Carl,
I don't think Trump is an example of your typical corporate CEO, not any of
them, not the greediest, nor those who are most thoughtlessly cruel in their
search for more and more wealth. I've listened to the way he talks, his tone of
voice, the filth that comes out of his mouth, and I've read three books about
him and God knows how many articles. He is a Hitler, a Fascist. He's a
sociopath who has no feeling for other people, no conscience, no warmth toward
anyone including family members. He sees everything in terms of his own needs.
He doesn't even have the capacity to hide his greed and corruption behind a
façade. He doesn't know what he actdually sounds like when he says things
like, "I'm the least anti-semitic person in the world". And because he is so
narcissistic and unaware, he is easily manipulated. Bush was stupid and the
country was run by his vice president and close political advisors. You have
the same situation now, only even worse, if that's conceivable.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2017 11:56 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Return of American Race Laws
Words, words, words. The central tool in the Trumpster's bag of tricks. Words
may be used to inform, or to instruct, or to create a particular feeling. Or,
words can be spread out as a covering to confuse the real intent of the speaker.
Whatever Donald Trump thinks he believes, his words have given license to Right
Wing White Supremacists to creep out from under their slimy rocks and begin
their all too familiar hate mongering.
The recent desecration of over 500 graves in a Jewish cemetery, along with the
burning of Mosques, and the angry threats and insults shouted at people of
Color and those who dress "differently" warn of an era of oppression. Donald
Trump, rather than condemning such acts of outrage and violence, declares "war"
on the Press.
Can it be that average folks don't understand that Trump's entire upbringing
has been one of confrontation? Survival in the World in which Donald Trump
lives, survival depends upon aggression and the ability to out maneuver your
opponents. And every other competitor is an opponent. The Ladder of Success
is built upon the backs of those you have bested.
I have sat in rooms filled with company presidents and corporate CEO's, all
smiling and slapping one another on the back, and wishing one another success,
until they are out of earshot of one another.
Their charm was a means of gathering inside information to be used against the
other members of their Executive Club. These Men never respect the weak. They
only respect the strongmen who reach the top, by whatever means.
Cold? Calculating? Hey! These are men who believe that they are looking out
for their family, their children, their employees, as well as their personal
fortunes. Donald Trump is doing exactly what he believes is good for Donald J.
Trump, first. Then he is looking to take care of his "family", those fellow
Super Rich whom he sees as "his people". Whining and grumbling about it will
get us nowhere.
What we are witnessing is the Corporate Capitalist World uncovered.
We have been lulled into believing that our bloated, incompetent Federal
Government is the big problem. Trust me, our big threat is this Corporate Tank
of Sharks.
So, how do we fight back without becoming just like them? Well, in my humble
opinion, we do not do it with anger and violence. That simply turns us into
"them". Just what are the tools in our bag of tricks?
What strengths can we bring to meet and best theirs? Well, for one thing, we
have numbers. Our first challenge is to mend the fences between our various
factions, and unite on some basic issues. The Trumpster and his Minion will
lie over and over in order to keep us at each others throats. We must find
ways of countering these lies and connecting our numbers. Remember, without
us, the Ruling Class cannot do anything. But without them, we might just go
about building a new People's world.
Carl Jarvis On 2/27/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Truthdig
The Return of American Race Laws
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_return_of_american_race_laws_2
017022
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Posted on Feb 26, 2017
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The warmup act for a full-blown American fascism and orchestrated race
war is taking place in immigrant and marginal communities across the
United
States: Racial profiling. Random police stops. Raids at homes and
businesses. People of color pulled from vehicles at checkpoints.
Seizures of individuals with no criminal records or who never
committed a serious crime.
