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Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice: for they shall be filled. Mine eye also shall see my desire on mine enemies, and mine ears shall hear my desire of the wicked that rise up against me. The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever: the Lord shall rejoice in his works. He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke. I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the Lord. Let sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless thou the Lord, O my soul. Praise ye the Lord.

Author Topic: Corruption in Government  (Read 734 times)

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AGelbert

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Reagan’s Treason, Two Bushes and the $23 Million Payoff
« Reply #30 on: March 21, 2023, 07:32:18 pm »

March 21, 2023 by Greg Palast

Reagan’s Treason, Two Bushes and the $23 Million 😈💰 Payoff


This week, a Texas pol, 🐍 Ben Barnes, confessed that he was personally involved—and therefore an eyewitness to–high treason: The Ronald Reagan campaign’s successful  secret deal with the Iranian government to hold 52 Americans hostages so that Reagan could defeat Jimmy Carter.

Reagan’s skanky deal worked. In 1980, Carter’s failure to bring home the hostages destroyed his chance of reelection. Reagan ultimately would repay the favor from Iran’s murder-crats with weapons and even, for the Ayatollah Khomeini, a birthday cake from Reagan advisor Oliver North.

The question is, why now? Why did Barnes suddenly blow the whistle on this crime—and a crime it is—four decades late? His cute excuse, reported without question by the New York Times, is that, “History needs to know that this happened.”

Wrong. “History” doesn’t need to know—American voters needed to know about Reagan’s treason before the 1980 election.

So, then, why did Barnes squirrel away the truth for decades? Follow the money.

It’s a money trail that leads to two Bushes who would not have become president if not for Barnes’ silence about Iran—and Barnes’ omertà about another creepy Bush scheme.

In 1999, for The Guardian, I discovered that Barnes, in his previous role as Lt. Governor of Texas, used his political juice to get Congressman George Bush Sr.’s son, “Dubya” into the Texas Air Guard—over literally thousands of far-more-qualified applicants. (Little Bush scored 25 out of 100 on the test, just one point above “too dumb to fly.”)

And so, 😈 Dubya dodged the draft and Vietnam.

Barnes hid the truth despite pleas from Texas Gov. 🗽 Ann Richards, who, in 1994, lost a squeaker of an election too.

In Austin, Texas, I received unshakeable evidence that Barnes was the fixer who got Congressman Bush’s son out of the Vietnam draft. (This, while Bush Sr. was voting to send other men’s sons to Vietnam.)

What did Barnes get for his burial of Reagan’s deal with Iran and Bush Jr.’s draft dodging? Did $23 million do it?
 
In 1999, I was investigating a company, GTech, which ran both the British and Texas lotteries. Texas had disqualified GTech from operating the state lottery based on strong evidence of corruption. But oddly, the new Governor of Texas, George W. Bush, fired the lottery director who banned GTEch. Then Bush’s new lottery commissioner gave GTech back its multi-billion-dollar contract, no bidding.

Notably, Bush’s firing of the state’s lottery director came two days after a meeting with GTech’s lobbyist—Ben Barnes.

Barnes’ fees from GTech? $23 million.

I wasn’t in the Bush-Barnes little tête-à-tête: the info came from a confidential memo from the lottery director that was well buried inside Justice Department files.

In a civil suit, Barnes supposedly denied any quid pro quo with Gov. Bush. Maybe. A nice payment from GTech to the wronged lottery director sealed Barnes’ testimony from the public.

Maybe Bush met with Barnes just to reminisce . But if Barnes had the Bush family’s entire political fortune in his pocket, did he really need to remind Dubya of the consequences if the Governor did not take care of Barnes’ client?
*
Secretly conspiring with a foreign power to keep Americans imprisoned, secretly negotiating with and providing weapons to a foreign enemy is the definition of treason—and so would a cover-up for cash.

This was another example, I wrote in The Guardian, how the Bushes turned America into “the best democracy money can buy.”

*
I then wrote a book of that title and made a film, Bush Family Fortunes, detailing the Bush Family crime-wave, for BBC Television.

Today, you can download that documentary, Bush Family Fortunes, free of charge. (If you want to throw in a tax-deductible donation, hey, we won’t say ‘no.’ Our investigations continue: The cast of characters has changed, but not the crimes.)

*
And a word about the 🐍 creeps, 🐒 cowards and 🦀 conmen who call themselves “journalists.” Let’s start with a trivia question: Who is 🐉 Dan Rather? He’s a former TV star and one-time reporter who took my story of Bush’s draft dodging, stuck it on 60 Minutes and, in violation of any sense of ethics and decency, exposed a whistleblower, Texas Air Guard Col. 🗽 Bill Burkett 🦅, a man of inestimable courage and integrity.

Rather’s exposure ruined Burkett. No Texan would sell him feed. His cattle were dying, so he lost his ranch.

Dan Rather was fired by CBS for getting the network in hot water with the Bush White House. Then, by his own admission, Rather agreed to backtrack on the story of Bush the draft dodger in return for a promise of a return to the CBS airwaves. CBS screwed Rather—but that often happens to feckless recreants.

Neither I nor the BBC nor The Guardian retracted a single word of our story of Dubya the Draft Dodger nor the tale of the $23 million questionable payment.

There are zeroes—and there are  🗽heroes. The story of Reagan and his “October Surprise” was first busted open by 🦅 Robert Parry – who also uncovered the Iran-Contra scandal. Instead of getting a Pulitzer, Parry’s career was destroyed. For uncovering too many uncomfortable truths, he was bounced from the Associated Press, Newsweek, Bloomberg, and The Nation.

Parry died in 2018, in journalistic exile.
« Last Edit: March 21, 2023, 07:46:36 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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The Donald Trump Problem
« Reply #31 on: March 27, 2023, 04:10:51 pm »


The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

MARCH 27, 2023 By Chris Hedges


The Donald Trump Problem

Donald Trump is not being targeted for the misdemeanors and serious felonies he appears to have committed but for discrediting and undermining the entrenched power of the ruling duopoly.

Donald Trump — facing four government-run investigations, three criminal and one civil, targeting himself and his business — is not being targeted because of his crimes. Nearly every serious crime he is accused of carrying out has been committed by his political rivals. He is being targeted because he is deemed dangerous for his willingness, at least rhetorically, to reject the Washington Consensus regarding neoliberal free-market and free-trade policies, as well as the idea that the U.S. should oversee a global empire. He has not only belittled the ruling ideology, but urged his supporters to attack the apparatus that maintains the duopoly by declaring the 2020 election illegitimate.

The Donald Trump problem is the same as the Richard Nixon problem. When Nixon was forced to resign under the threat of impeachment, it wasn’t for his involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity, nor was it for his illegal use of the CIA and other federal agencies to spy upon, intimidate, harass and destroy radicals, dissidents and activists. Nixon was brought down because he targeted other members of the ruling political and economic establishment. Once Nixon, like Trump, attacked the centers of power, the media was unleashed to expose abuses and illegalities it had previously minimized or ignored.

Members of Nixon’s re-election campaign illegally bugged the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building. They were caught after they broke back into the offices to fix the listening devices. Nixon was implicated in both the pre-election illegality, including spying on political opponents, as well as attempting to use federal agencies to cover up the crime. His administration maintained an “enemies list” that included well known academics, actors, union leaders, journalists, businessmen and politicians.

One 1971 internal White House memo entitled, “Dealing with our Political Enemies” — drafted by White House Counsel John Dean, whose job it was to advise the president on the law — described a project designed to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

Nixon’s conduct, and that of his closest aides, was clearly illegal and deserving of prosecution. There were 36 guilty verdicts or guilty pleas associated with the Watergate scandal two years after the break-in. But it was not the crimes Nixon committed abroad or against dissidents that secured his political execution but the crimes he carried out against the Democratic Party and its allies, including in the establishment press.

