Trump's Tyranny
The man who would make himself dictator is with us because we have put so many like him in power in so many other places.
And because we have 800 bases around the world, spend unlimited sums on an imperial military, and continue to use it to tell everyone else on this planet what to do and who will rule them.
Remarkably, many of those rulers turn out to be a lot like Donald Trump.
Think of Trump as the ultimate payback, the balloon payment on the Empire. He is the eternal imperial mobster, a composite of exactly who we’ve foisted on so many other innocents throughout history.
We need to stop whining about him. Instead, we need to apologize to the world, sell our bases, turn our military to peaceful and ecological uses, and stop behaving like an imperial overlord. If we don’t, our next ruler (even if a Democrat) will be just like this one, only smarter and more brutally effective. And then the one after that. And the one after that. And the one after that.
Imagine yourself in Greece just after WW2. Revolution is in the air. The chances for social democracy are real.
On 4 April 2019, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO, marked the 70th anniversary of its existence with a conference attended by the foreign ministers of member nations in Washington DC. This will be complemented by a meeting of the heads of state of member nations in London next December.
Letting a ruler get away with power grabs and abuses guarantees that worse will come, from him or from his successors. This is the lesson of the failure to impeach recent U.S. presidents. For those who haven’t understood this yet, here’s a helpful FAQ.
Now, here are the 20 surest ways to impeach Trump:
1. Violation of Constitution on Domestic Emoluments
In his conduct while President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” has illegally received emoluments from the United States government and from individual state governments.
The U.S. government gets little credit for it, doesn’t even like to brag about it, but as of 2017 provided military “aid” to 73% of the world’s dictatorships. Ocassionally, the U.S. turns against one of its dictators and chooses that moment to tell everyone about him: Hussein, Noriega, Gadaffi, Assad. Sometimes it loses a dictator for other reasons: the Shah of Iran, Hosni Mubarak.
Sometimes the U.S. imposes a U.S. dictator on a foreign colony: as historically in the Philippines, or Haiti, Chile, or post-“liberation” Iraq. More often it selects and trains, imposes and props up a dictator from within the population of “natives” or “savages.” And sometimes such a dictator spends many years in the United States preparing and awaiting opportunity.
Trump wants to leave 31% of discretionary spending for all things non-military, while Bernie wants to move some unspecified amount of money from militarism to human needs, and Elizabeth Warren believesa budget is a statement of values.
Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no presidential candidate has now or within living memory ever produced a proposed federal budget, or ever been asked in any debate or interview, to even approximate — give or take $100 billion — what they’d like spent where, or even just whether militarism would be better at 70%, 60%, 50%, 40%, or 30% of federal discretionary spending.
Bases, Europe, Nonviolent Activism
Two U.S. Veterans For Peace Refused Bail at Ennis District Court
Charged with Trespass and Causing Criminal Damage at Shannon Airport
Monday 18 March
Two US veterans were arrested at Shannon Airport on 17 March for entering the airfield to inspect and investigate an OMNI Air International plane on contract to the U.S. military. The two, Tarak Kauff and Ken Mayers, were refused bail at Ennis District Court today.
The plane, tail number N351AX, arrived at Shannon Airport about 8.30 a.m. from Eielson US air force base in Faribanks Alaska, believed to be on its way to the Middle East with up to 300 armed US troops.
At about 10 am Mayers, a former Marine Corps Major and Kauff, a former Army paratrooper, both members of US Veterans For Peace, entered the airfield carrying a large banner that said:
U.S. Veterans say
By Nicolas J S Davies, World BEYOND War
The world faces many overlapping crises: regional political crises from Kashmir to Venezuela; brutal wars that rage on in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia; and the existential dangers of nuclear weapons, climate change, and mass extinction.
But beneath the surface of all these crises, human society faces an underlying, unresolved conflict about who or what governs our world and who must make the critical decisions about how to tackle all these problems — or whether we will tackle them at all. The underlying crisis of legitimacy and authority that makes so many of our problems almost impossible to solve is the conflict between U.S. imperialism and the rule of law.
Imperialism means that one dominant government exercises sovereignty over other countries and people across the world, and makes critical decisions about how they are to be governed and under what kind of economic system they are to live.
Despite claims by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to have defeated its own troops using Facebook (and, really, what plot to take over a high school hasn’t done that?), the biggest challenge NATO will face this year will probably not be nefarious Russian social media posts.
Nor will it be the dreaded Russian military, now sucking down 6 percent as many dollars each year as the war machines of the NATO nations.
Nor is NATO terribly threatened by a U.S. president who demands that its members spend more, that more nations join, that the North Atlantic nation of Colombia partner up, and that the war games and weapons deals and expansion eastward press ahead, but who once blurted out obvious stuff his handlers would never allow him to act on, such as that NATO serves no good purpose. (Which of his projects does serve any good purpose?)
Reader Supported News
04 February 19
In 1985, an activist for the relatives of the disappeared [persons in Guatemala], named Rosario Godoy, was abducted by the army. She was raped. Her mutilated body was found alongside that of her baby. The baby’s fingernails had been torn out. The Guatemalan army, when asked about this atrocity, said, “Oh, they died in a traffic accident.”
When [US human rights official] Elliott Abrams was asked about this accident, he affirmed also that they died in a traffic accident. This activist raped and mutilated, the baby with his fingernails pulled out, Abrams says it’s a traffic accident.
– Allan Nairn, on Democracy NOW January 30, 2019