Imprisonment without trial. Expedited deportation hearings and removal
proceedings that violate human rights. The arrest of a beneficiary of
the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA
(http://www.nclr.org/issues/Immigration/daca/) ) program, Daniel
Ramirez Medina, 23, who along with the program's other 750,000
successful applicants had revealed all personal history to the
government in applying for DACA status. Parents separated, perhaps
forever, from their children. The hunted going underground. The end of
the rule of law. The abandonment of the common good. The obliteration
of a social state in which institutions and assistance programs-from
public education to Social Security and welfare-make justice, equality
and dignity possible.
White Europeans who are undocumented are not being targeted. The
executive orders of President Trump are directed against people of
color. They begin from the premise that white Americans are the true
victims of neoliberalism, deindustrialization and falling living
standards. The Trump orders are written not to make America great
again but to make America white. They are an updated version of the
Nazis' Nuremberg race laws
(https://www.google.com/search?q=nuremberg+race+laws&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 ;
) , the Jim Crow laws
(https://www.google.com/search?q=nuremberg+race+laws&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
#q=jim
+crow+laws&*) , the Chinese Exclusion Act
(https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47 ;) and the
Naturalization Act of 1870
(http://middleeastandasianimmigrants.pbworks.com/w/page/21495984/Natur
alizat
ion%20Act%20of%201870) . They are intended to institutionalize an
overt racial hierarchy in the United States, one already advanced by
the miniature police states in which marginal communities of color
find themselves. In these impoverished enclaves there is no right to
trial or due process.
Militarized police kill with impunity, and the courts lock people away
often for life. Rights are treated as privileges that can instantly be
revoked.
The poor, especially poor people of color, have been exempted from
moral consideration. They are viewed as impediments to social
cohesion. And these impediments must be eliminated. This is the template for
what will come.
Jews-their community centers under threats of violence and their
graveyards being desecrated-will be persecuted. American fascism will
be cemented into place by uniformed and heavily armed paramilitary
squads clutching the flag and the cross and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance
and the Lord's Prayer.
"Little or no prospect of rescue from individual indolence or
impotence can be expected to arrive from a political state that is
not, and refuses to be, a social state," the sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman warned in "Collateral
Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age." "Without social rights
for all, a large and in all probability growing number of people will
find their political rights of little use and unworthy of their
attention. If political rights are necessary to set social rights in
place, social rights are indispensable to make political rights 'real'
and keep them in operation.
The two rights need each other for their survival; that survival can
only be their joint achievement."
Presidential chief strategist Stephen Bannon, in his public comments
and his films
(http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/19/i-watched-all-of-ste
ve-ban non-s-bad-movies.html ) such as "Generation Zero," has
embraced a historical determinism worthy of Karl Marx. He posits that
Western culture has been contaminated and is being destroyed by darker
races and barbaric religions and belief systems. His conspiratorial
view of history and society sees a global war between the white race
and the lesser breeds of the earth as not only inevitable but one that
will reinvigorate and purify America.
Racists and conspiracy theorists such as Bannon, Michael Anton
(https://theintercept.com/2017/02/16/trump-official-obsessed-over-nucl
ear-ap ocalypse-mens-style-fine-wines-in-40000-posts-on-fashion-site/
) , Stephen Miller
(http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/stephen-miller-donald-
trump-
2016-policy-adviser-jeff-sessions-213992 ) and Sebastian Gorka
(http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/sebastian-gorka-has-link
s-to-a nti-semitic-groups.html ) constitute Trump's ideological brain
trust.
Gorka
goes so far as to argue that the failure to understand the evil of
radical Islam stems from a "systematic subversion of the national
security establishment under the banner of inclusivity, cultural
awareness and political correctness."
In a 2014 speech, Bannon said, "I believe we've come partly off-track
in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union and we're starting now
in the 21st century, which I believe, strongly, is a crisis both of
our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of
capitalism." (He delivered the talk via Skype to a group of other
right-wing Catholics gathered in the Vatican. For a transcript posted
by BuzzFeed, click here
(https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-th
e-enti re-world?utm_term=.bcz0w2Lql#.vt9AQ30eL ) .)