“The political center was subjected to an attack with 🦍 techniques that are usually reserved for those who depart from the norms of 😈 acceptable political belief,” Noam Chomsky wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1973, a year before Nixon’s resignation.

As Edward Herman and Chomsky point out in their book, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media:”

The answer is clear and concise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.”

What led to the unraveling of Nixon’s government, and what lies at the core of the attacks against Trump, is the fact that, like Nixon, Trump’s targets included “the 🎩 rich andrespectable, spokesmen for official ideology, men who are expected to share power, to 😈 design social policy, and to 😈 mold popular opinion,” as Chomsky noted about Nixon at the time. “Such people are not fair game for persecution at the hands of the state.”

This is not to minimize Trump’s crimes. Trump — nearly even in the polls with President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race — appears to have committed several misdemeanors and serious felonies.

In November 2022, the Department of Justice appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and any potential criminal liability resulting from that act, as well as any unlawful interference with the transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election.

Separately, a district attorney in Georgia is working with a special purpose grand jury in relation to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result. A key piece of evidence is the notorious phone call between Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, in which the president kept insisting he needed more votes to be found. Charges in this case could include conspiracy to commit election fraud, racketeering and pressuring and/or threatening public officials.

The Manhattan district attorney has been investigating the $130,000 Trump used to pay off the p o r n star Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump allegedly had a sexual relationship. This payment was misreported in the Trump Organization’s records as a legal retainer in violatation of campaign finance laws.

Finally, New York Attorney General Letitia James is bringing a civil lawsuit alleging the Trump Organization lied about its assets in order to secure bank loans. If the attorney general’s lawsuit is successful, Trump and other members of his family may be barred from doing business in New York, including buying property there for five years.

Trump’s alleged offenses should be investigated. Though, the cases involving Daniels and the retention of classified documents seem relatively minor and similar to those committed by Trump’s political opponents.

Last year, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the DNC agreed to pay a fine of $8,000 and $105,000 respectively, for mislabelling a $175,000 expenditure on opposition research, namely the long-discredited “Steele Dossier,” as “legal expenses.” The improper retention of classified documents has typically resulted in a slap on the wrist when other powerful politicians have been investigated. Clinton, for example, used private email servers instead of a government email account when she was secretary of state. The FBI concluded that she sent and received materials classified as top secret on her private server. Ultimately, FBI director James Comey declined to prosecute her. Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence and Biden also had classified documents at their homes, though we are told this may have been “inadvertent.” The discovery of these classified documents, rather than triggering outrage in most of the media, initiated a conversation about “overclassification.” Former CIA director David Petraeus was given two years probation and a $100,000 fine after he admitted to providing highly classified “black books” that contained handwritten classified notes about official meetings, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and the names of covert officers to his lover, Paula Broadwell, who was also writing a fawning biography of Petraeus.

As was the case with Nixon, the most serious charges Trump may face involve his attack on the foundations of the two-party duopoly, especially undermining the peaceable transfer of power from one branch of the duopoly to the other. In Georgia, Trump could face very serious criminal charges with potentially lengthy sentences if convicted, likewise if the federal special prosecutor indicts Trump for unlawful interference in the 2020 election. We won’t know until any indictments are made public.

Yet, the most egregious of Trump’s actions while in office either received minimal media coverage, were downplayed or lauded as acts carried out in defense of democracy and the U.S.-led international order.

Why hasn’t Trump been criminally investigated for the act of war he committed against Iran and Iraq when he assassinated Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani and nine other people with a drone strike in Baghdad airport? Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi condemned the strike and told his parliament that Trump lied in order to get Soleimani exposed in Iraq as part of peace talks between Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iraq’s parliament passed a resolution demanding that all foreign troops leave the country, which the U.S. government proceeded to reject.

Why not prosecute or impeach Trump for pressuring his secretary of state to lie and say that Iran wasn’t complying with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran nuclear deal? Trump ultimately fired him and resumed unilateral, devastating and illegal sanctions against Iran, in violation of international law and quite possibly domestic U.S. law.

Why wasn’t Trump impeached for his role in the ongoing attempts to engineer a coup and overthrow the democratically elected president of Venezuela? Trump declared a previously unknown right-wing politician — and would-be coup leader — Juan Guaido to be the true Venezuelan president and then illegally handed him control of the Latin American country’s U.S. bank accounts. The illegal U.S. sanctions that have facilitated this coup attempt have blocked food, medicine and other goods from entering the country and prevented the government from exploiting and exporting its own oil, devastating the economy. Over 40,000 people died between 2017 and 2019 due to the sanctions, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That figure is certainly higher now.

Nixon, like Trump, was not impeached for his most egregious ☠️ crimes. He was never charged for directing the CIA to destroy the Chilean economy and back a far-right military coup that overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende. Nixon wasn’t brought to justice for his illegal, secret mass bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and his government’s role in the slaughter of Vietnamese people, resulting in at least 3.8 million killed according to a joint report from Harvard University and the University of Washington and even higher casualties according to investigative journalist Nick Turse. Nixon wasn’t held accountable for what then-President Lyndon Johnson privately blasted as “treason” when he discovered that the yet-to-be-elected Republican candidate for president, and his future National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, were deliberately and illegally sabotaging his peace negotiations in Vietnam, ultimately prolonging the war for another four years.

Articles of impeachment against Nixon were passed by the House Judiciary Committee. Articles I and III focused on allegations related to Watergate and Nixon’s failure to deal properly with congressional investigations. Article II related to allegations of violations of citizens’ civil liberties and abuse of government power. But they became moot once Nixon resigned, and in the end the disgraced former president didn’t face charges related to Watergate. A month after Nixon left office, President Gerald Ford pardoned him for “all offenses against the United States” that he “committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.”

This pardon cemented into place the imperial presidency. It entrenched the modern notion of “elite immunity,” as the constitutional lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald notes. Neither Republicans nor Democrats want to set a precedent that might hamstring the unchecked and unaccountable power of a future president.

The most serious ☠️ crimes are those that are  normalized by the power elite, regardless of who initiated them. George W. Bush may have started the wars in the Middle East, but Barack Obama maintained and expanded them. Obama’s crowning achievement may have been the Iran nuclear deal, but Biden, his former vice president, hasn’t reversed Trump’s trashing of it, nor has he reversed the decision by Trump to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in violation of international law.

Trump, like most of his opponents in the Republican and Democrat parties, serves the interests of the billionaire class. He, too, is hostile to the rights of workers. He, too, is an enemy of the press. He, too, backs the diversion of hundreds of billions of federal dollars to the war industry to maintain the empire. He, too, does not respect the rule of law. He, too, is personally and politically corrupt. But he is also impulsive, bigoted, inept and ignorant. His baseless conspiracy theories, vulgarity and absurd antics are an embarrassment to the established power elite in the two ruling parties. He is difficult, unlike Biden, to control. He has to go, not because he is a criminal, but because he is not trusted by the ruling crime syndicate to 😈 manage the firm.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/the-donald-trump-problem

« Last Edit: March 27, 2023, 04:35:55 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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"Those decisions dramatically undermined our democracy."
« Reply #32 on: May 05, 2023, 05:09:56 pm »
Letters from an American

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 5, 2023

SNIPPET:

And this is the profound national crisis at the heart of the stories emerging about Thomas 💵🎩😈. His votes were decisive not only in Shelby County v. Holder, but also in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, also decided by a vote of 5–4, which opened the floodgates for 💵🎩😈 dark money in political campaigns. Those decisions dramatically undermined our democracy. It now seems 🗽 imperative to grapple with the fact it appears a key vote on the court that decided those cases was compromised.

