to varying degrees] have played a role in this. The Republicans are overall worse. The two parties, apart from the different lip service, have both engaged in endless foreign wars, covert operations, assassinations, government destabilizations and overthrows, sucking the life and wealth out of developing countries [read colonies]. Where the parties do differ has been in domestic policy. The Democrats allowing a modicum of slow progress when pushed; the Republicans unabashedly stating that or hinting that Whites, Christians, the Rich, Corporations, Privatization, Oligarchy, more and harsher Police are the answer in the country. It is only a matter of degree; both have become owned/run by the same forces who control the power structures of the two parties. The populations who support the two parties are very different.

All that said, Trump is something totally different. He is a neo-fascist and openly racist President. We've not had any before who would say they were, even if some thought that privately. He is building a wave and riding a wave of hate, nationalism, patriotism, racism, mysogeny, know-nothingism, open fascism the likes of which has not been seen at this intensity in the USA in my lifetime. He aims to roll-back what precious little progress we have made and to destroy all the precious little positive changes in the structure of government and society. I don't believe in a two party system, and I don't see the 'Democrats' as the antidote to a Trump. My focus is to stop Trumpfism and all it stands for! This is NOT the USA as usual....this is the 'fall' as in Spain/Italy/Germany in the '30s if not opposed and stopped - and stopped fast!! To hell with the two main parties. We need a mulitparty system and real democracy. I have voted Green or Peace and Freedom all my life. But now is the time to get out in the streets and stop this putsch or perish. I have never in my life been very proud of my country for what it has done externally and failed to do internally - but this is a crisis situation unparalleled in my lifetime and beyond. We are IMO looking into the abyss and the end of what little democracy and progress there was in the USA - and perhaps forever unless this monster [and it goes way beyond the man Trumpf] has a wooden stake pounded through its heart and is killed! What is happening is NOT supported by the Public. Trumpf has about a 40% approval rating and many of these people are too stupid to realize the magic trick happening before and against them. I don't think most in Germany really wanted Nazism either - but they got it...and the USA can get a full-blown police-state and fascism too under this Administration unless there is enormous fight-back at all levels, but mostly in the streets. The best Administration we had since the Second World War was Kennedy - and that is why they killed him. The worst we've had is by far the one we have now. The most dangerous situation the USA has been in perhaps ever is now. To say this is what the USA has always been is not correct. Yes, there has always been 'some' of 'this'..but not like this, and not moving like this. This is uncharted territory in all the wrong places and an attempt to permanently delete all the small bits of positive change that were made and delegitimize what remains of a popular opposition to the hidden forces who have always wanted such an outcome.

[Lauren Johnson]

Peter, the issue are raising is indirectly addressed in the George Webb video series I put up. He spends a lot of time talking about DynCorp, and extension of the CIA, engaged in organized theft on a global scale. He also refers to DynCorps influence in American police forces. My bet is that much of the brutality we are seeing by the police seems to be intentionally organized through training programs.

[Peter Lemkin]

Trump Designates Agency "Hit Squads" To Cut Most Regulations February 27, 2017 | Celia Wexler