"There is a major war brewing, a war that's already global," Bannon said.
"It's going global in scale, and today's technology, today's media,
today's access to weapons of mass destruction, it's going to lead to a
global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today. Every day
that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and
really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we
didn't act."
Bannon, as Micah L. Sifry points out
(https://www.thenation.com/article/steve-bannon-wants-to-start-world-w
ar-iii
/) in The Nation, is a proponent of the theory popularized by authors
William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books "Generations: The History
of America's Future, 1584 to 2069" (1991) and "The Fourth Turning: An
American Prophecy-What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's
Next Rendezvous With Destiny" (1997). This theory holds that roughly
every 80 years, roughly an average human life span, the country goes
through a cataclysmic crisis.
This crisis unleashes genocide and other killing that last a decade or
more.
In its aftermath the social order is rejuvenated. Strauss and Howe
highlight the American Revolution of 1775-83, the Civil War, the Great
Depression and World War II as examples of how the cycle works.
"Inside each 80-year saeculum, Howe and Strauss argue, there are four
turnings, each a generation long, and each as inevitable as the coming
of the seasons," Sifry writes. "In the first turning, for the
generation that survives the prior catastrophe, the newly restored
society reaches a collective apex of social order and economic power.
Think of America in the post-war boom of 1945 to 1965. Then comes the
awakening, as the first new generation of post-catastrophe children
enter adulthood and, unlike their traumatized parents, let loose with
their emotions and take risks that their forebears would never have
imagined. Hello to the long 1960s. Then comes the unraveling, as the
once robust order starts to fall apart, people question the eternal
verities and institutions weaken. The fourth turning is kicked off and
punctuated by ongoing crises, out of which a whole new order is born."
Pseudo-intellectuals such as Strauss and Howe play the role that Paul
de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Alfred
Rosenberg played for the Nazi Party. They give an intellectual veneer
to racist conspiracy theories, a virulent nationalism, a hatred for
culture and the lust for domination through violence.
I share Bannon's distaste for globalization, free trade agreements,
the failure to put Wall Street bankers in jail, the bank bailouts and
crony capitalism and would even concede that Americans wallow in the
moral swamp of a culture of narcissism. He is right when he attacks
the two major political parties as the one "party of Davos
(https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-20
17 ) ." But his solution to the purported crisis-total war by the
white race to regain its ascendancy-is insane, as are the causes he
cites: a New Deal that turned citizens into whining dependents; the
permissiveness of the 1960s; white guilt that made the country cater
irresponsibly to African-Americans by giving them social service
programs and undeserved mortgages that led to the 2008 financial
meltdown; an intellectual and a liberal class composed essentially of
traitors; and the "new barbarity" of "Jihadist Islamic fascism."
Racism, misogyny, the inherent cruelty of capitalism and the crimes of
empire, from Wounded Knee to Vietnam and Iraq, simply do not exist in
Bannon's mystical nationalist worldview. He insists that the white
male aristocratic elites who formed a republic that enslaved
African-Americans, exterminated Native Americans and denied the vote
to women and white men without property created "a church and a
civilization that really is the flower of mankind." This is what he wants to
recover.
Fritz Stern, in his book "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in
the Rise of the Germanic Ideology," wrote of the early fascists in
Germany, "The movement did embody a paradox: its followers sought to
destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past
in an imaginary future.
They
were disinherited conservatives, who had nothing to conserve, because
the spiritual values of the past had largely been buried and the
material remnants of conservative power did not interest them. They
sought a breakthrough to the past, and they longed for a new community
in which old ideas and institutions would once again command universal
allegiance."
Bannon shares these fascist yearnings. He excoriates leftist and
liberal elites for supposedly poisoning the minds of young people, a
point he luridly makes in his film "Occupy Unmasked" (2012). A new
generation, he says, has been brainwashed to see America as evil and
the status quo as repressive. His mythical past will return through a
crusade both domestic and international. All forms of coercion, from
torture to murder, are justified. Any suffering along the way is the
price that has to be paid for this white, Christian paradise.
