Washington invokes "domestic terrorism" to justify police
state rule
Behind the backs of the
population, a bipartisan group of US lawmakers, military leaders and
intelligence agents are engaged in a secret operation to endow the executive
branch with dictatorial powers to suppress social opposition in the United
States.
On July 27, Donald
Trump offered a glimpse of this movement within the state apparatus, tweeting,
“Consideration is being given to declaring ANTIFA … a major Organization of
Terror (along with MS-13 & others). Would make it easier for police to do
their job!” On August 17, Trump repeated the same threat.
Trump has seized upon
the actions identified with ANTIFA, a loose amalgam that includes middle class
protesters and, no doubt, police provocateurs, in order to label any form of
left-wing opposition to fascism “terrorism,” a hallmark of police-state dictatorships
from Hitler’s Third Reich to Pinochet’s Chile.
Trump is not merely
expressing a personal opinion. In the face of growing strikes and protests and
mounting social unrest internationally, the American ruling class is
acknowledging that maintaining the flow of corporate profits and defending
unprecedented levels of social inequality against the opposition of the broad
masses of people requires dictatorial forms of rule. Under conditions in which
three US billionaires control as much wealth as half the US population, even
the worn-out forms of democratic rule have become untenable.
Trump increasingly
legislates by “national emergency,” deploying troops on US soil, diverting
Pentagon funds to build a border wall, threatening to end due process and
constructing a network of concentration camps presently filled with desperate
asylum seekers.
The next
steps—including for martial law, mass arrests of left-wing dissidents, and
shutting off the Internet—are being developed out of the public view.
For example, Brennan
Center co-director Elizabeth Goitein wrote in theAtlantic in
February that the military-intelligence agencies now interpret a section of the
1934 Communications Act as granting the executive branch the power to “seize
control of US internet traffic, impeding access to certain websites” as well as
to shut down the internet, block the delivery of email and manipulate smart
speakers like Amazon Alexa upon the president’s proclamation “that there exists
a state or threat of war involving the United States.”
The government is also
developing plans to abolish the Constitution and carry out mass arrests.
Since 2012, Congress
has granted the Justice Department’s requests for funds to update secret
executive directives called Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADS)
used to plan “continuity of government” operations in case of national
emergencies including mass social unrest, strikes and protests.
Perhaps the most
well-known PEAD was the directive that authorized Lt. Col. Oliver North and the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to establish a contingency plan
authorizing “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United
States over to FEMA, appointment of military commanders to run state and local
governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis,” as The Miami Herald reported
in its 1987 exposure of the program, known as “Rex 84.”
Goitein notes that such
plans are far from dormant:
“A 2007 Department of
Homeland Security report lists ‘martial law’ and ‘curfew declarations’ as ‘critical
tasks’ that local, state, and federal government should be able to perform in
emergencies. In 2008, government sources told a reporter for Radar magazine
that a version of the Security Index [the mass arrest list of the mid 20th
century] still existed under the code name Main Core, allowing for the
apprehension and detention of Americans tagged as security threats.”
Trump’s July 27 and
August 17 tweets to label Antifa a “major terrorist organization” are an
expression of these police state plans, which can only be implemented through
massive censorship and the silencing of dissent. These plans lie behind the
international imperialist campaign to imprison and vilify WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, both of whom remain locked up
for the “crime” of exposing such crimes to the world.
These plans are
bipartisan.
Democratic Chairman of
the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff recently introduced the
“Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Act.” This bill, which has a high
chance of passage, would allow the Attorney General to prosecute people or
groups as “domestic terrorists” if they engage in or conspire to engage
in activity that seeks to “influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion” if that activity impacts “interstate or foreign
commerce,” which by nature any workers’ strike would do. The “conspiracy”
clause will facilitate the prosecution of individuals based on political
opinion alone.
The Democrats and the
Democratic-linked press present this initiative as aimed against right-wing
mass shooters. But because shootings, bombings and other acts of terrorist
violence are already illegal in every state, the only purpose for the proposed
law is to criminalize free association with those who will be listed as
“domestic terrorists,” as well as to apply anti-foreign terrorist laws like the
PATRIOT Act against US citizens engaged in First Amendment-protected speech and
activity. This is directed ultimately against the working class.
As law professor and
former Justice Department attorney Robert Chesney enthusiastically explains, a
domestic terrorism statute would allow the government to compile “a list of
proscribed organization to which it becomes a crime to provide, knowingly, any
form of support (including becoming a person subject to the group’s orders).”
In addition, if
“domestic terrorism” is made a legal category, then Sections 1021 and 1022 of
the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) may give the executive branch the
power to arrest and indefinitely detain without charge or trial anyone labeled
a “suspected terrorist” based on “extreme” political views.
The introduction of the
war on terror into domestic law has more than legal significance. For nearly
two decades, US imperialism has used the most brutal and criminal methods
against the international working class in a desperate bid to maintain the
hegemonic position it enjoyed in the post-war period.