Environmental, Public Health, Safety Protections on Chopping Block

President Donald Trump signing an Executive Order. Photo credit: CSPAN
On February 24, the Trump Administration did something consequential. No, it was not barring certain news outlets from an informal briefing called a "gaggle" with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, although that story made the front page of The Washington Post and was the subject of a lead editorial in The New York Times the next day.
This was the day's real newsmaker: President Donald Trump issued another executive order, Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda. The President was flanked by leaders of the country's largest corporations, including the heads of Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin and Archer Daniels Midland, when he signed the document.
The order tightens the screws on federal agencies by putting in place enforcers to ensure compliance with White House policy "to alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens placed on the American people." Trump said his new order would help eliminate "75 percent of the repetitive, horrible regulations that hurt companies, hurt jobs." He insisted that, although he sought to cut three-quarters of all federal regulations, he still wanted to protect public health and safety and the environment.
The order requires agencies to designate regulatory reform officers (RROs) to ensure compliance with Trump's new regulatory reforms. These RROs will chair agency task forces whose goal is to identify regulations for extinction.
In a statement, Scott Slesinger, Natural Resources Defense Council legislative director, called the February 24 order "a directive to kill the safeguards Americans depend on for clean air, drinkable water and safe food."
The agency hit squads are asked to target regulations that "eliminate jobs or inhibit job creation," are "outdated, unnecessary or ineffective," or "impose costs that exceed benefits." Those measurements may be subjective, but critics point out that they appear to require at least a modicum of substantiation.
But other criteria are more expansive. Also on the chopping block will be regulations that "create a serious inconsistency or otherwise interfere with regulatory reform initiatives." Presumably, any regulation would pose a threat to an anti-regulatory agenda.
But perhaps most chilling for public health and safety is the task force's mandate to target "those regulations that rely in whole or part on data, information, or methods that are not publicly available or that are insufficiently transparent to meet the standard of reproducibility."
Here's the problem, according to scientists and regulatory lawyers: many regulations, such as those reducing air pollution, are based on scientific studies measuring the health effects of dirty air on people, including children and the elderly. These studies rely on patient information that is confidential by law and cannot be disclosed. Other data that agencies use come from businesses and are proprietary information. Much of science, including our predictions about global warming, is based on studies that can't be reproduced. You can't reproduce studies measuring climate changes over hundreds of years.
Some of the EPA's most protective rules, such as those preventing air pollution, or the emissions of greenhouse gases causing global warming, are based on this type of data. These rules could be caught up in this agency-wide crusade against regulation.
The order's language mimics past House and Senate proposals that failed to achieve passage. These "Secret Science" bills would have restricted agencies to developing regulations based only on fully disclosable information that could be reproduced.
Those "Secret Science" proposals were widely criticized. In 2014, eight professors of environmental and administrative law wrote a letter strongly opposing "Secret Science" bills, stating that they would cripple the Environmental Protection Agency and "undermine, rather than enhance the scientific rigor of EPA decision-making."
The order "further concentrates regulatory decision-making in the White House" and away from the science and policy experts at federal agencies, charged James Goodwin in an email response to WhoWhatWhy. James Goodwin is senior policy analyst with the legal think tank The Center for Progressive Reform.
Goodwin warned that the order is "an attempt to delegitimize agencies, particularly the EPA," by "creating the illusion" that the EPA and other agencies use flawed data or science.
Agency task forces will have a "powerful all-purpose weapon for attacking any regulations that might inconvenience politically powerful industries," Goodwin wrote. He added that because of the order's vague language, "industry-funded think tanks and trade associations would always be able to find some way to criticize the data or science the EPA or other science-based agencies rely on for regulations."
The February 24 order was the latest Trump initiative to sharply cut regulations. On January 30, Trump issued an executive order to require agencies to cut two regulations for every new regulation they propose. NRDC, Public Citizen and the Communications Workers of America have sued the Trump administration in federal district court to block that order from being implemented.

[Peter Lemkin]

Trump's War on Immigrants Has Already Reached the Supreme Court

Posted on Feb 27, 2017

By Bill Blum

A protest at the Supreme Court over President Trump's executive orders. (Alex Brandon / AP)

