Global

BANGKOK, Thailand -- A U.S. retired defense contractor with wartime
experience in Iraq and Afghanistan was on the run April 19 with his
bitcoin-savvy girlfriend, fearing Bangkok's military government will
execute them for living on a floating platform off Thailand's Phuket
island.

"The Bangkok Post reported that Nadia and I were being accused of
breaking a Thai law that carries a life sentence or the death
penalty," Chad Elwartowski said in an interview conducted online.

"What is reported in the press in Thailand is usually what the
military wants reported. Even though the allegations are far off base,
we have to take seriously their intention to kill us."

The Thai navy reportedly demolished their floating residential pod
"without following any legal process," Mr. Elwartowski said.

"We have no reason to believe we would face any sort of fair trial."

He denied violating Thai laws including its territorial rights in the
Andaman Sea or "commercially extracting natural resources."

He offered to donate the anchored platform -- if it has not been

Monty Python collaborator Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote falls into an interesting motion picture category. Cinematic lore includes a sort of subgenre of “difficult” films often made by powerful directors seeking to impose their exacting, iconic, auteurish visions on studios, audiences, critics, etc. During the silent screen era the original uncut versions of D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance and Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 Greed reportedly unspooled with hours of endless footage. Sometimes these demanding directors’ dreamt-of masterpieces went unfulfilled - von Stroheim never completed his 1932 Queen Kelly starring Gloria Swanson (although, strangely, scenes from it are glimpsed in Billy Wilder’s 1950 Sunset Boulevard, where a washed up von Stroheim portrays the chauffeur Max, ex-star Swanson’s onetime helmer).

Bernie Sanders wrapped up a weekend campaign swing through California with a Sunday afternoon speech to 16,000 of us a few miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. News coverage seemed unlikely to convey much about the event. The multiracial crowd reflected the latest polling that shows great diversity of support for Bernie, contrary to corporate media spin. High energy for basic social change was in the air.

Speaking from the podium, Bernie 2020 co-chair Nina Turner asked and answered a question about the campaign: “What’s love got to do with it? Everything.”

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 Supreme Court has just now certified the deadliest and most economically destructive scam of the entire Trump catastrophe.

Every downwind American is now threatened with deadly radiation while state after state bankrupts itself with soaring electric bills and ecological disaster, crippling the Solartopian green energy revolution.

It is, in short, the “hole in the head” wave of massive state-based nuke bailouts 

All across the US, brain-dead Trumpist legislatures are scamming public billions into dying nuke reactors that pose the #1 threat to human survival on this planet. 

All the world’s 440 reactors (98 in the US) are decrepit, crumbling, ready to blow. They’re uninspected, under-maintained, filthy, falling apart. They emit massive quantities of heat and radiation that cause climate chaos. Most are huge money-losers that can’t compete with green Solartopian technologies. 

1. What would you like the U.S. discretionary budget to look like? With 60% now going to militarism, what percentage would you like that to be?

It is depressing to observe how the United States of America has become the evil empire. Having served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War and in the Central Intelligence Agency for the second half of the Cold War, I had an insider’s viewpoint of how an essentially pragmatic national security policy was being transformed bit by bit into a bipartisan doctrine that featured as a sine qua non global dominance for Washington. Unfortunately, when the Soviet Union collapsed the opportunity to end once and for all the bipolar nuclear confrontation that threatened global annihilation was squandered as President Bill Clinton chose instead to humiliate and use NATO to contain an already demoralized and effectively leaderless Russia.

Oh, the normalcy of militarism! Our annual financial hemorrhage to this complex menagerie of institutions — from the Pentagon to Homeland Security to the Nuclear Security Administration to the CIA and its secret expenditures — must not be seriously questioned in the corridors of Congress, even though, all things considered, it comes to almost a trillion dollars annually.

Call it the Defense budget, smile and move on.

Even the current “liberal revolt” in the House of Representatives over the Dems’ proposed budget isn’t a serious questioning of the American way of war but, rather, a demand for “parity” between social and defense spending, which, if anything, further hardens the latter into an unquestioned reality. Yes, yes, America spends more on its military than the next seven countries combined, but let’s make sure we have money available for healthcare too, OK?

In some of the many Duty to Warn columns that I have written over the years about the domination that for-profit corporations have acquired over healthcare delivery in America, I have especially tried to warn readers (especially parents of vulnerable infants and children) about the many hidden dangers from the thousands of drugs and vaccines that are mass-produced by the hundreds of multinational drug and vaccine manufacturers across the world. Every single one of those corporations has unethically hidden those dangers via their ever-present propaganda efforts.

For profit corporations don’t pledge the Hippocratic Oath like physicians and nurses used to do. And the only “ethical” duty of corporations is a fiduciary one. Their only “ethical” responsibility is to their shareholders; and that means “to make as large a profit as possible” so that those shareholders will benefit from dividend distribution or share price escalation.