To this end, the US has
killed millions in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia
and elsewhere. Under the pretext of fighting “terrorism,” the US has fought to
control the world’s geopolitical chokepoints and natural resources. But these
wars have solved nothing. They have engendered massive opposition at home and
have only metastasized the historical crisis confronting American imperialism.
Now, methods of equal
or greater ruthlessness and criminality are being planned within the US itself,
both in an attempt to maximize the level of exploitation of the working class
and to terrorize the population into submission, ensuring the ruling
oligarchy’s monopoly of political power.
Congressional Democrats
have been key participants in creating the powers Trump is now wielding, voting
overwhelmingly for the PATRIOT act, supporting the Obama administration’s
assertion of the right to kill American citizens without trial, and now,
acquiescing to even the most flagrantly dictatorial actions by the would-be
tyrant in the White House.
The Democrats’ role in
creating the framework for dictatorship reflects the fact that they, like
Trump’s Republicans, express the social interests of the financial oligarchy
and the affluent upper middle class, both of which look with horror at the
growing movement of the working class.
The threat of
dictatorship in the US is part of an international process. Across the world,
governments are creating the legal and physical framework for mass repression.
But these
conspiratorial cabals of financiers, generals and spooks will not be able to
implement their plans for dictatorship without arousing the profound social
opposition of billions of workers and young people worldwide. That opposition
must be politically mobilized in a conscious struggle to tear control of
society out of the hands of the capitalist class, dismantle the
military-intelligence agencies and reorganize the world’s productive forces on an
egalitarian socialist basis.
The
judge found these releases, together with the publication of Clinton’s secret
speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be their representative,
were “matters of the highest public concern.” They “allowed the American
electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties
in the United States during a presidential election.”
“Clinton
also failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after
his presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in
part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street
bankers.”
Democrats Move Towards
‘Oligarchical Socialism,’ Says Forecaster Joel Kotkin
Associated Press
4 Sep 2018299
Left-wing
progressives are embracing a political alliance with Silicon Valley oligarchs
who would trap Americans in a cramped future without hope of upward
mobility for themselves or their children, says a left-wing political analyst
in California.
Historically, liberals advocated helping the middle class
achieve greater independence, notably by owning houses and starting companies.
But the tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on
Wall Street — have a far less egalitarian vision. Greg Fehrenstein, who
interviewed 147 digital company founders, says most believe that “an
increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller
slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly
subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ’gig work‘ and
government aid.”
Numerous oligarchs — Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, founder of
eBay, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, founder of the Y Combinator — have embraced
this vision including a “guaranteed wage,” usually $500 or a $1,000 monthly.
Our new economic overlords are not typical anti-tax billionaires in the
traditional mode; they see government spending as a means of keeping the
populist pitchforks away. This may be the only politically sustainable way to
expand “the gig economy,” which grew to 7 million workers this year, 26 percent
above the year before.
Handouts, including housing subsidies, could guarantee for the
next generation a future not of owned houses, but rented small, modest
apartments. Unable to grow into property-owning adults, they will subsist while
playing with their phones, video games and virtual reality in what Google calls
“immersive computing.”
This plan, however, is being challenged by the return of
populism and nationalism when President Donald Trump defeated the GOP’s
corporatist candidates and the progressives’ candidate in 2016. In his 2017
inauguration, Trump declared:
For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital
has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the
cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its
wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories
closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our
country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not
been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there
was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.
That all changes starting right here and right now because this
moment is your moment, it belongs to you …
What truly matters is not which party controls our government,
but whether our government is controlled by the people.
For several years, Kotkin has been dissecting the Democrats’
shift from working-class politics toward a tacit alliance with the billionaires
in the new information-technology industries that are centralizing wealth and
power through the United States. In 2013, for example, he argued that
California’s politics were increasingly “feudal“:
As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental
sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent
of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of
opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent
census estimates, the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some
estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as the Dominican
Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.
At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level
of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse
than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to
roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare
recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.
Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are
downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos
actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one
recent report. Nor are things expected to get
better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey, most Californians expect their
incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the
young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.
*
“Protecting citizens from industrial capitalism’s
giant corporations? Where were the Securities and Exchange Commission, the
Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of Federal
Housing Enterprise Oversight as the mortgage bubble blew up in 2008, nearly
taking the whole financial system with it and producing the worst economic bust
since the Great Depression, which even today has sunk the labor-force
participation rate and hiked the suicide rate among working-class men and women
to record levels?”
“By contrast, many voters give Barack Obama no such
credit for his analogous response to the Great Recession.”
“Mexican criminals really have infiltrated the
country and really have killed Americans, inevitably, under the
administration’s anything-goes immigration stance.”
WHY ARE
VOTERS SO FUCKING MAD?
CITY
JOURNAL
MYRON
MAGNET
Haunting
this year’s presidential contest is the sense that the U.S. government no
longer belongs to the people and no longer represents them. And this uneasy
feeling is not misplaced. It reflects the real state of affairs.
