President Donald Trump has slammed former adviser Steve Bannon, claiming the political strategist had "lost his mind," after he was quoted calling a Trump campaign meeting "treasonous".
"Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency," Mr Trump said in a statement. "When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind."
He added: "Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country ... Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself."
“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s***, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately," Mr Bannon said of the meeting, according to journalist Michael Wolff.
The meeting has been of intense interest to Congressional investigators, as well as special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Mr Trump issued his fiery response in an official White House statement hours after the report first surfaced. He accused Mr Bannon, once thought to be his most trusted adviser, of leaking false information to the media, and downplayed his former White House role.
"Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books," Mr Trump said.
Mr Bannon was seen as a key architect of the Trump campaign, helping the candidate tap into his populist message and pushing him towards more nationalist ideas. He was also a driving force behind Trump administration policies like the travel ban and the repeal of Obama-era regulations.
Mr Bannon left the White House in August, amid controversy over the President's response to a white supremacist rally in Virginia. Close advisers had long urged Mr Trump to oust his chief strategist, and the President himself was beginning to suspect him of leaking to the press, according to the New York Times.
Nonetheless, Mr Trump complemented Mr Bannon as he left to resume a leadership role at Breitbart News.
"Steve Bannon will be a tough and smart new voice at Breitbart News ... maybe even better than ever before," Mr Trump tweeted at the time. "Fake news needs the competition!"
Mr Bannon went on to work with Alabama Judge Roy Moore on his ill-fated Senate campaign. Mr Moore lost the race after being accused of sexual misconduct with underage women, giving Alabama its first Democratic senator in 25 years.
Mr Trump taunted his former adviser for the loss in his statement, writing: "Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look."
"Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country.," he added. "Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 40516.html
Petty vengeance or what?
Booj politicians all lie like rugs, the game would be up pretty quick otherwise. But this guy is something else, besides being the avatar of his class he is the vanguard of the New Truth, which is that of the moment. No more of that silly and stressful ass-covering, no more history. We've been working up to this for a while, starting with Bernays. The only genius that Trump possesses was his realization of how far you can run with this puppy, and of course his entire life has prepared him for this culmination. Being fabulously well to do one can insist upon one's own reality, and mostly get away with it. And that's what these booj do, their absurd quantities of money can shape reality, and when it can't they call upon their servant, the State. Orwell was a fuckin' amateur.
Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Bannon: Adelson Drove Jerusalem Embassy Move
JANUARY 4, 2018ELI CLIFTON
Steve_Bannon_(32752496880)
by Eli Clifton
Candidate Donald Trump claimed that he wouldn’t be beholden to campaign donors and slammed his Republican primary opponents as puppets of their wealthy patrons. “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!” Trump tweeted in October 2015. But an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s upcoming book Fire and Fury quotes Steve Bannon, who served as CEO of the Trump campaign and went on to become White House chief strategist, effectively acknowledging that Adelson has been a driving force behind the Trump administration’s foreign policy decision-making.
Adelson and his wife Miriam contributed $35 million to help elect Trump, making the couple Trump’s biggest campaign supporters.
An excerpt published in New York Magazine describes a dinner attended by Roger Ailes two weeks before Trump’s inauguration. Wolff writes [my emphasis]:
Earlier this week, Trump went even further, tweeting that he had “taken Jerusalem off [the negotiating] table,” effectively making a unilateral decision about a key issue that previous administrations had maintained could only be decided in talks between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators.
But Trump’s biggest supporter wasn’t pleased with the administration’s slowness to fulfill its campaign promise.
Adelson, who once accused Palestinians of existing “to destroy Israel,” was reportedly “furious” with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in May for suggesting in a Meet The Press interview that moving the embassy should be contingent on the peace process, a position consistent with previous administrations. Axios reported:
[S]ources say the Las Vegas billionaire doesn’t buy the argument that the embassy move should be contingent on the peace process. He has told Trump that Palestinians are impossible negotiating partners and make demands that Israel can never meet.
Adelson and his wife Miriam spent more than $80 million on Republicans in 2016, and he gave $5 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Adelson even used his own newspaper, the Las Vegas Review Journal, to telegraph his displeasure with Trump’s slowness to deliver on the promised embassy move. “The Adelsons reportedly have been disappointed in Trump’s failure to keep a campaign pledge to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem on his first day in office,” according to an article published in October. But as Wolff quotes Bannon saying last January, that may have been more than a campaign promise. It may have been a personal promise to Adelson in exchange for his support.
Bannon’s characterization of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and casino billionaire Adelson as the two most important individuals steering U.S. policy on a sensitive matter is a shift from the independence Trump touted as a candidate.