Read more: 🤦‍♂️
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/may-4-2023
« Last Edit: May 05, 2023, 05:20:14 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Letters from an American

June 13, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 14, 2023

🦀 DONALD TRUMP UNDER ARREST, IN FEDERAL CUSTODY.”

It was quite a chyron from CNN, marking the first time in the history of the United States that a former president has been charged with federal crimes. And in this case, what crimes they are: the willful retention, sharing, and hiding of classified documents that compromise our national security. Trump’s own national security advisor John Bolton said, “This is material that in the hands of America’s adversaries would do incalculable damage to the United States. This is a very serious case and it’s not financial fraud, it’s not hush money to p o r n stars, this is the national security of the United States at stake. I think we’ve got to take the politics out of this business when national security is at stake.”

Cameras were barred in the courtroom as Trump pleaded not guilty to the 37 charges in Miami today. Presiding magistrate judge Jonathan Goodman ordered Trump not to communicate with witnesses about the case, including co-defendant Waltine Nauta, then released him on his own recognizance, that is, without needing to post bail. Special prosecutor Jack Smith was in the courtroom; ABC’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott reported that Trump did not look at Smith.

Then Trump went back to his residence in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he gave a speech that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who is close to the Trump camp, described as low energy, focusing on his insistence that he had a right to keep the classified documents (which experts agree is nonsense and amounts to a confession) and that the indictment was “the most evil and heinous abuse of power.” Right-wing Newsmax and the Fox News Channel (FNC) carried the speech; CNN and MSNBC did not.

FNC has been hemorrhaging viewers since it fired Tucker Carlson, a threat to its bottom line that might have been behind its chyron tonight attacking Biden by claiming “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.”

In statements similar to the one from FNC, 👿 right-wing pundits spent the day flooding Twitter and other social media with furious insistence that Trump is being unfairly prosecuted , followed by  ::) attacks on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and with allegations that there are tapes of President Biden accepting bribes—allegations that Biden openly laughed at this evening.

But that performative outrage among leaders did not translate into support on the ground in Miami. Law enforcement had been prepared for as many as 50,000 protesters, but only a few hundred to a thousand turned out (one wearing a shirt made of an American flag and carrying the head of a pig on a pole).

The lack of supporters on the ground was significant. Since the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, much of Trump’s power has rested on his ability to call out his base to silence opponents by threatening violence. That power was in full force on January 6, 2021, when his loyalists set out to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, believing they were operating under the orders of then-president Trump.

Since then, though, more than 1,000 people who participated in the events of January 6 have been charged with crimes, and many have been sentenced to prison, while Trump, who many defendants say called them to arms, has skated. That discrepancy is likely dampening the enthusiasm of Trump’s supporters for protest.

Today Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out that the audacity of Nevada’s militia-related Bundy family simply grew as family members launched successive stands against the federal government without significant legal repercussions. Republican politicians cheered on their attacks on federal officials for political gain, while Democratic politicians didn’t push to go after them out of concern that a show of federal power would alienate Nevada voters.

Trump’s threats and determination to stir up his base seem to reflect a similar consideration: if he can just rally enough support, he might imagine, the federal government will back off.

Federal officials permitting politics to trump the rule of law in our past have brought us to this moment.

After the Civil War, officials charged Confederate president Jefferson Davis and 38 other leading secessionists with treason but decided not to prosecute when the cases finally came to trial in 1869. They wanted to avoid the anger a trial would provoke because they hoped to reconcile the North and South. They also worried they would not get convictions in the southern states where the trials were assigned.

In the end, between President Andrew Johnson’s pardons and Congress’s granting of amnesty to Confederates, no one was convicted for their participation in the attempt to destroy the country. This generosity did not create the good feeling men like General Ulysses S. Grant hoped it would. Instead, as Civil War scholar Elizabeth Varon established in her book on the surrender at Appomattox, it helped to create the myth that the southern cause had been so noble that even the conquering northern armies had been forced to recognize it. The ideology of the 👿 Confederacy never became odious, and it has lived on.

The same quest for reconciliation drove 🐘 President Gerald R. Ford to grant a pardon to former president Richard M. Nixon for possible “offenses against the United States” in his quest to win the 1972 election by bugging the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.

🐒 Ford explained that the “tranquility” the nation had found after Nixon’s resignation “could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” The threat of a trial would “cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”

In an echo of 100 years before, Ford’s generosity did not bring 🐘 Nixon or his supporters back into the fold. Instead, they doubled down on the idea that Nixon had done nothing wrong and had been hounded from office by his “liberal” enemies. Nixon himself never admitted wrongdoing, telling the American people he was resigning because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. Although his support had collapsed because even members of his own party believed he was guilty of obstructing justice, violated constitutional rights of citizens, and abused his power, 🐍 Nixon blamed the press, whose members had destroyed him with “leaks and accusations and innuendo.”

The willingness of government officials to ignore the rule of law in order to buy peace gave us enduring reverence for the principles of the Confederacy, along with countless dead Unionists, mostly Black people, killed as former Confederates reclaimed supremacy in the South.

It also gave us the idea that presidents cannot be held accountable for crimes, a belief that likely made 😈 some of the presidents who followed Nixon less careful about following the law than they might have been if they had seen Nixon indicted.

Holding a former president accountable for an alleged profound attack on the United States is indeed unprecedented, as his supporters insist. But far from being a bad thing to stand firm on the rule of law at the upper levels of government, it seems to fall into the category of “high time.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/june-13-2023



Notes:

https://twitter.com/Fritschner/status/1668684149845028864

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/13/politics/trump-court-hearing-takeaways/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/13/us/trump-indictment-arraignment-court

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/us/politics/trump-arraignment-miami-court.html

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1668781392694591488

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/donald-trump-indictment-court-appearance-06-13-23/index.html

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/25/1165022885/1000-defendants-january-6-capitol-riot

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/former-fbi-general-counsel-says-trump-admitted-to-a-crime-during-tuesday-night-speech-that-is-an-admission-to-that-charge/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-end-of-bundy-clan-rules

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169189

https://www.nps.gov/rich/learn/historyculture/the-trial-of-jefferson-davis-cancelled-february-15-1869.htm

Elizabeth R. Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Richard M. Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), pp. 1044-1045.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/13/trump-supporters-begin-descending-on-miami-courthouse-amid-circus-like-atmosphere-00101721

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-and-tucker-carlson-both-lose-after-his-firing

https://watergate.info/impeachment/articles-of-impeachment

Twitter links:

ChrisDJackson/status/1668792486553088002

JuddLegum/status/1668603907184947201

MarkHertling/status/1668686293448925201

AmbJohnBolton/status/1668736977439531008

MollyJongFast/status/1668817291494998017

VABVOX/status/1668711564608778246

« Last Edit: June 14, 2023, 11:13:27 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Republican Social Darwinists CHAMPION CHILD EXPLOITATION
« Reply #34 on: June 15, 2023, 01:39:13 pm »
Letters from an American

June 14, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON JUN 15

SNIPPET:
..., in 1938, as part of the New Deal effort to level the playing field between workers and employers, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). It established a federal minimum wage, a 44-hour work week, and an end to work for those under 16. During his quest for the legislation, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Congress, “A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling worker's wages or stretching workers’ hours.”

By the time the FLSA passed, laws requiring children to attend school had joined with the high unemployment of the Depression years to shift the idea that children should work to the idea that they should stay in school, and worker protections and Social Security, passed in the same era, meant that parents no longer needed their children’s wages to survive.

In the years after World War II, when people in the United States were determined to stand strong against both fascism and communism, the nation embraced the idea that children should be in school rather than in factories. An education would permit them to be upwardly mobile economically, thus lessening the likelihood that they would be tempted by authoritarian leaders who promised to improve their standard of living, and it would guarantee that they would be informed citizens who would work to advance democracy.