We have
lost the government we learned about in civics class, with its democratic
election of representatives to do the voters’ will in framing laws, which the
president vows to execute faithfully, unless the Supreme Court rules them
unconstitutional. That small government of limited powers that the Founders
designed, hedged with checks and balances, hasn’t operated for a century. All
its parts still have their old names and appear to be carrying out their old
functions. But in fact, a new kind of government
has grown up inside the old structure, like those parasites hatched in another
organism that grow by eating up their host from within, until the adult
creature bursts out of the host’s carcass. This transformation is not an
evolution but a usurpation.
What has
now largely displaced the Founders’ government is what’s called the
Administrative State—a transformation premeditated by its main architect,
Woodrow Wilson. The thin-skinned, self-righteous college-professor president,
who thought himself enlightened far beyond the citizenry, dismissed the
Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights as so much outmoded
“nonsense,” and he rejected the Founders’ clunky constitutional machinery as
obsolete. (See “It’s
Not Your Founding Fathers’ Republic Any More,” Summer 2014.) What a modern country
needed, he said, was a “living constitution” that would keep pace with the
fast-changing times by continual, Darwinian adaptation, as he called it,
effected by federal courts acting as a permanent constitutional convention.
Modernity, Wilson thought,
demanded efficient government by independent, nonpartisan, benevolent, hyper-educated
experts, applying the latest scientific, economic, and sociological knowledge
to industrial capitalism’s unprecedented problems, too complex for
self-governing free citizens to solve. Accordingly, he got Congress to create
executive-branch administrative agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission,
to do the job. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt
proliferated such agencies, from the National Labor Relations Board and the
Federal Housing Administration to the Federal Communications Commission and the
Securities and Exchange Commission, to put the New Deal into effect. Before
they could do so, though, FDR had to scare the Supreme Court into stretching
the Constitution’s Commerce Clause beyond recognition, putting the federal government
in charge of all economic activity, not just interstate transactions. He also
had to pressure the justices to allow Congress to delegate legislative
power—which is, in effect, what the lawmakers did by setting up agencies with
the power to make binding rules. The Constitution, of course, vests all legislative power in Congress, empowering it to make laws,
not to make legislators.
But the
Administrative State’s constitutional transgressions cut deeper still. If
Congress can’t delegate its legislative powers, it certainly can’t delegate
judicial powers, which the Constitution gives exclusively to the judiciary.
Nevertheless, after these administrative agencies make rules like a
legislature, they then exercise judicial authority like a court by prosecuting
violations of their edicts and inflicting real criminal penalties, such as
fines and cease-and-desist orders. As they perform all these functions, they
also violate the principle of the separation of powers, which lies at the heart
of our constitutional theory (senselessly curbing efficiency, Wilson thought),
as well as the due process of law, for they trample the citizen’s Fifth
Amendment right not to lose his property unless indicted by a grand jury and
tried by a jury of his peers, and they search a citizen or a company’s private
papers or premises, without bothering to get judge-issued subpoenas or search
warrants based on probable cause, flouting the Fourth Amendment. They can issue
waivers to their rules, so that the law is not the same for all citizens and
companies but is instead an instrument of arbitrary power. FDR himself ruefully
remarked that he had expanded a fourth branch of government that lacked
constitutional legitimacy. Not only does it reincarnate the arbitrary power of
the Stuarts’ tyrannical Star Chamber, but also it doesn’t even meet the minimal
conditions of liberty that Magna Carta set forth 801 years ago.
Adding
insult to injury, Wilson, his allies, and their current followers call
themselves “progressives,” a fatuous boast implying that they are the
embodiments and chosen instruments of the spirit of an ever-improving,
irresistible future. In tune with the German idealist philosophy that Wilson
and his circle studied, they claim to be marching toward an as-yet-unrealized
goal of human perfection. But that perfection, the German philosophers
believed, would look something like Prussia’s enlightened despotism. For
Americans to think that it is progress to move from the Founders’ revolutionary
achievement—a nation of free citizens, endowed with natural rights, living
under laws that they themselves have made, pursuing their own vision of
happiness in their own way and free to develop as fully as they can whatever
talent or genius lies within them—to a regime in which individuals derive such
rights as they have from a government superior to them is contemptible. How is
a return to subjection an advance on freedom? No lover of liberty should ever
call such left-wing statism “progressive.” In historical terms, this elevation
of state power over individual freedom is not even “liberal” but quite the
reverse.
As these agencies have
metastasized, they have borne out not a single premise that justified their
creation, and their increasingly glaring failure has drawn citizens’ angry
attention to them. Expert? As a New Deal congressman immediately recognized
with shock, many of those who staffed the Administrative State were kids just
out of law school, with zero real-world experience or technical knowledge.
Efficient? Can-do America, which built the Empire State Building in 11 months
and ramped up airplane production during World War II from 2,000 in 1939 to
nearly 100,000 in 1944, now takes years of bureaucratic EPA busywork to repair
a bridge or lay a pipeline, and who knows how many businesses never expand or
even start because the maze of government regulation is too daunting and costly
to navigate? Only last year, EPA “experts” fecklessly stood by as workers under
their supervision accidentally dumped 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater
into the Colorado River, and the agency vouchsafed not a word of warning to
downstream Colorado and New Mexico officials for an entire day before the
poisonous, fluorescent-orange flood hit them. Over at Veterans Affairs, those
who’ve fought for their country die in droves while waiting for medical care.
