Trump's Tyranny
Journalists aren’t supposed to “bury the lead.” But when death is the topic and corporate power is the culprit, the connection routinely goes unmentioned.
Class war -- waged methodically from the top down -- is so constant and pervasive that it might seem unremarkable. The 24/7 siege to make large companies more profitable and the wealthy more wealthy is going on all around us. In the process, it normalizes avoidable death as a cost of doing business.
Trump Threatens the future of human civilization
There is so much wrong with Donald Trump that one hardly knows where to start. He is a bully, braggart, narcicist, racist, mysogenist, habitual liar, and tax evader, in addition to being demonstrably ignorant. He has contempt for both domestic and international law, as well as for the US Constitution. However, it is Trump's climate change denial, withdrawal from the Paris agreement, and sponsorship of fossil fuels that pose the greatest threats to the future of humans society and the biosphere. The general support of the Republican Party for the fossil fuel industry is the reason why Prof. Noam Chomsky has called the party “the most dangerous organization in history”.
Trump's climate change denial
The Lieutenant Governor of Texas is happy to sacrifice the lives of old people for “the economy.” A Congressman from Indiana doesn’t discriminate; he’s willing to let anybody lose their life to maintain what he calls their “way of life.” How they can have a way of life without a life becomes clear when he explains that by “way of life” he means the economy. The President of the United States is afraid that the cure of isolating ourselves is worse than the disease, even though the latter is deadly for some who get it.
Two years after Donald Trump won the presidency, the author of “How Fascism Works” assessed him in a video. “It might seem like an exaggeration to call Trump a fascist,” Yale professor Jason Stanley said. “I mean, he’s not calling for a genocide or imprisoning his own people without due process. But . . . if you use history and philosophy as a guide, it’s easy to see parallels between Trump’s words and those of the most reviled fascists in history. That scares me, and it should scare you too.”
Drawing on his decade of studying fascist propaganda, Stanley concluded: “If you’re not worried about encroaching fascism in America, before long it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we’re all in trouble.”
The 24/7 intensified media coverage of the coronavirus story has meant that other news has either been ignored or relegated to the back pages, never to be seen again. The Middle East has been on a boil but coverage of the Trump administration’s latest moves against Iran has been so insignificant as to be invisible. Meanwhile closer to home, the declaration by the ubiquitous Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that current president of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro is a drug trafficker did generate somewhat of a ripple, as did dispatch of warships to the Caribbean to intercept the alleged drugs, but that story also died.
Grassroots action’s immense upset victory in Wisconsin shows we can overcome even a rigged election.
In November, you must do it again.
When Trump tries to steal or cancel the election, our informed non-violence must rise to protect and win it.
Neither the human race, nor American democracy, nor the US economy will survive more of this. Our further existence as a species depends on you.
Much of the upcoming election will be through Vote by Mail (VBM). Oregon, Washington, Colorado and Hawaii already use it with great success.
VBM is probably (as Winston Churchill said of democracy) the worst election system there is…except for all the other ones.
Huge problems are virtually certain. We need to be prepared to deal with them.
Donald Trump’s “Perfect Plan” to become dictator in November now runs through 30 Republican-controlled state legislatures, with the pivot in 12-18 swing states.
Anyone hoping for any remnant shreds of human rights and personal freedom has just seven months to stop the terminal destruction of what’s left of American democracy. Nothing is hidden or a surprise. There are no excuses.
Trump’s path to dictatorship is simple…and no secret.
Its primary foundation is the stripping from the voter rolls some 17 million American citizens. Using a wide range of pretexts, the Republicans have made it clear that “voter fraud” means any ballot cast by anyone who is not rich, white, old or a member of the Republican Party.
There has been no effort to hide this. Trump has worried in public that if all eligible voters get a ballot in a Vote by Mail system, the Republicans “will never win another election.”
For Donald Trump’s GOP followers, the real issue in the 2020 election is democracy itself.
They want it abolished.
Their primary allies are the Coronavirus, state legislatures like those in Ohio and Wisconsin, and the US Supreme Court.
The campaign just hit a new level in Wisconsin. Using the Pandemic, its gerrymandered GOP legislature made voting in the April 7 primary as dangerous as possible. The US Supreme Court, with its usual 5-4 death hammer, has backed them up.
That 5-4 margin selected George W. Bush (Bush v. Gore) in 2000, and cemented the corporate purchase of our elections with Citizens United (2010), Arizona Clean Elections (2011), Shelby County (2013) and McCutcheon (2014).
When a few thousand people were murdered on September 11, 2001, I was actually stupid enough – I kid you not – to imagine that the general public would conclude that because massive military forces, nuclear arsenals, and foreign bases had done nothing to prevent and much to provoke those crimes, the U.S. government would need to start scaling back its single biggest expense. By September 12th it was clear that the opposite course would be followed.
Since 2001, we have seen the U.S. government dump over a trillion dollars a year into militarism, and push the rest of the world to expend another trillion dollars a year, much of it on U.S.-made weapons. We’ve seen the creation of permawars, and the normalization of long-distance, push-button murder with drone wars. All of this has generated more terrorism in the name of fighting it. And it has come at the expense of actual defense.
A government agency aimed at actually defending people from actual dangers would cease activities that are counter-productive, that cause major environmental and climate destruction, and that consume resources that could be put to good use. Militarism meets all of those criteria.
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