If you've been waiting for President Donald John Trump's war on immigrants to reach the Supreme Court, your wait is over. The battle has already begun.
No, the conflict hasn't come to the top court by way of Trump's high-profile "Muslim ban," which has been enjoined by a series of lower court decisions, including one handed down on Feb. 9 by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The administration has backed away from its threat to seek immediate Supreme Court review of those unfavorable rulings in favor of revising the ban on narrower terms.
But even before the original travel ban was announced on Jan. 27, the Supreme Court had loaded up its current docket with cases that will have profound consequences for Trump's war, especially his plans to secure and militarize the border and fulfill his campaign promises of mass deportations.
Two appeals before the Supreme Court stand out in particular. Although both originated well prior to November's election, the federal government is represented in them now by Jeff Sessions' Justice Department.
The first is Hernandez v. Mesa, which was argued last week.
The facts of the case are gut-wrenching: As dusk fell on the evening of June 7, 2010, a group of Mexican teenagers was playing a game in the sprawling concrete culvert that winds between the cities of Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. The actual boundary between the two countries is unmarked but is plotted along the middle of the culvert. Security fences sit atop the culvert on both sides of the divide.
The game, according to subsequently filed court documents, involved the teens daring one another to run up the culvert's northern incline to the American side, touch the U.S. fence and scamper back down to Mexican territory.
For one of the participants15-year-old Sergio Hernandezthe game proved deadly. He and his buddies were confronted by U.S. Border Patrol Agent Jesus Mesa, Jr., who was on the lookout for alien smugglers attempting to bring people into the States.
With his handgun drawn, Mesa apprehended one youth by the shirt collar on the American side of the border, then turned in the direction of the others who had run away. He fired his weapon, striking Hernandez in the head from a distance of approximately 60 feet. Hernandez died instantly beside a concrete pillar on the Mexican flank of the culvert.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Mesa claimed that he had been surrounded by Hernandez and the other teens, and that they were throwing rocks at him. Those claims were later disproved by a cellphone video taken by an onlooker. The video, which was aired by both American and Mexican TV outlets, showed no rocks being hurled or any other imminent threats to Mesa's safety.
Mexican authorities charged Mesa with murder, but the U.S. refused to extradite him. In 2012, the FBI cleared him of criminal wrongdoing. The Justice Department also exonerated him in another investigation of the shooting, finding that Hernandez, despite his age, was a known smuggler who had been arrested twice before in the U.S. on smuggling charges but was allowed to return voluntarily to Mexico without prosecution because he was a juvenile.