But what’s the problem? asks agency head Robert MacDonald blithely. After
all, at ever-popular Disneyland, “do they measure the number of hours you wait
in line?”
Non-political?
Ask Lois Lerner at the Internal Revenue Service. Oh wait: she pleaded the Fifth
Amendment—and her boss, John Koskinen, simply ignores Congress’s orders, even
as more than 2,000 of his enforcement agents have acquired military-grade
weaponry, among 200,000 of such administrative-agency officers now similarly
equipped with lethal arms, presumably for coercion of the citizens they
supposedly serve. Or there’s the Federal Elections Commission and the Federal
Communications Commission, lackeys of President Obama and his ultra-partisan
agenda.
Protecting citizens from industrial capitalism’s
giant corporations? Where were the Securities and Exchange Commission, the
Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of Federal
Housing Enterprise Oversight as the mortgage bubble blew up in 2008, nearly
taking the whole financial system with it and producing the worst economic bust
since the Great Depression, which even today has sunk the labor-force
participation rate and hiked the suicide rate among working-class men and women
to record levels? Moreover, from the establishment of the first administrative
agency—the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, essentially designed to
create shared railroad cartels—these agencies have been key instruments of
crony capitalism, which today often takes the form of senators and congressmen
pressuring agencies for rule changes or waivers to benefit their contributors,
usually at the expense of their competitors as well as the public, as the
author of the recent Confessions of Congressman X complains of his
fellow legislative “puppets.” Little wonder that today’s Americans think that
such people don’t represent them. Pollsters report that trust in government is
at its lowest level ever, with only 19 percent expecting government to do the
right thing, according to last year’s Gallup and Pew polls.
Ensuring
the citizens’ health and safety? Where is the Food and Drug Administration as
counterfeit medicines and medical supplies from China infiltrate our hospitals?
As for the infamously dysfunctional Transportation Security Administration, its
Keystone Kops’ regularly reported inability to spot journalists carrying banned
weapons onto airplanes, while they are too busy fondling travelers’ private
parts or undressing grannies, is a standing national joke—on us. We lost our
constitutional safeguards for this?
FDR spewed out his
agencies in a “try anything” spirit to cure a Depression that his predecessor’s
misguided palliatives had worsened, and debate still surges over whether the
New Deal agencies did harm or good, putting aside their doubtful legitimacy.
But the majority of Americans at the time gave the president credit for good
intentions. By contrast, many voters
give Barack Obama no such credit for his analogous response to the Great
Recession. They see it as a cynically calculated ploy to extend
government’s power over the people, especially given the White House chief of
staff’s crack that a president should “never let a good crisis go to waste.” So
on the pretext of addressing the financial crisis, the administration partially
socialized American medicine with legislation that only Democrats voted for,
without bothering to read it, and that citizens who opposed the measure—still a
solid majority of those polled—saw as a kind of coup d’état, framed with utter
irresponsibility and ignoring the scary financial mess. As happened during the
New Deal, a timid Supreme Court found the act constitutional only by the
politically driven legerdemain frequent in that institution’s checkered
history. It struck many as flimflam, not government by consent.
The
result was a spectacular expansion of the Administrative State, with some 150
new agencies and commissions created; no one knows the exact number. And these
agencies purposely removed the Administrative State even further from
government by the people. One agency, the Independent Payment Advisory
Board—the so-called death panel—is so democratically unaccountable that
Congress can only abolish it by a three-fifths vote in both houses within a
seven-month period next year. After that, the law bars Congress from altering
any of the board’s edicts, a provision as far from democratic self-government
as you can get.
When the
administration finally confronted the financial crisis, lengthened by
Obamacare’s disincentives to hiring, its reflex response was to expand the
Administrative State still further with the Dodd-Frank Act, named for its two
legislative sponsors, both of whom had been in bed with the mortgage racket,
one figuratively and one literally. Whether it solved the problem is dubious.
What is certain is that it is as undemocratic as Obamacare, with its Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, whose budget Congress can’t control, its Financial
Stability Oversight Council, whose rulings no court may review, and its army of
regulators occupying the big banks and squeezing multimillion-dollar penalties
out of CEOs clinging to their supersize compensation, regardless of what
happens to the stockholders. Meanwhile, the opaque Federal Housing Finance
Agency, formed during the crisis to salvage the misbegotten mortgage giants
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, seems bent on nationalizing permanently this
sizable chunk of the economy, putting the government in charge of citizens’
housing as well as their health care.
As for
the “stimulus” that was supposed to give a Keynesian boost to the economy:
since you can’t prove a negative, no one can show that if all that money had
stayed in the private economy, it would have created more jobs and economic
growth than the economically anemic Obama era has done. What unemployed or
underemployed workers saw, though, is that a good portion of stimulus money
went to protect the jobs of public employees, whose welfare evidently trumps
that of the citizens whom they supposedly serve. Coal miners saw that, even as
the administration aimed to kill their jobs, its stimulus shoveled out hundreds
of millions of dollars to now-defunct Solyndra and other nonviable,
crony-capitalist “green” energy companies, supposed solutions to a
global-warming crisis that many think a hoax, though some two dozen public
officials seem keen to suppress, Inquisition-style, the very utterance of that
thought. And voters noticed that America’s three highest-income counties are in
the Washington suburbs that house the federal government’s recession-proof
functionaries. (See “Hail Columbia!,” Winter 2013.)