The central tenet of fascism is always that war cleanses society and
that the "virtues" that war inculcates in its combatants and survivors
provide a new moral vigor. Bannon knows no more about war's reality,
which I endured for two decades covering conflicts in Central America,
the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, than he sees in Hollywood
movies. But war for him, which will come in a confrontation with the
Islamic world and perhaps China, cannot arrive too soon.
This clash of civilizations will be prosecuted in the homeland, too.
Within the United States it will spawn the darkness endemic to all
wars-sadism, hypermasculinity, blind obedience to authority, a belief
in the efficacy of unrestrained violence, racism, hate crimes and the
use of the organs of internal security and wholesale surveillance to
crush all dissent and eradicate groups seen as opponents of authority.
Those who orchestrate such crusades ultimately sacrifice themselves
and their nations on the altars of the idols they worship. The
conflict desired by Bannon and those around him could mean the extinction of
the human race.
The paramilitary forces of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which
will hire 10,000 more agents, and the Border Patrol, which will hire
5,000 more agents, along with the Homeland Security Investigations
unit of the Department of Homeland Security, have deputized local and
state police to function as their auxiliaries. These paramilitary
forces will not disband once they have finished terrorizing and
deporting some of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
They will turn on their next victims-Muslims, African-Americans, Asians and
dissidents.
The paramilitaries relish their power to kick down doors while wearing
body armor and pointing weapons at terrified women and children. They
are not warriors, as they imagine, but goons. They have few actual
skills. And they intend to remain steadily employed by the state. The
for-profit prisons, reopened for business by Attorney General
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a man named not for one Confederate
traitor but two, intend to remain full.
The state will make America and the global community inhospitable for
people of color and all those who attempt to stand with them.
Trump is stoking the darkest and most destructive strains of the
American psyche. Congress, controlled by the Republicans, is unlikely
to use impeachment powers to stop him. The courts are spineless
subsidiaries of the corporate and security and surveillance state. The
elites will not save us.
If we fail to build mass protest movements, ones that cripple the
ability to govern, we will be enslaved.
Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999) in his book "Defying Hitler
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/65458.Defying_Hitler) " describes
being a law clerk at the Prussian Supreme Court. The courthouse was
raided in March 1933 by Nazi thugs. They grabbed the Jewish judges and
lawyers and hauled them outside; never would the jurists return to
their posts. A Jewish attorney, a former army captain who had been
wounded five times and lost an eye fighting in World War I, resisted.
He was beaten. "It had probably been his misfortune that he still
remembered the tone to use with mutineers,"
Haffner wrote.
"I put my head down over my work," Haffner went on. "I read a few
sentences
mechanically: 'The defendant's claim that . is untrue, but irrelevant. .'
Just take no notice!"
A brown shirt approached him and asked: "Are you Aryan
(https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aryan ;) ?
Haffner shot back, "Yes."
"A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat," he wrote. "I had
said 'Yes! Well, in God's name, I was indeed an 'Aryan.' I had not
lied, I had allowed something much worse to happen. What a
humiliation, to have answered the unjustified question as to whether I
was 'Aryan' so easily, even if the fact was of no importance to me!
What a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the right to stay with my
documents in peace! I had been caught unawares, even now. I had failed
my very first test."
Haffner left the Kammergericht, Prussia's highest state court, and
stood outside.
"There was nothing to show that, as an institution, it has just collapsed,"
he wrote. "There was also nothing about my appearance to show that I
had just suffered a terrible reverse, a defeat that would be almost
impossible to make good. A well-dressed young man walked down
Potsdamer Street. There was nothing untoward about the scene. Business
as usual, but in the air the approaching thunder of events to come."
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