Until 🤦‍♂️ recently, that idea seemed permanent.

Full article (Be sure and check out the EXCELLENT Comments):
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/june-14-2023
« Last Edit: June 16, 2023, 01:30:09 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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The trouble with the U.S. being ruled by Social Darwinists
« Reply #35 on: June 16, 2023, 12:37:48 pm »
The trouble with the U.S. being ruled by Social Darwinists is that they don’t care about other people. They are actually incapable of imagining the lives of others, especially the fact that these others care about each other, and what happens to them.

« Last Edit: June 16, 2023, 01:40:05 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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🥵📢 It REALLY IS the 👿 Social 🦍 Darwinism!
« Reply #36 on: June 16, 2023, 01:50:54 pm »
Seeing the despicable ☠️ war 🎩 profiteering and the 🦖 hydrocarbon 😈 hellspawn profit over people and planet modus operandi that has thoroughly corrupted our government and judiciary, we can reach only one conclusion:

IT'S THE SOCIAL 🦍 DARWINISM, STUPID!

Social Darwinists believe that ethics based principles are 'limitations pretending to be virtues'. To them, ethics are 'feel good illusions' that humans invented to pretend our species has empathy. To Social Darwinists, empathy is irrefutable evidence of inexcusable weakness. To them, all who are guided by ethics are deluded fools that should be eliminated from the human 'apex predator' gene pool for the "good" of our species.

Social Darwinists believe that the dictum, “survival of the fittest” (a term coined not by Charles Darwin but by sociologist Herbert Spencer), means that only the "fittest" should survive. Darwin's book published later ("Descent of Man") made it clear that Darwin completely supported the morally bankrupt views of Spencer.

The ideology of the Social Darwinist is indistinguishable from the despicable ideology of NAZI Germany, clearly exemplified in their brutally enforced morally bankrupt concentration camp law: “Eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor.”


Enthusiastic converts to Social Darwinism have, to this day, used the language of evolution to frame an understanding of the growing gulf between the rich and the poor, as well as the many differences between cultures all over the world. The explanation they arrived at, and continue to use to justify biosphere trashing profit over people and planet, regardless of any alligator tear filled mendacious claims to the contrary, is that businessmen and others who are economically and socially successful are so because they are biologically and socially “naturally” the fittest. 🙄🤔

Conversely, they reason that the poor are “naturally” weak and unfit and it would be an error to allow the weak of the species to continue to breed. 😡 Anyone paying attention can SEE that Netanyahu's Government, AND ANYONE or ANY GOVERNMENT (i.e. 😈 US) supporting it, IS a 🦖 SOCIAL DARWINIST, whether they consciously carry that label or not.

EXCELLENT Painting by Caitlin Johnstone:
BLOOD on our Hands

The "Apex Predators have a DARWINIAN RESPONSIBILITY to BE as PREDATORILY EVOLVED (SEE: Steal everything that is not nailed down.) as possible" WORLDVIEW is the socially destructive tsunami now engulfing human society.


What all the entrenched insiders among the parasitic, predatory (i.e. Social Darwinist) elites and institutions don't dare admit publicly, though they celebrate that privately, is that to protect themselves from consequence, making the rest of us sacrifice everything else is what they-the-Apex-Predators have a DARWINIAN DUTY to DO. After all, Homo sapiens is "just the result of random undirected processes", the more you can "enlightened self interest" DO to get MORE POWER by causing, directly or indirectly, the death of human competitors for the species gene pool high ground, "the better".

Social Darwinists champion Kafkaesque survival olympics.

Social Darwinism is actually based, not on "survival of the fittest", but on fear of tomorrow, a morally bankrupt excuse for rejecting altruism and empathy and embracing a selfish greed dominated hoarding 🦍 modus vivendi. "One who fears tomorrow does not offer his bread to others. But one who is willing to divide his food with a stranger has already shown himself capable of fellowship and faith, the two things from which hope is born." -- Primo Levi, author of Survival in Auschwitz

Social Darwinism is the morally bankrupt world view that spawned the profit over people and planet neoliberal ideology. Neoliberal intellectuals like Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman were all Social Darwinists long before they renamed laissez-faire liberalism (that had been thoroughly discredited by the Great Depression) with the catchy title of "Neoliberalism".

The celebrated social theorist and geographer David Harvey explains that neoliberal ideology serves the following principle:
Quote
"There shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective: Those possessed of money shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion, not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative capacities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable."
David Harvey, “The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis,” http://www.zcommunications.org/the/party/of/wall/street/meets/its/nemesis. Also, by David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Agelbert OBSERVATION: If the morally bankrupt, socially destructive ideology which backs no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely, while it simultaneously deems the rest of humanity disposable, is not SOCIAL DARWINISM, I don't know what is.

Frugality and prudence, once accepted by all human cultures as sine qua non, has given way to massive 🐷 excess by TPTB (and too many of the, brainwashed by the "education system", non-rich populace) and a level of craziness in culture ethical humans never imagined they would experience.

Our species is on a track to extinction BECAUSE of TPTB's TOTAL embrace of the morally bankrupt SOCIAL DARWINIST IDEOLOGY. TPTB, blatantly self-serving, corrupt, unaccountable and devoid of any sense of good and evil, will be our doom if they are not stopped.   


« Last Edit: March 12, 2024, 04:10:36 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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06/08/20233

Latest Natural Health News By ANH-USA

What Do Fishermen and Dietary Supplements Have in Common?

A 40-year old Supreme Court case has given federal agencies a blank check to abuse their power, but all of that could be coming to an end. Here’s what that means for natural health.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider a decades-old decision that, if reversed, will curb the power of federal agencies. In 🦖 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court ruled that, when a law passed by Congress is unclear or ambiguous on a topic, courts should defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of the statute. This makes it extremely difficult for anyone to challenge federal agencies’ interpretation of the law and has had a direct negative consequence for supplements and the natural products industry. Among the many possible results if the so-called Chevron doctrine is overturned, many potential avenues open up to challenge FDA and FTC interpretations that have limited access to and information about supplements.

The case that will be heard by the Supreme Court challenging the Chevron doctrine has been brought by a group of commercial fishing companies challenging a rule issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service requiring the fishermen to pay for the costs of observers that ensure regulatory compliance with federal fishing rules. While the law states that the government can require fishing boats to carry monitors, it does not specify who pays for them. But with the precedent in Chevron, lower courts hearing the fishermen’s case deferred to the interpretation of the federal agency, which said the fishermen should pay for the observers. Now the case will be heard by the Supreme Court, which will specifically reconsider its ruling on Chevron.


It’s hard to overstate how game-changing this decision could be. Look back through the archives of ANH’s Pulse of Natural Health newsletter, and notice how many times we are writing about how the FDA or FTC are working to limit access to natural medicines. In many cases this is done through an overreach because the agency is 😈 taking liberties with the law. Here are a few examples:

► Implied disease claims. Federal law allows supplement companies to make claims related to how a nutrient effects the structure or function of the body, as long as they aren’t claiming to treat or prevent a disease. But the FDA has denied many truthful claims because it interprets them as “implied” disease claims. So, the truthful claim that chromium lowers blood sugar, for example, is banned because, according to the FDA, this is an “implied” disease claim that chromium treats diabetes. This and other claims have been denied on the basis of an FDA interpretation of the law, so if Chevron were overturned, stakeholders could more easily challenge the FDA to allow these claims so consumers are better informed about products that can improve health.

► Health claim substantiation. We recently covered the FTC’s shot across the bow to the natural products industry, putting them on notice that clinical trials will be needed to substantiate health-related advertising claims. This comes down to the FTC’s interpretation of what constitutes “competent and reliable” scientific evidence, with the agency setting the bar at clinical trials because supplement companies can’t afford to do them. The result will be fewer health claims about vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. The FDA has done something similar in its interpretation of what constitutes “significant scientific agreement", which is required for the approval of certain supplement health claims. Again, due to agency interpretations of the law, consumers are denied access to crucial health information.