Iran is another issue where Adelson’s influence can be felt. Adelson also proposes deploying a nuclear weapon against Iran and vehemently opposes the Iran nuclear deal (known as the JCPOA). During the campaign, Trump called the JCPOA “the stupidest deal of all time” and told an American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee audience, “My number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” In the middle of January, Trump will face a deadline to reimpose sanctions, potentially in violation of the JCPOA, or waive the sanctions. Here, too, Trump may well reveal that he made a commitment to adopt a hawkish foreign policy in the Middle East in exchange for Adelson’s support.
http://lobelog.com/bannon-adelson-drove ... assy-move/
Regardless of whatever else is in the book, and I expect there is some 'story telling', this is easily believable.
JANUARY 4, 2018ELI CLIFTON
Steve_Bannon_(32752496880)
by Eli Clifton
Candidate Donald Trump claimed that he wouldn’t be beholden to campaign donors and slammed his Republican primary opponents as puppets of their wealthy patrons. “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!” Trump tweeted in October 2015. But an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s upcoming book Fire and Fury quotes Steve Bannon, who served as CEO of the Trump campaign and went on to become White House chief strategist, effectively acknowledging that Adelson has been a driving force behind the Trump administration’s foreign policy decision-making.
Adelson and his wife Miriam contributed $35 million to help elect Trump, making the couple Trump’s biggest campaign supporters.
An excerpt published in New York Magazine describes a dinner attended by Roger Ailes two weeks before Trump’s inauguration. Wolff writes [my emphasis]:
On December 6, the Trump White House, marking a huge shift in U.S. policy, recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and declared its intention to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Past presidents refused to move the embassy on grounds that it would upset potential talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators and thwart efforts to achieve a two-state solution, but Adelson publicly pushed the White House to make the move.Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all-in. Sheldon”—Adelson, the casino billionaire and far-right Israel defender—“is all-in. We know where we’re heading on this … Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying.”
“Where’s Donald on this?” asked Ailes, the clear implication being that Bannon was far out ahead of his benefactor.
“He’s totally onboard.”
Earlier this week, Trump went even further, tweeting that he had “taken Jerusalem off [the negotiating] table,” effectively making a unilateral decision about a key issue that previous administrations had maintained could only be decided in talks between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators.
But Trump’s biggest supporter wasn’t pleased with the administration’s slowness to fulfill its campaign promise.
Adelson, who once accused Palestinians of existing “to destroy Israel,” was reportedly “furious” with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in May for suggesting in a Meet The Press interview that moving the embassy should be contingent on the peace process, a position consistent with previous administrations. Axios reported:
[S]ources say the Las Vegas billionaire doesn’t buy the argument that the embassy move should be contingent on the peace process. He has told Trump that Palestinians are impossible negotiating partners and make demands that Israel can never meet.
Adelson and his wife Miriam spent more than $80 million on Republicans in 2016, and he gave $5 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Adelson even used his own newspaper, the Las Vegas Review Journal, to telegraph his displeasure with Trump’s slowness to deliver on the promised embassy move. “The Adelsons reportedly have been disappointed in Trump’s failure to keep a campaign pledge to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem on his first day in office,” according to an article published in October. But as Wolff quotes Bannon saying last January, that may have been more than a campaign promise. It may have been a personal promise to Adelson in exchange for his support.
Bannon’s characterization of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and casino billionaire Adelson as the two most important individuals steering U.S. policy on a sensitive matter is a shift from the independence Trump touted as a candidate.
Iran is another issue where Adelson’s influence can be felt. Adelson also proposes deploying a nuclear weapon against Iran and vehemently opposes the Iran nuclear deal (known as the JCPOA). During the campaign, Trump called the JCPOA “the stupidest deal of all time” and told an American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee audience, “My number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” In the middle of January, Trump will face a deadline to reimpose sanctions, potentially in violation of the JCPOA, or waive the sanctions. Here, too, Trump may well reveal that he made a commitment to adopt a hawkish foreign policy in the Middle East in exchange for Adelson’s support.
http://lobelog.com/bannon-adelson-drove ... assy-move/
Regardless of whatever else is in the book, and I expect there is some 'story telling', this is easily believable.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
and so it begins....
Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump 54m54 minutes ago
....Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star.....
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Lazy Liberals and “the Trump Effect”
by PAUL STREET
Photo by Taymaz Valley | CC by 2.0
Liberals and other Democrats are getting dumber by the day. I keep running into them and hearing the same story over and over: things are bad because Trump is the president.
That’s it. It’s all you have to know. It’s the only thing that matters to these unstable dolts. It’s all about Trump. It’s Trump this, Trump that. All day long. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and Trump some more.
CNN and MSNBC et al. keep up the drumbeat. Trump tweeted this. Trump said that. Everything is trumped by Trump, Trump, Trump (with a strong overlay of Russia, Russia, Russia, of course).
