Wednesday, August 28, 2019

OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS WERE RIGHT.... REVOLUTION IS AROUND THE CORNER AND WALL STREET BANKSTERS WILL BE HUNG AND THEIR GROVELING POLS BURNED AT THE STAKE

"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."

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.
A US Army Bradley Fighting Vehicle waits to be driven into place in front of the Lincoln Memorial for President Donald Trump's 'Salute to America' Fourth of July event. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
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.

Under the headline “America is moving toward an oligarchical socialism,” Joel Kotkin writes:
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.
Read Kotkin’s “oligarchal socialism” article here.




*

“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.”
*
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“Obama would declare himself president for life with S oros really running the show, as he did for the entire Obama presidency.”
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“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
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*

“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.”


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’





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