► “New” supplements. The law considers ingredients “marketed in or as” supplements in the US after 1994 as “new” and those “marketed in or as” supplements before 1994 as “old.” “New” supplements must comply with so-called “new dietary ingredient” (NDI) regulations. But ambiguities exist about what it means to be “marketed” for the purpose of determining if a supplement is considered “old” or “new.” The FDA successfully argued in court that “marketed as” is not the same as “sold as.” This is crucial, as it means that the mere presence of an ingredient in food is not sufficient evidence to prove prior marketing of the ingredient. Resveratrol has been present in the food supply in grapes forever, but this doesn’t mean it was “marketed as” a supplement for the purposes of determining if resveratrol is “old” or “new.” This interpretation means many ingredients would need to comply with NDI regulations, which are costly and burdensome—and if they don’t, drug companies can snatch them up and turn them into drugs via the back-channel that exists at the FDA. A plain reading of the law is that a dietary ingredient sold in the food supply before October 1994, whether as an ingredient in food or dietary supplements, is grandfathered and excluded from the NDI provisions.

If your eyes glazed over reading some of that 😈 legal jargon, the simple takeaway is that agencies like the FDA and FTC have had, because of Chevron, greater leeway to restrict access to and censor information about supplements you care about. If SCOTUS reverses Chevron, the floodgates could be open to legal challenges against the FDA and the FTC for the arbitrary and restrictive interpretations of the law they’ve been engaging in for decades.

We will monitor the results of this case closely and keep you informed of any developments.
https://anh-usa.org/what-do-fishermen-and-dietary-supplements-have-in-common/

AGelbert COMMENT: I expect nothing good for the health and welfare of most Americans from this Supremely fascist Court handmaiden of profit over people and planet corporations. They will certainly "reinterpret" the law so fishing companies NO LONGER HAVE TO PAY pay government observers on board. That is BAD for we-the-people because the government will then be forced to pay them, which the 👿 Republicans in Congress will NOT allow. Consequently, the government will be forced to exclude observers from most, or all, of the fishing boats, opening the door to them violating government regulations on what type of fish, and how much of it they can catch without harming fish populations.

And THAT attack on nature for short term 💰😈 profit is just the initial skullduggery the corrupt Supreme Court will enable with their "reinterpretation". The hope that ANH has, as stated in the above article, is sadly a very forlorn hope. If ANH thinks we-the-people will get improved access to supplements of our choice because the government agencies' interpretation of the law on supplements is no longer binding on companies that sell supplements, they will be very disappointed. Fascists only restrict government action when it benefits some greedball corporation, NOT when we-the-people are the main beneficiaries. Expect a torrent of supplements coming to market that have unchallenged bogus "health Benefit" claims. Fraudulent "Health Supplement" Companies will spring up like weeds in an untended garden. The courts will severely limit Government Oversight and we will be back to the 19th century snake oil salesmen days. THAT is what you can expect from this supremely fascist Supreme Court.

Be not thou envious against evil men, neither desire to be with them. For their heart studieth destruction, and their lips talk of mischief. ~ Proverbs 24:1-2
« Last Edit: July 01, 2023, 02:51:42 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Selected Coments from:

Monday, June 26, 2023


pinkprince500 5 days ago
Biden is not standing up to the Republicans, McCarthy & the Ultra Right Wing Conservative Con People Nutjobs have taken over the country. When Ehud Barack Obama was POTUS, Republicans blocked his attempt to appoint people to the Supreme Court, when Trump was POTUS, he appointed RWNJ's such as Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett & Brett Kavvanaugh.
Brett Kaanaugh & Clarence Thomas are sexual predators. Republicans approve of that when it is the Republicans that are the sexual predators.

AGelbert > pinkprince500 a day ago
👍 📢 Well said!

Cat's Paw > pinkprince500 5 days ago
Biden is doing a good job standing up to The GOP.
He is accomplishing things.
and ignoring GOP. ... I agree. They have enough rope to hang themselves.
and tha'ts what they seem to be doing.

AGelbert > Cat's Paw
"Biden is doing a good job standing up to The GOP."


Cat's Paw  > AGelbert a day ago
Biden is doing a good job.

AGelbert > Cat's Paw 


Cat's Paw > AGelbert 15 hours ago
Why do you dislike Joe?

AGelbert > Cat's Paw 
I like a lot of the things President Biden has done during his Administration. He is head and shoulders a far better choice than the 👿 Trump Fascist Horror. Trump is the poster boy for the Kafkaesque survival olympics championed by the Social 😈 Darwinist oligarchs in the US. 

That said, that ain't sayin' much. The moral compass "bar" Biden needed to exceed is right there with the 🐟 fish at the 💩 bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench.

Perhaps this is a quixotic discussion, because I am convinced that neither you nor I matter in who becomes POTUS, but let us pretend our opinion and our vote matters for the sake of non-argument.

I wanted Senator Bernie Sanders to be President. Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, etc. et al. did NOT. You know why. And no, it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Biden was running for POTUS too. Really, you might ask?

These political discussions are kind of like a layered cake type subject. Unless you start with the ROOT layer, you don't see where, and why, all the upper, more visible, layers appear the way they do. That is why I can unequivocally  state that Sanders was fraudulently railroaded out of the Presidency BECAUSE they wanted a status quo preserving handmaiden of the oligarchs who REALLY mattered in ruining running this country. I used to post at Daily Kos. They couldn't stomach my evidence based comments about the serial attacks on Health Care, Social Security, the Federal Minimum Wage, Food Stamps, Welfare Legislation, Bankruptcy laws favoring we-the-people over Corporation legerdemain based accounting, etc. (you get the idea if you haven't lived under a rock for the past 30 years or so) CHAMPIONED by the Democratic Party in general, AND Nancy Pelosi and Senator Joe (Delaware bastion of corporate tax dodging enabling PLUS government corporate welfare queen fostering legislation) Biden in PARTICULAR.

I wish it wasn't so. I wrote this (see below) before the 2020 election, which got a friend of mine, who is a Democrat, and a Left Leaning 👍Progressive one at that, rather perturbed. He said, "Me, I would vote for Dread Cthuhlu if he were on the ticket.", which misses the whole point I was trying to make (see: "layer cake" political issues cause and effect).

He stopped talking to me, to this day, because he actually believed 🤦‍♂️ Biden would NOT play dead while the 🐘 Republicans continued their march back to the 19th Century murderous Gilded 💰 Age of happy "unrestrained" Social Darwinism based Capitalism.


But Biden HAS MOSTLY PLAYED DEAD on ALL those issues 🥵 I listed above, that got me kicked out of Daily Kos.