Unease over illegal
immigration also has stoked today’s fear that the government no longer belongs
to the people, and it’s important to understand the separate but mutually
reinforcing ways that it has done so. Once again, President Obama has made a
bad situation worse—this time, by his contemptuous refusal to execute the laws
faithfully. His catch-and-release policy for illegal border-crossers, as well
as his ban on deporting young aliens brought here by their illegal-immigrant
parents, are imperial, antidemocratic edicts that might have sparked
impeachment proceedings, had not Congress’s silly move to impeach Bill Clinton
for lying about his sex games with an intern tainted that weapon for years to
come. The result of Obama’s diktat, as contrary to the spirit of the Founders’
Constitution as is the Administrative State, is that law-abiding taxpayers must
pay for the kids’ welfare support, health care, and schooling—as they already
do for “anchor babies” born to mothers who have sneaked over the U.S. border
for the purpose of having a child eligible for “child-only” welfare benefits,
scarcely less than ordinary welfare payments and vastly more than the income of
Central American peasant families. No American voted to incur these costs,
which, if current trends continue, are likely to persist for several
generations of such families, so they amount to taxation without representation
as naked as George III’s.
As for the illegals who work, often for long
hours at low pay, off the books: because immigrants, 13 percent of the
population, hold 17 percent of the jobs—and no one knows the percentage of workers
who are here illegally—jobless working-class citizens have understandably
concluded that a lawless government, by countenancing such cheap labor, is
taking the bread out of their mouths. Should they eat cake instead?
America’s highest-income counties are in the suburbs that house
Washington’s recession-proof functionaries.
What
citizens want to know is that, of all the world’s people who seek to live in
America, our government will admit those who come legally, whose families will
not harm us, and who will add to the wealth of the nation, not reap where they
have not sown. After all, public safety—not clean energy or national health
care—is government’s purpose. Nevertheless, Mexican criminals really have infiltrated the country and really have
killed Americans, inevitably, under the administration’s anything-goes
immigration stance. Further, it’s no comfort to any American who has
suffered loss from an Islamist terror attack within our borders—from Ground
Zero and Fort Hood to San Bernardino and Orlando—that such incidents pose no
threat to our existence as a nation, as the president has said by way of
reassurance, while refusing to call such outrages by their right name. How many
citizens would have to die in a dirty-bomb attack in Grand Central Terminal for
such events to strike him as a threat to the nation’s existence?
The
question of providing a path to citizenship for the 12 million illegal aliens
already here is also germane to the debate about whom the U.S. government
serves and to whom it belongs. Talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh jokes that “illegal
aliens” is a politically incorrect term; we must say “undocumented Democrats”
instead. But it’s a joke with a barb,
for no one can doubt that these 12 million, if they could vote, would vote for
the Democratic program of an ever-larger, richly paid government extracting
ever-larger transfer payments from productive workers to the dependent
poor—James Madison’s definition of the tyranny of the majority in Federalist 10. With black poverty and exclusion steadily ameliorating,
thanks to decades of striving by well-intentioned Americans of all races—even
though Obama’s ex–attorney general Eric
Holder devoted his tenure to denying this plain truth—the Democratic Party
needs a new class of victims to justify its “helping” agenda and its immense
cadre of well-paid government “helpers.” Central American peasants fill the
bill.
Formerly,
our open economy drew the enterprising and energetic to these shores, and our
lack of a public safety net, with only private ethnic and religious charities
to help the unfortunate, meant that those who couldn’t contribute to the U.S.
economy went home. But today, when we
have a vast welfare state that didn’t exist during earlier waves of
immigration, the mothers of anchor babies come for handouts, and even the
children of hardworking legal Hispanic immigrants end up on the welfare rolls
at troublesomely high rates. In addition, our showering of self-proclaimed
refugees with welfare benefits, which attracts the shiftless rather than the
enterprising, only compounds the government-sustained dependency problem—dependency
upon taxpayers who didn’t choose this particular philanthropy.
The phalanx of privately
supported settlement houses and other institutions that met the great
immigration wave around the turn of the twentieth century, along with the
public school system, aimed to “Americanize” the new arrivals—teaching them our
language, manners, and customs, and especially our republican civic ethic.
Culture, after all, is as important an element of national identity as
political institutions. To become an American in those days meant little more
than learning English and subscribing to a broadly shared creed of
self-reliance, self-government, self-improvement, and allegiance to a tolerant
nation that most people agreed was unique in the freedom and opportunity it afforded—as
well as in its readiness to confer citizenship on newcomers who almost
universally desired it. But today’s
legal Hispanic immigrants often don’t apply for American citizenship, or retain
dual nationalities: Americanization often is not high on their agendas.