Now we have the Michael Wolff book – an orgy of revelations on the madness and dysfunction of the Insane Clown President.
There’s no social and power structures that matter. There’s no underlying class rule or longstanding capitalist ecocide, no dominant oppressive institutions, no ideologies that matter….no history that matters.
Racism? It’s cuz of Trump.
Sexism? Trump did it.
Threat of nuclear holocaust? Blame Trump.
Inequality and plutocracy? The handiwork of Boss Tweet, that bastard.
Climate change? You know the answer: big stupid Trump. Damn him!
Look, I dislike the Stable Genius as much as does anyone left of Paul Ryan. But this is crazy. It’s every bit as dotard-like as the Donald his own mad self. Liberals have fallen prey to what one of my Canadian correspondents, Gabriel Alan, calls “the Trump Effect of whitewashing and absolving this rightwing system.” (The “Trump Effect,” Alan notes, is used “being applied by corporate [neo]liberals in other countries. For example, the Liberal government in Canada is casting corporate ‘free trade’ as a progressive feature of economic governance by virtue of the fact that Trump’s NAFTA negotiators are trying to change the accord to eliminate the corporate courts thru which governments can be sued for any law or action that hinder ‘future expected profits.’”)
“Their fixation on Trump,” Vivek Jain writes me from Virginia, “allows them to ignore the wickedness of capitalism and of the US government.”
“Trump is a great distraction,” Tom Wetzel writes me – a “cover for elite interests: ‘if only there wasn’t some obviously racist clown in the white house everything would be cool.’”
It’s a richly bipartisan wickedness. Droves of liberals and Democrats think that things were just great when the Neoliberal Drone King, Wall Street bailout champion, single-payer deep-sixer, Libya bomber, and offshore drilling and fracking fan Barack Obama was president. And that things would be just super if the Wall Street War Hawk and arch-elitist “Queen of Chaos” was back in the White House. You betchya!
The orange-tinted Awful One has helped turn of untold millions of liberals into sputtering morons every bit as idiotic as some FOX News “deplorable” who thinks that global warming is a Chinese conspiracy. It’s a just a different, blue brand of stupid.
Liberals have gone down a childish, presidentially and electorally obsessed black hole. It’s more extreme now because of the peculiar freakishness of the arch-narcissistic and Twitter-weaponized El Donito, but it’s nothing new, really. This went on with George W. Bush, too, to some degree. And Reagan.
The solution to everything wrong in the world for liberals is getting a corporate military Democrat in the White House. It’s all about rallying around some new shining star from the Inauthentic Opposition Party (the late Sheldon Wolin’s excellent for the dismal dollar-drenched Dems) into the Oval Office. Then it’ll be blue-zone liberals turn to feel good while red state Republicans stew.
Hey, maybe Oprah Winfrey. Or Michelle Obama, who said this to the new presidential hopeful Oprah on CBS five weeks after Trump was elected: “color, wealth, these things that don’t matter…It’s our values; it’s how we live our lives.” Leaving aside the fact that U.S. domestic oppression structures of class and race generate savagely unequal life chances for hundreds of millions of Americans, just what good and progressive “values” were suggested by the following key parts of the record of the Obama administration: bailing out the parasitic elites who crashed the national and global economy but not the working-class majority and the poor; taking the U.S. drone campaign to new levels of planetary hyper-terrorism; passing a health care reform that only the big insurance and drug companies could love; doing nothing to make it easier for workers to form unions; lecturing poor Black people on their own supposed personal responsibility for their own poverty; serving as a shield and representative of the mostly white O.1% that owns nearly more wealth than the bottom 90 percent; advancing the corporate school privatization agenda; going after whistleblowers more viciously than any other president; advancing an “all of the above” energy policy that helped keep carbon emissions and planetary warming on the rise after undermining efforts for binding global emission limits; bombing innocent villagers in Afghanistan; decimating Libya; installing a right-wing coup regime in Honduras and generally keeping the U.S. imperial machine set on kill, maim, spy, and torture.
All of this more helped set the nation and world up for the, yes, noxious and dangerous Donald Trump presidency. Three cheers to professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for this recent reflection from her recent essay in the indispensable new Haymarket Press collection U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty:
The horrors and challenges presented by the Trump administration should not obscure the very important discussion of how the administration came into power…This means locating that which connects the Trump administration to the past while allowing for what sets his administration apart.
…if we assign Trump and his band of rogues, racists, and reactionaries an exceptional or unprecedented place in American history, then we cannot make sense of the most recent past. Plainly stated, if things were so great before Trump, why did Ferguson, Missouri erupt in the summer of 2014?; why did Baltimore explode eight months later?; why, indeed, did a movement called Black Lives Matter arise during a time of the greatest concentration of Black political power in American history?