There is an even MORE important issue, amazing as that seems, than every issue I listed. That NUMBER ONE in IMPORTANCE ISSUE  is PENTAGON BLOAT 😖. Biden has done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to reduce that, but has, insane as that is, supported MORE MONEY FOR WAR and a BIGGER PENTAGON BUDGET❗😵
As if that wasn't enough, policy intellimorons in his Administration (e.g. 🦍 Blinken, 🦍 Fascist Enabler Victoria Nuland, etc.  🦍☠️ et al.) support "tactical" NUCLEAR WEAPONS for Ukraine❗ 😱


📢 Here is what I wrote way back in the Spring of 2020:
Quote
April 10, 2020
Readers, save this list of the craven corrupt similarities of Trump with Biden to repeat them over and over to people that do not know the score with Biden: 👀

📢 😈 Biden and 🦀 Trump are BIRDS OF THE EXACT SAME NEOLIBERAL FASCIST FEATHER:

Corporate COVID-19 welfare and PEANUTS for we-the-people ✔

Subsidies for Fossil Fuel Industry POLLUTERS ✔

FRACKING support ✔

SNAP funds REDUCTION ✔

New "chained" CPI (i.e gamed formula to UNDERCOUNT INFLATION) to ROB workers and retired on pensions through COLA reductions ✔ 🤬

PROTECTION of Credit Card Corporation USURY LEVEL HIGH INTEREST RATES ✔

DEFUNDING SOCIAL SECURITY ✔

People KILLING SANCTIONS on IRAN ✔

Gigantic PENTAGON BUDGET SWAG ✔

Endless foreign wars for MIC SWAG ✔

PROTECTING Big Pharma Drug Price Gouging ✔

PROTECTING PREDATORY Payday Lender usury level rates ✔

RELAXING Government BANKSTER Controlling Regulations ✔

DEFANGING the SEC so 😈 Wall Street can run wild with insider trading, front running, etc. with IMPUNITY 👉CHECK

NO return to 1933-2000 Glass-Steagall to stop the Bank irresponsible insovency causing derivatives speculation we-the-people had to BAILOUT in 2008 👉CHECK

NO return to 1933-1982 when Corporate Stock BUYBACKS to game the stock price up WERE ILLEGAL 👉CHECK

NO INCREASE IN MINIMUM WAGE 👉CHECK 😠

DEFENSE of Corporate Health Insurance people bankrupting premiums and ZERO support for Medicare-4-ALL 👉CHECK

ZERO support for a GREEN NEW DEAL 👉CHECK 🥵

I can go ON, and ON and ON. Biden is a 🐘 DINO, like most 🐘 "Democrats". Trump is a FAKE "populist". It's the same God Damned THING!

Please do your own research into Biden's despicable oligarchy ass kissing record in the Senate. It is ALL THERE. Trump has simply been less subtle about his in-our-faces worship of the 1% profit over people and planet parasites, that is all. In actual policies, they are nearly identical.

For the "Democrats" (i.e. DINOs) who are already busy, busy, busy demonizing truth telling former Bernie supporters (calling us "Extremists" 🙄 who want to "see the planet burn rather than voting for Saint Joe Biden" 🥱) who are moving to the GREEN PARTY in order to herd us into voting for 🏴☠️ Biden: 🔊 Go ahead and pretend the Green Party "is irrelevant". Your Fascist Republican/"Democratic" profit over people and planet Duopoly worship is killing we-the-people. Have a nice day, you Planet Killing Extremists. 😡

The DINOS are the ones who want to see the world BURN, rather than saying goodbye to Corporate profit over people and planet CROOKS and moving to the GREEN PARTY.


😟 I wish I had been wrong about predicting that President Joe Biden would CONTINUE to be what he had always been, as Senator from Delaware and Vice-President under of Wall Street greedballs handmaiden President Obama, nothing but a Republican in Democratic Party 😇 "feel your pain" 🐍 legerdemain.

Now that you know how I feel about our present political predicament, perhaps you can understand why I enjoy hearing audiobooks like this one (see below). It ain't all bad, but the trend is definitely not our friend.

The Librivox Free Audiobook 'Tilda Jane is fiction, but the hardhips and hard hearts portrayed are all too real in human society.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings. ~ Jeremiah 17:9-10 (KJV)
« Last Edit: July 02, 2023, 10:09:28 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Cat's Paw > AGelbert 11 hours ago
Boil it away.
all that remains is left v right.
Do you want to diversify, or concentrate power?

governance by the governed, is very messy as you point out.

Maybe you are right.. We need a decisive leader, a King to follow.?

AGelbert > Cat's Paw
Well, I don't view this politics thing as "Right versus Left"; I vew it as Caring people versus Uncaring people, regardless of political affiliation.

Caring people are sober minded, responsible reality based humans who take the long view of the consequences of their actions on society, not just for the benefit of the present generation, but on future generations as well.


Uncaring people are, like Milton Friedman et al., egotists dedicated to the worship of self. They can be great actors that convince many through legerdemain that they are "😇 wise counselors working for the welfare of humanity". Eventually their 😈 track record always exposes the fact that they are tyrannical egocentric scam artists.
Milton Friedman was a water carrier for the neoliberal parasites. Everything he said was legerdemain distortion of historical reality. It was Milton Friedman who convinced the Federal government after WWII to WITHHOLD a portion of wages for taxes, while he waas quiet as DEATH about "unearned income' DIVIDENDS. So, the dividends for the RICH are UNTOUCHED by the government and the POOR and middle class MOSTLY shoulder the tax burden.

Had I been able to talk to him in the 1980's, I would have yelled, YOU HYPOCRITE!

The only thing I RECOGNIZE is that Milton Friedman had the ethics of a Boa constrictor.

Cat's Paw, if you do not  right now know the following info about the "how it works" of Neoliberalism from the getgo, it is time you learned:

Social Darwinism is the morally bankrupt world view that spawned the profit over people and planet neoliberal ideology. Neoliberal intellectuals like Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman were all Social Darwinists long before they renamed laissez-faire liberalism (that had been thoroughly discredited by the Great Depression) with the catchy title of "Neoliberalism".
🤔 Based on what David Harvey himself has written, I'm surprised that he has not reached the "It's the Social Darwinism, stupid" conclusion yet (see below): 
The celebrated social theorist and geographer David Harvey explains that neoliberal ideology serves the following principle:
"There shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective: Those possessed of money shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion, not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative capacities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable."
David Harvey, “The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis,” http://www.zcommunications.org/the/party/of/wall/street/meets/its/nemesis. Also, by David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Agelbert OBSERVATION: If the morally bankrupt, socially destructive ideology which champions the absolute power of money to rule absolutely, while it simultaneously deems the rest of humanity disposable, is not SOCIAL DARWINISM, I don't know what is. 😠


The status quo evidences that virtually all governments in the world are corrupted, either directly or indirectly, by those intellimorons who think it is a "weakness" to be ethical. That moral bankruptcy is at the the ROOT of the Social Darwinist ideology destroying everything good about human civilization.


Politicians in the US who are ETHICS based, when not unjustly branded as "Anti-American Socialists" and railroaded into losing elections, are allowed token government positions for "optics", but without any power to improve the lot of the many exploited and abused among us.


Unless unethical behavior is overcome by ethical behavior, this WILL end badly.  The trend is not the friend of ethics based people of good will.


All the options you asked about as to how I think power should be wielded are moot. Why? Because. whether diversified or concentrated governance, whether by a dictator or a king, in ALL those scenarios, if the power is ETHICALLY wielded,  human civilization benefits.  Otherwise,  human civilization continues to self-destruct.

As long as people argue endlessly about economic systems and/or political systems that "need" to wield power in order to reduce inequality, abuse, and so on, WTHOUT EMPHASIS ON ETHICS as the BASIS of a healthy society and people that LACK OF ETHICS as a DANGER, to be searched out and removed from ANY decision making ability in Government AND Business, things WILL GET WORSE.

« Last Edit: July 03, 2023, 06:05:05 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Letters from an American

August 15, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

SNIPPET:
And finally, third: tonight, just before midnight, the state of Georgia indicted former president Donald J. Trump and 18 others for multiple crimes committed in that state as they tried to steal the 2020 presidential election. A special-purpose grand jury made up of citizens in Fulton County, Georgia, examined evidence and heard from 75 witnesses in the case, and issued a report in January that recommended indictments. A regular grand jury took the final report of the special grand jury into consideration and brought an indictment. 

“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost” the 2020 presidential election, the indictment reads, ”and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.”

The indictment alleges that those involved in the “criminal enterprise” “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury.”

That is, while claiming to investigate voter fraud, they allegedly committed election fraud.