Moreover,
our new doctrine of multiculturalism gives today’s immigrants nothing to
assimilate to, since current intellectual fashion—set by the universities,
Hollywood, and the mainstream media—celebrates everything that makes us
different rather than the creed that once made one nation out of many
individuals. And multiculturalism’s accompanying creed of victimology
encourages dependency rather than self-reliance. Who are the victimizers of
illegal Hispanic aliens? According to today’s politically correct
“progressivism,” it is the neocolonial United States that has exploited the
Third World’s natural resources, shored up its ruling oligarchies, and
subverted its incipient democratic governments. And then it further victimizes
them with racism when they try to escape to this country.
Deference
to the greater wisdom of government, which Wilsonian progressivism deems a
better judge of what the era needs and what the people “really” want than the
people themselves, has been silently eroding our unique culture of enterprise,
self-reliance, enlightenment, and love of liberty for decades. But if we cease
to enshrine American exceptionalism at the heart of our culture—if we set equal
value on such Third World cultural tendencies as passive resignation, fatalism,
superstition, devaluation of learning, resentment of imaginary plots by the
powerful, and a belief that gratification deferred is gratification forgone—the
exceptionalism of our institutions becomes all the more precarious.
Supercharging
American anger over illegal immigration and its consequences is the politically
correct ban on openly discussing it, with even the most reasoned reservation
dismissed as racism and yahooism. And political correctness generates its own
quantum of anger among citizens, who think of freedom of speech and debate as
central to American exceptionalism. But elite culture stigmatizes plain
speaking, so that now a rapist or a murderer is a “person who committed a
crime” or an “individual who was incarcerated,” says the Obama Department of
Justice, or, according to the latest humbug from the Department of Education, a
“justice-involved individual.” Implicit in these euphemisms is the theory that
“society,” not the criminal, is to blame for crime, a long-exploded idea aimed at
blurring the distinction between right and wrong.
That’s
what makes it so disheartening to learn that the University of California has
just deemed it a politically incorrect offense to declare America a land of
opportunity, so as not to stigmatize those who’ve failed to seize it. It’s
disheartening not only because such a retreat from our traditional culture will
hold back immigrants, but also because our long cultural unraveling already has
damagingly demoralized the native-born working class in the face of economic
change. They dimly know that, and part of what makes them so angry is what they
have allowed themselves to become.
When Theodore Roosevelt,
who unsuccessfully ran against Woodrow Wilson in 1912 on the Progressive Party
ticket, first declared his intention to go into politics, his fellow clubmen
jeered at him for wanting to associate with the “saloon-keepers, horse-car
conductors,” and other “rough and brutal” characters running the nation’s
political parties. “I answered,” recalled TR, “that if this were so it merely
meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that
the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class.”
That’s the true voice of “progressivism” speaking. As the Founders often cautioned,
a self-governing republic doesn’t have a governing class. Part of America’s
current predicament is that it now has such a class, and the American people
are very angry about it.
Time for America to get through the fog and wake up
It's
harder than ever to know what's going on in today's messed up world, thanks to
the flood of misinformation and the political censorship of mainstream news and
social media. It seems at times best to shut out the noise, put in a
good day's work, and conclude with a prayer. Unfortunately, that
luxury is no longer an option in today's ruptured America.
What
comes clearest through the fog of misinformation and censorship may be
identified as a sort of table of essential requirements for today's
Americans. Americans are being made to believe that to be decent
people, they have to
- renounce the
sovereignty of their country
- accept illegal
migration across the Mexican border
- allow instant
citizenship to illegal migrants
- allow exposing
themselves to foreign terrorists
- condone Islamic
jihad and accept sharia law
- tolerate the
vilification of police officers
- accept the export
of American jobs to other countries
- denigrate
America's heritage and remove its symbols
- denounce people of
white skin
- reject the nature
and reality of male and female
- reject freedom of
speech
Missing
from this list (admittedly incomplete) is the disclaimer that each one of these
requirements is the opposite of what decent Americans should
do.
Notice
the reversal of moral value – a major tactic of
the left to deconstruct America and groom it for socialist-communist domination
and takeover, which seems outrageously stupid, given the historic and ongoing
failure of collectivism to make life good for anyone. In language
free of academic frills, this reversal-of-moral-value tactic may be summarized
this way: take something considered evil by the opposition, recast it in
language that makes it sound good, then accuse opponents of being against what
is "right." It's a tactic also used to smear opponents
with the faults of the smearers, who, need it be said, need to take a hard look
in the mirror.
The
ceaseless broadcast of falsehood-as-truth from the mainstream media – the voice
of the left since most of us have been alive – continues to stifle the ability
of Americans to see that they are being played like pawns on a global chessboard– or learn that prominent
globalist schemers finance NGOs, lobbyists, and demonstrations against
everything and everybody standing in the way of their agenda for global hegemony, let alone be given the
opportunity to ask why these "elites" should be in charge of our
lives or question whether their "superior wisdom" is in fact superior
arrogance and power.