Seeking a judicial remedy, Hernandez's parents filed a wrongful death action in federal district court in Texas against the Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol and other agencies, as well as Mesa. They alleged that their son's Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unjustified lethal force had been violated, along with his rights to due process under the Fifth Amendment.
A federal district court judge dismissed the suit, holding that Hernandez enjoyed no constitutional protections because he was in Mexico when he was hit, even though Mesa was standing on American soil. Although a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling, an en banc panel of 15 circuit court judges reinstated the dismissal in April 2015, setting the stage for a showdown in the Supreme Court.
The Hernandez case is important not only in its own right, but because border-area shootings involving U.S.agents have proliferated at an alarming rate. According to an amicus ("friend of the court") brief filed with the Supreme Court by the Mexican government, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers have killed 51 people since 2005. Several of the fatalities were caused by shots fired across the border.
Still, Hernandez's parents face an uphill road in the Supreme Court. Even the court's four liberals seemed hard-pressed during the oral argument to articulate a rule of law or identify a Supreme Court precedent that could allow the case to proceed to a trial on the merits.
At one point in the proceedings, Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that the court's 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush might provide a way forward. In that case, the court held, by a hotly contested vote of 5-4 in a majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, that prisoners incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could challenge their detentions on Fourth Amendment grounds in U.S. courts, even though they weren't American citizens and were confined outside the country.
Chief Justice John Roberts, however, sharply disagreed with Breyer over Boumediene's relevance. If Mexican nationals were accorded constitutional protections against the kind of deadly force used by agent Mesa, Roberts asked, why wouldn't Iraqi victims of air attacks by drones guided from Nevada have similar protections and be able to file lawsuits in American courts? The clear implication was that such a liberal interpretation would jeopardize U.S. sovereignty.
By any measure, the stakes in the Hernandez case are high. A victory for the parents could give refugees and others denied visas to enter the U.S. new avenues to contest future Trump travel bans. A loss would likely do the opposite. It would also embolden the Border Patrol to continue its Gestapo-like tactics with impunity. Should the court divide 4-4 along party lines, the Fifth Circuit's adverse decision would remain in force.
The other immigration case with big implications for Trump's crackdown is Jennings v. Rodriguez, a class action dealing withthe rights of immigrants detained pending deportation hearings to receive bail hearings.
On any given day, on average, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains 34,000 people, many in privately owned and operated prison facilities that are poised to prosper and expand during Trump's tenure. Under the president's recently promulgated executive orders on immigration and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memorandums implementing the orders, the daily count of ICE detainees is projected to mushroom to 80,000 as the administration moves to end the agency's "catch and release" programs, which allowed unauthorized immigrants to be paroled into the community on bond or their own recognizance, pending deportation hearings.
The named plaintiff in the case, Alejandro Rodriguez, represents a class of some 1,000 people who have been subjected to ICE detentions of six months or more. Rodriguez was brought into the country as an infant from Mexico. He gained lawful permanent resident status when he was nine years old, and as an adult he became a dental assistant.
But he also ran into to trouble with the law, sustaining criminal convictions for joyriding at age 19 and misdemeanor drug possession at 24. In 2004, he was taken into ICE custody, placed in mandatory detention because of his criminal history and denied bail.
Rodriguez lost his deportation hearing, but with the ACLU representing him, he filed an appeal with the 9th Circuit. While the appeal was pending, in 2007, ICE finally released him from detention, and an immigration judge eventually canceled his removal from the country. In all, he spent more than three years in ICE detention.
In 2015, the 9th Circuit handed Rodriguez and his fellow plaintiffs a resounding victory, declaring that aliens detained by ICE for six months or more have a statutory right to a bail hearing under various provisions of federal immigration law. The Supreme Court subsequently granted the Obama administration's petition for review. Since Trump's election, the case has taken on added significance.
After hearing oral arguments in November, on Dec. 15 the court asked the parties to submit supplemental briefs, addressing the issue of whether long-term ICE detainees have a constitutionalnot just a statutoryright to receive bail hearings. The briefs are now on file, and a decision is expected by the close of the court's present term at the end of June.
While it is difficult to predict how the court ultimately will rule, even a tie vote this time would favor immigrants' rights, allowing the 9th Circuit decision to stand and dealing a dramatic blow to Trump's anti-immigrant agenda.
Whatever the outcome in Rodriguez's case, however, Trump's war on immigrants has landed in the marble halls of the nation's most powerful judicial body and is only just beginning. As the great French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his seminal text "Democracy in America" in 1835, "There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one."
We'll see in due course whether the Supreme Court is prepared to enforce the principles of judicial review and stand up to Trumpor turn the third branch of government into a legal rubber stamp.

[Magda Hassan]

Peter, the issue are raising is indirectly addressed in the George Webb video series I put up. He spends a lot of time talking about DynCorp, and extension of the CIA, engaged in organized theft on a global scale. He also refers to DynCorps influence in American police forces. My bet is that much of the brutality we are seeing by the police seems to be intentionally organized through training programs.

Indeed it is organised and it has been in place way before January 20th.

[Peter Lemkin]

Peter, the issue are raising is indirectly addressed in the George Webb video series I put up. He spends a lot of time talking about DynCorp, and extension of the CIA, engaged in organized theft on a global scale. He also refers to DynCorps influence in American police forces. My bet is that much of the brutality we are seeing by the police seems to be intentionally organized through training programs.

Indeed it is organised and it has been in place way before January 20th.

There are power structures and groups within the Corporate/Finance/Military/Police/Intelligence and Secret Government structures who have always been trying to get where Trump now seems to be racing at full speed - but there has never before, in modern times, such momentum and openness to it all.

In many ways Obama, Clinton, Bush, Bush, and all the others that came before set up the structures, rules, regulations, agencies, mechanisms, etc. that enable this with such ease under Trump. Yes, it has been a longterm project, but this to me doesn't seem like 'just anther part of how things have been' but the last gasp of democracy and the rule of law - we are in another period entirely.