And that effort has run them afoul of a number of laws, including the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which is broader than federal anti-racketeering laws and carries a mandatory five-year prison term.

Those charged fall into several categories. Trump allies who operated out of the White House include lawyers Rudy Giuliani (who recently conceded in a lawsuit that he lied about Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss having stuffed ballot boxes), 🦀 John Eastman, 🐘 Kenneth Chesebro, 🦕 Jeffrey Clark, 🐍 Jenna Ellis, and Trump’s White House chief of staff 😈 Mark Meadows.   

Those operating in Georgia to push the scheme to manufacture a false slate of Trump electors to challenge the real Biden electors include lawyer 🦍 Ray Stallings Smith III, who tried to sell the idea to legislators; Philadelphia political operative 👿 Michael Roman; former Georgia Republican chair 🐘 David James Shafer, who led the fake elector meeting; and 👹 Shawn Micah Tresher Still, currently a state senator, who was the secretary of the fake elector meeting.

Those trying to intimidate election worker and witness Ruby Freeman include Stephen Cliffgard Lee, a police chaplain from Illinois; 🦍 Harrison William Prescott Floyd, executive director of Black Voices for Trump; and 🦍 Trevian C. Kutti, a publicist for the rapper formerly known as 🐵 Kanye West.

Those allegedly stealing data from the voting systems in Coffee County, Georgia, and spreading it across the country in an attempt to find weaknesses in the systems that might have opened the way to fraud include Trump lawyer 🐘😈 Sidney Powell; former Coffee County Republican Committee chair 🐍 Cathleen Alston Latham; businessman 😈 Scott Graham Hall; and Coffee County election director 🐍 Misty Hampton, also known as 🐍 Emily Misty Hayes. 

The document also referred to 30 unindicted co-conspirators.

Trump has called the case against him in Georgia partisan and launched a series of attacks on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Today, Willis told a reporter who asked about Trump’s accusations of partisanship: “I make decisions in this office based on the facts and the law. The law is completely nonpartisan. That's how decisions are made in every case. To date, this office has indicted, since I’ve been sitting as the district attorney, over 12,000 cases. This is the eleventh RICO indictment. We follow the same process. We look at the facts. We look at the law. And we bring charges."

The defendants have until noon on August 25 to surrender themselves to authorities.

*EDIT at 10:45 am August 15: I incorrectly identified Seeley as a federal judge last night. She is a state judge.

Full article (Be sure and check out the EXCELLENT Comments):
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-14-2023


August 15, 2023 Michael Moore

« Last Edit: August 23, 2023, 12:11:30 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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The Trump Comeuppance 😁
« Reply #42 on: August 16, 2023, 04:20:49 pm »
AGelbert NOTE: Graphics by me.

COUNTERPUNCH

AGUGUST 16, 2023 BY RICHARD C. GROSS
Richard C. Gross, who covered war and peace in the Middle East and was foreign editor of United Press International, served as the opinion page editor of The Baltimore Sun.

The Trump Comeuppance



“For trust not him that hath once broken faith.” – William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, “Henry VI,” Act IV, Scene 3.

Not only did Trump get indicted for the fourth time in five months, but the state of Georgia accused the former president of being a mob boss.


A mobster, the indictment says, though more politely: allegedly being involved in a “criminal racketeering enterprise.” And this was an occupant of the White House for four long, chaotic, troubling and troublesome years. And he’s running for it again.


A godfather, which he most certainly is for the weak shell of the once-noble Republican Party. Its members repeatedly pay him homage and defend his fantasy about a stolen election despite two House impeachments and the three criminal federal and state indictments before the Peach State joined the fray.

Trump now faces 91 felony counts against him, including those in Georgia’s Act IV, Scene 1. Even if the four indictments are not counted together, nothing like this has happened to any current or former president.

Not ever, since George Washington took the first oath of office as president on 😒 Wall Street April 30, 1789.

That last 98-page indictment Monday night may be most serious of all because, if convicted, he cannot be pardoned by a national president, even by himself should he be elected to a second term. That’s only possible if convicted of breaking federal, not state, laws.

Further, the latest grand jury indictment charges Trump and 18 others, some his closest White House advisers like Rudy Giuliani and his final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with violating Georgia’s very tough Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The federal government and more than 30 states adopted it to use against the Mafia, gangs and Ponzi schemes.

Meadows wants his case switched to a federal court. Trump may demand the same thing, which could lead to all of the defendants seeking an exodus from the Georgia court. So, I don’t think a mass escape would be possible.

Someone convicted under Georgia’s RICO act faces between five and 20 years in prison or a fine of up to $250,000. If convicted, Trump shouldn’t be sentenced to paying the fine; it’s no more than petty cash to him, the cost of doing business.

If convicted, prison would be more appropriate for all of the crimes he’s accused of committing. He’s going to deny, deny, deny and delay, delay, delay. That’s his M.O.

“The indictment alleges that rather than abide by Georgia’s legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis 🗽 told a news conference Monday night. She led the two-year investigation.

The charge includes Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger appealing to him to “find 11,780 votes” that would flip the election from Joe Biden to him. Bad move.

If he was trying to find more votes, didn’t he then know that he lost the election?

Typically, Trump lashed out at Willis on his Truth Social website even before the indictment was released.

“Phony Fani Willis . . . wants desperately to indict me on the ridiculous grounds of tampering with the 2020 presidential election,” he typed. “No, I didn’t tamper with the election! Those who rigged & stole the election were the ones doing the tampering & they are the slime that should be prosecuted.”

If past is prologue, I believe he means President Biden. His MAGAites believe him.

In a federal indictment earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan warned Trump against criticizing her Washington, D.C., court, its personnel, potential witnesses and eventual jurors. She knows very well the nature of what he’s been and what he is.

We all lived it for nearly eight years.


The deranged narcissist, disgraced by virtue of the four indictments against him, finally met his comeuppance after many years of beating court cases. They began when he was a real estate developer in New York City, where he occasionally refused to pay subcontractors.


He also stiffed Giuliani, who was his personal lawyer when he still was in the White House. He wouldn’t pay the former New York mayor’s bills for his unsuccessful post-election court challenges. Giuliani demanded $20,000 a day for two months of work.

Trump never could man up and admit that he lost the 2020 election. He wasted years since then whipping up fantasy tales of his having won, charging without evidence that it was stolen from him, that it was part of a “witch hunt” by the “deep state.” What deep state? Where? Who?

He tried and failed many times through the courts to reclaim a lost election, through continual lying, allegedly through creating false electors who signed on to represent him and through state officials to change the vote in his favor.

We are fortunate that we really are a nation of laws, as has been said many times, with people of integrity and in positions to enforce them to ensure our democracy lives, despite the few whose lust for power would destroy one of mankind’s better experiments.

Trump always has ached for the spotlight, with him at stage center. He needn’t worry. His name will live on long after he’s dead. In infamy.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/16/the-trump-comeuppance/
« Last Edit: August 16, 2023, 05:03:23 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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I just found a person that does Orwell better than Orwell!
« Reply #43 on: August 16, 2023, 06:10:09 pm »

I just found a person that does Orwell better than Orwell!. 😲 This doubletalking SNAKE must have given Karl Rove 🐍 classes (SEE: Rove's "😈 maxim" of accusing the enemy of your 'weaknesses').

😒 "This is going to be a horrendous period. And we just need to understand: The people who want to control America and want to dictate to America break any law, lie about any topic, and manipulate the system any way they can, and that includes a lot of the elite news media."  former Speaker of the House 🐘🐍 Newt Gingrich

📢 THAT WAS EXACTLY WHAT Newt Gingrich's MO WAS when he was busy destroying democracy in the USA durning the 1990's!