Moneyed
egomaniacs with an obsession to lord it over others, if it means stripping them
of their freedom, or even their right to live, were never more
active. Enemies of America, external and internal, are doubling
their efforts to destabilize America by creating discord and division and
inciting violence. The talk of "civil war" in the air
highlights the fact that the very basics of civil order and well-being are
being attacked, even in high places, a red flag indicating very bad
management by central and local government officials. The
need to wake up has never been greater.
A
full review of all that has been happening behind closed doors is not necessary
to know that the time is now for sensible people of good
will to vote out of office all who choose not to defend America against its
enemies, foreign and domestic, or choose to violate their oath to
uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States – and vote in those
whose words and deeds show a dedication to America, its core values, and its
Constitution.
Anthony J. DeBlasi is a war veteran and lifelong defender of
Western culture.
The judge found these releases, together with the
publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she
pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest public
concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of
one of the two major political parties in the United States during a
presidential election.”
“Clinton also
failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after his
presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in
part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street
bankers.”
SWAMP EMPRESS HILLARY CLINTON
Leaked Julian Assange
Message:
Hillary Is A ‘Well Connected,
Sadistic, Sociopath’
’
"But what
the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the
American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it
to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal.
Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to
every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia
McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
Clinton Foundation Put On Watch List
Of Suspicious ‘Charities’
"But what
the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the
American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it
to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal.
Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every
person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy
- AMERICANTHINKER.com
Media silent on dismissal of DNC
suit against Julian Assange
A federal court ruling last Tuesday dismissing a Democratic
National Committee (DNC) civil suit against Julian Assange “with prejudice” was
a devastating indictment of the US ruling elite’s campaign to destroy the
WikiLeaks founder. It exposed as a fraud the entire “Russiagate” conspiracy
theory peddled by the Democratic Party, the corporate media and the intelligence
agencies for the past three years.
The decision, by Judge John Koeltl of the US District Court for
the Southern District of New York, rejected the smears that Assange “colluded”
with Russia. It upheld his status as a journalist and publisher and dismissed
claims that WikiLeaks’ 2016 publication of leaked emails from the DNC was
“illegal.”
Despite the significance of the ruling, and its clear
newsworthiness, it has been subjected to an almost complete blackout by the
entire media in the US and internationally.
The universal silence on the court decision—extending from
the New York Times (which
buried a six-paragraph report on the ruling on page 25) and the Washington Post, to
“alternative” outlets such as the Intercept,
the television evening news programs and the publications of the
pseudo-left—can be described only as a coordinated political conspiracy.
Its aim is to suppress any discussion of the court’s exposure of
the slanders used to malign and isolate Assange, and to justify the
unprecedented international pursuit of him over WikiLeaks’ exposure of US war
crimes, surveillance operations and diplomatic conspiracies.
The New
York Times, the Washington
Post and other corporate outlets have relentlessly smeared
Assange as a “Russian agent” and depicted him as the linchpin of a conspiracy
hatched in Moscow to deprive Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton of the
presidency in the 2016 US elections.
Now that their claims have been subjected to judicial review and
exposed as a tissue of lies and fabrications, they have adopted a policy of
radio silence. There is no question that if the court ruling had been in favour
of the DNC, it would have been greeted with banner headlines and wall-to-wall
coverage.
The response exposes these publications as state propagandists
and active participants in the campaign by the Democratic Party, the Trump
administration and the entire ruling elite to condemn Assange for the rest of
his life to an American prison for the “crime” of publishing the truth.
The editors and senior writers at these outlets, such as New York Timeseditorial page
editor James Bennet, are in constant contact with the CIA and other
intelligence agencies. Behind the scenes, they work out an editorial line that
will advance the interests of the Wall Street banks and the
military-intelligence apparatus. At the same time, they decide what news and
information they will hide from the American and world population.
The efforts by the mainstream news outlets to bury the ruling
presents a clear example of the type of media manipulation that has led
millions of people to seek alternative sources of news on the internet, of
which WikiLeaks is itself an example.
Judge Koeltl’s decision made plain the anti-democratic and
dictatorial logic of the DNC case against Assange. He warned: “If WikiLeaks
could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC’s political,
financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them
‘secret’ and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or other media outlet.”
This, he stated, would “override the First Amendment” protection to freedom of
the press mandated by the US Constitution.
Koeltl’s finding was an absolute vindication of Assange and
WikiLeaks’ 2016 publications exposing the attempts by the DNC to rig the
Democratic Party primaries against self-declared “democratic socialist” Bernie
Sanders in favour of Hillary Clinton.
The judge found these releases, together with the publication of
Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be
their representative, were “matters of the highest public concern.” They
“allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two
major political parties in the United States during a presidential election.”
Koeltl, moreover, found there was no evidence to justify the
DNC’s assertion that WikiLeaks had colluded with the Russian state to obtain
the material. Assange and WikiLeaks have always maintained that the documents
were not provided to them by the Putin regime.