For those who don't remember Newt Gingrich's "Contract for America" (which was really a  Republican HIT MAN CONTRACT ON AMERICA), perhaps you should. Reagan and Bush daddy got the fascist ball rolling, but without Gingrich, sell out Clinton would not have caved to destroying welfare and SNAP, among other important government programs that were ravaged because of the Contract ON Amercia championed by Gingrich.

If you have a strong stomach, read the article (Pro-Trump 🐷 Gingrich 😇 Puff piece) that includes the above quote. If you have an even stronger stomach, read the 🦀🐘🦕🦖🐍🦍🐉 comments. I found only a few comments that were reality based before I left in dismay and disgust.

Quote
ReturnOfDaMac 👍
Horseshyt.  A LOT not all yet, but a LOT of MAGA in my family have finally figured out he ain't running for them, he's running from the big-house.  They saw the grift, the "DONATE NOW TO MY LEGAL FUND", the $Millions he grifted with his daughter from China and the $Billions he grifted from the Saudi's with his son-inlaw, and are awakening from their faux slumber.  My thinking is that when a critical mass of MAGA realizes they been had by a two-bit con man and a cult leader, they are gonna wanna take some orange scalp!
The commenter was viciously attacked by Wall Street MAGA Maggots. So it goes. 🤦‍♂️


« Last Edit: August 16, 2023, 06:27:51 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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AGelbert NOTE: Graphics by me.

Letters from an American

August 24, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[Note: There is a discussion of **** () in paragraph 8.]

Today a former U.S. president and the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination turned himself in to be arrested in Georgia.


He had to because a grand jury of ordinary Americans indicted him, along with 18 other defendants, for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

For the first time in U.S. history, there is a mugshot of a former president.

And, for that matter, mugshots of his chief of staff and key advisors. With noon tomorrow, August 25, the deadline for the defendants to surrender, they have been showing up since Tuesday, when Scott Hall, accused of breaching election equipment in Coffee County, Georgia, became the first of the defendants to surrender.

Since then, several of the lawyers behind the election scheme, including John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Rudy Giuliani have surrendered.


So have Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, and David Shafer, the former chair of the Georgia Republican Party.

All but one—Harrison Floyd, the former executive director of Black Voices for Trump, who is charged with harassing election worker Ruby Freeman and who had previously assaulted an FBI agent—have been released on bail.

Trump is the first president to be charged with crimes, and he is facing an astonishing 91 counts in four different cases, two at the state level in New York and Georgia, and two at the federal level.

In addition, Trump, his two elder sons, and the Trump Organization are also facing an October trial in a civil fraud case in New York City, after which he has a January trial in a defamation suit from writer E. Jean Carroll for denying that he d her (a judge recently agreed that his sexual assault of her was **** () by common understanding, although the narrow definition of **** () in the New York penal code meant that a New York jury in May did not find him liable for it).

And then there are the criminal charges. In New York he is charged with 34 counts surrounding an alleged hush-money scheme before the 2016 election.

He has been charged with 40 counts in the federal case concerning his theft and concealment of national security documents at his organization’s Mar-a-Lago property. In a separate federal case, he is charged with 4 counts of conspiring to defraud the government, obstruct an official proceeding, and take away voters’ right to have their vote counted.

In the Georgia case for which he was arrested today, he has been charged with 13 crimes under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute of Georgia, a law that permits a group working together for a criminal purpose to be charged as a criminal organization.

True to form, Trump appears to have timed his surrender to make the evening news. And then, after he surrendered, he posted his mugshot himself on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, telling his supporters “NEVER SURRENDER!”

In our system, Trump, like any defendant, is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

But here’s the thing: At last night’s Republican primary debate, all the candidates except former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (polling at 3.3%) and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson (polling at 0.7%) pledged they would support Trump as the 2024 Republican nominee even if he’s convicted. 
                                                                    

In the 1960s, Republicans made a devil’s bargain, courting the racists and social traditionalists who began to turn from the Democratic Party when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to make inroads on racial discrimination. Those same reactionaries jumped from the Democrats to create their own party when Democratic president Harry S. Truman strengthened his party’s turn toward civil rights by creating a presidential commission on civil rights in 1946 and then ordering the military to desegregate in 1948. Reactionaries rushed to abandon the Democrats permanently after Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, joining the Republicans at least temporarily to vote for Arizona senator 👿🐘 Barry Goldwater, who promised to roll back civil rights laws and court decisions.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was the final straw for many of those reactionaries, and they began to move to the Republicans as a group when Richard Nixon promised not to use the federal government to enforce civil rights in the states. This so-called southern strategy pulled the Republican Party rightward.

In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan appeared at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a few miles from where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 for their work registering Black Mississippians to vote, and said, “I believe in states’ rights.” Reagan tied government defense of civil rights to socialism, insisting that the government was using tax dollars from hardworking Americans to give handouts to lazy people, often using code words to mean “Black.”

Since then, as their economic policies have become more and more unpopular, the Republicans have kept voters behind them by insisting that anyone calling for federal action is advocating socialism and by drawing deep divisions between those who vote Republican, whom they define as true Americans, and anyone who does not vote Republican and thus, in their ideology, is anti-American.

From there it has been a short step to arguing that those who do not support Republican candidates should not vote or are voting illegally (although voter fraud is vanishingly rare). And from there, it appears to have been a short step to trying to overturn the results of an election where 7 million more Americans voted for Joe Biden, a Democrat, than voted for Trump and where the Electoral College vote for Biden was 306 to 232, the same margin Trump called a landslide in 2016 when it was in his favor.

The Republicans on stage last night have abandoned democracy, and in that they accurately represent their party.


It is no accident that in addition to the Georgia party chair indicted for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Wisconsin Republican Party chair Brian Schimming was also mentioned in the Georgia indictment as part of the conspiracy for his role in the scheme to use false electors to steal the election for Trump, though he was not charged; former Arizona Republican chair Kelli Ward is in the crosshairs for her own participation in the scheme in Arizona; and in a different case, former Michigan Republican Party co-chair Meshawn Maddoch has pleaded not guilty to eight felony charges for her part in the attempt to steal the White House.

State leaders have taken their cue from the top: Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel also apparently participated in Trump’s fake elector scheme to steal the presidency.

It is quite a thing to see leading Republicans—including a former president—in mugshots for their assault on our democracy and to know that party leadership supports their actions. Indeed, it is unprecedented, and for those who remember what a grand party the Republicans have been at times in their history—Lincoln, after all, was a Republican, and so were Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower—it is a sad end.

But an end it is. The authoritarians who have taken over the party have abandoned their history and are now building something altogether different.
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/august-24-2023



Notes:

https://www.axios.com/2023/08/15/indictment-trump-prison-rico

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-fulton-county-georgia-08-14-23/h_3e279320f2ba518105782f61371e030f

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/nyregion/trump-letitia-james-deposition.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-attorney-general-letitia-james-trump-lawsuit-ready-for-trial/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-declares-donald-trumps-appeal-e-jean-carroll-case-frivolous-2023-08-18/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/07/donald-trump-****-language-e-jean-carroll

https://www.axios.com/2023/08/22/trump-codefendant-surrender-georgia-jail

https://www.mlive.com/politics/2023/07/former-michigan-gop-co-chair-pleads-not-guilty-in-trump-electors-case.html

https://www.cbs58.com/news/state-gop-chair-named-in-latest-trump-inditement-heres-what-we-know

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/arizona-attorney-general-probing-alternate-electors-2020-presidential-rcna94113

https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/will-arizona-be-the-next-state-to-indicted -former-president-donald-trump

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-jan-6-investigation-fake-electors-608932d4771f6e2e3c5efb3fdcd8fcce

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/23/willie-floyd-fulton-maryland-fbi-arrest/

AGelbert WARNING:

« Last Edit: September 21, 2023, 12:50:43 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12