The ruling demonstrated the flagrant illegality of the US
vendetta against Assange. The slander that he was operating as a “Russian
agent” to “interfere” in US politics was used by the American government and
its intelligence agencies to pressure the Ecuadorian regime to sever Assange’s
internet access in 2016, and again in 2018. It served as a central pretext for
its illegal termination in April of his political asylum in the embassy
building.
The judgment was also an implicit exposure of the lawlessness of
the attempts by the Trump administration, with the full support of the
Democrats, to extradite Assange from Britain, so that he can be prosecuted on
18 US charges, including 17 espionage counts, carrying a maximum sentence of
175 years’ imprisonment.
The Trump administration and the Justice Department are claiming
that it was illegal for WikiLeaks and Assange to publish US army war logs from
Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and other
documents exposing US war crimes and intrigues, provided by the courageous
whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Koeltl’s ruling, however, reasserted the fundamental democratic
principle that WikiLeaks had a right to publish the 2016 DNC documents, even if
they had been obtained by the Russian government, or any other entity,
illegally.
The clear implication is that even if Manning’s decision to leak
US military and diplomatic documents was a violation of the law, WikiLeaks’
publication of them was not. The publication of both the 2010 and the 2016
leaks was constitutionally protected journalistic activity.
Koeltl further undermined the claims of the Trump
administration, the Democrats and the media that Assange is a “hacker,”
undeserving of First Amendment protections. The judge repeatedly referred to
Assange as a “journalist” and WikiLeaks as a “publisher.”
In other words, the attempt to extradite Assange to the US and
prosecute him is a frontal assault on the US Constitution and press freedom. In
its disregard for domestic and international law, it can be described only as
an extraordinary rendition operation, similar to the kidnappings and torture
operations conducted by the CIA.
The hostile response to Koeltl’s ruling on the part of the
entire political and media establishment, in the US and internationally,
demonstrates that this conspiracy will not be defeated by plaintive appeals to
the governments, political parties and media corporations that have spearheaded
the assault on Assange’s legal and democratic rights.
All of them are using the persecution of Assange as a test case
for the imposition of ever-more authoritarian measures, aimed at suppressing
mounting popular hostility to war, social inequality and an assault on
democratic rights.
What is required is the development of a mass movement from
below, to mobilise the immense social and political power of the working class
internationally to secure Assange’s liberty and to defend all democratic
rights.
GEORGE
SOROS AND THE CLINTON GLOBALIST AGENDA FOR BANKSTERS AND WIDE OPEN BORDERS
*
NEW YORK — Demand Justice, an
organization founded by former members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential
campaign and associated with a “social welfare organization” financed by
billionaire activist George S oros, is raising money for an eventual court
fight against what the group describes as President Trump’s proposed “racist,
unnecessary wall.”
*
*
“Obama would declare himself president for life with S
oros really running the show, as he did for the entire Obama presidency.”
*
“Hillary was always small potatoes, a placeholder as it
were. Her health was always suspect. And do you think the plotters would have
let a doofus like Tim Kaine take office in the event that Hillary became
disabled?”
THE PHONY
CLINTON FOUNDATION CHARITY slush fund
*
*
“There is
no controlling Bill Clinton. He does
whatever he wants and runs up incredible expenses with foundation funds,”
states a separate interview memo attached to the submission.
“Bill Clinton
mixes and matches his personal business with that of the foundation. Many
people within the foundation have tried to caution him about this but he does
not listen, and there really is no talking to him,” the memo added.
CLINTON
MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS
TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?
The Clinton White House famously
abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and
investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major
bank mergers that
some analysts say helped
contribute to the
2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in
massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a
total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms,
including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to
Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than
$1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over
$500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.
It may well
be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation
before even taking office: the political destruction of
Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn
"Hillary will do anything to distract
you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the
America she and The Obama's have created."
THE FINAL DAYS OF HILLARY CLINTON:
MISTRESS of the SWAMP, GLOBAL BRIBES SUCKER and LOOTER OF THE POOR
“If the Constitution did not forbid cruel
and unusual punishment, the sentence I would like
to see imposed would place both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the same
8-by-12 cell.” ROBERT ARVAY – AMERICAN THINKER
com
The Clinton Looting of the Poor
of Haiti
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly
spent in “public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in
the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political
machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of
a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes. The basic
components of the operation are lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street and
Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign contributions, and donations to the
ostensibly philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in
the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political
machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of
a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes. The basic
components of the operation are lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street and
Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign contributions, and donations to the
ostensibly philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
IT WAS BILL
CLINTON WHO UNLEASHED WALL STREET’S BIGGEST CRIMINAL BANKSTERS…. And haven’t
they sucked up the banksters’ gratuities since?
Only Barack
Obama has serviced banksters more than Hillary and Billary!
“Clinton also failed to mention how
he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential
tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in
part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street
bankers.”
FOLLOWING THE CRIMES OF BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON BECOMES AMERICA’S
ROAD TO REVOLUTION
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/bill-and-hillary-clintons-global.html
Transcripts
released by WikiLeaks of Clinton speeches to Wall Street
bankers, for which she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising the recommendations of the 2010
Simpson- Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for
sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the
elimination of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’
No comments:
Post a Comment