You cannot, in fact, understand the emergence of Trump without taking account of this recent history and the failure of the liberal establishment to provide a real alternative to the reactionary populism…of Trump. As wholly opposite in demeanor, aptitude, and temperament as Barack Obama and Donald Trump are, we cannot actually understand the rise of Trump without taking account of the failure of Obama to deliver on his promises of hope and change (emphasis added).
Since their opposition is inauthentic, the neoliberal Dems hand the White House to the horrid GOP once every four or eight years. The White House swings between the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems (the 4Ds) and the radically regressive and reactionary Repugs (the 4Rs). Back and forth it goes, with both sides calling their electoral victories “change” in different but inseparably linked partisan and identity-politicized dialects – two sides of the same bourgeois-electoral coin and “two wings of the same bird of prey” (Upton Sinclair, 1904). Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs, Exxon, Citigroup, and Lockheed Martin always win, racist mass incarceration persists, inequality widens (as it did under Obama), wages stagnate, and the planet tips closer to terminal geocide.
“The greatest evil,” one correspondent writes me, “is the theory of the lesser-of-the-two evils.” Not for me. The top evil I’m trying to bring attention here is the obsession with (to paraphrase Howard Zinn) who’s sitting in the White House as opposed to the more urgent politics of who’s sitting in the streets, in the factories, in the offices, in the town halls, etc. My concern with that evil is why I check the Des Moines Register statewide election poll to make sure the presidential race is already a done deal in Iowa before I cast my third party presidential votes in that state. If it looks like the state is in play, I’ll vote for the 4D party to block the 4R party (I haven’t felt compelled to do that since 2004, the first time I ever voted in a “contested state”).
I have a different reason than standard left “less evil-ism” for preferring Democrats in the White House. . With a Republican in the White House, liberals and progressives fall into the standard trap of thinking that the only thing wrong with the country is that “those insane evil Republicans are in charge” and that the cure to the nation’s ills is to trek off to the polls for two minutes in a voting book once every four years and try to put a Democrat back in the White House. I’ve seen it again and again. It’s happening right now, with a vengeance
It’s pathetic and it’s what the brilliant Howard Zinn tried to warn people against in an essay on the “Election Madness” he saw “engulfing the entire society including the left” in the year of Obama’s ascendancy. An “election frenzy,” Zinn wrote, “seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to [falsely] believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls. …” Zinn acknowledged that he probably would support one major-party candidate over another “for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.” But then, he wrote:
[O]ur time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice. … We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism. … Before [elections] … and after … we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. … Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
This is why I resisted the temptation to be awestruck by the remarkable outpouring of U.S.-Americans who protested the inauguration of Donald Trump in January. Cable news talking heads marveled at the marches, calling them the “biggest social movement since the 1960s.” But what were those massive but polite, pink-hatted marches all about? While many of the chants and signs heard and seen at the historic marches indicated policy concerns, the clear and simple thing that had put millions in the streets was the awful man who is now sitting in the White House. It was about an election outcome. The new president hadn’t even made any policy yet. What he’s actually done as president has yet to generate protests remotely on the scale of the ones sparked by the Awful One’s entrance into the Oval Office.
Most of the millions who hit the streets to voice outrage against the election of Trump would have stayed home if it had been the dismal arch-corporatist and “lying neoliberal warmonger” Hillary Clinton being inaugurated. And that is very telling. As Chris Hedges noted in the summer of 2016:
The predatory financial institutions on Wall Street will trash the economy and loot the U.S. Treasury on the way to another economic collapse whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Poor, unarmed people of color will be gunned down in the streets of our cities whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. The system of neo-slavery in our prisons, where we keep poor men and poor women of color in cages because we have taken from them the possibility of employment, education and dignity, will be maintained whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Millions of undocumented people will be deported whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Austerity programs will cut or abolish public services, further decay the infrastructure and curtail social programs whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Money will replace the vote whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. And half the country, which now lives in poverty, will remain in misery whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton becomes president. This is not speculation. We know this because there has been total continuity on every issue, from trade agreements to war to mass deportations, between the Bush administration and the administration of Barack Obama. … The problem is not Donald Trump. The problem is capitalism. And this is the beast we are called to fight and slay. Until that is done, nothing of substance will change. … To reduce the political debate, as [Bernie] Sanders and others are doing, to political personalities is political infantilism. We have undergone a corporate coup. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will not reverse this coup. They, like Barack Obama, know where the centers of power lie. They serve these centers of power.
The atmosphere of the planet, Hedges might have added, would be continuing its disastrous, capitalogenic march towards 500 carbon parts per million by 2050 if not sooner (please see my latest report on Truthdig) with Hillary Clinton in the White House.
The dysfunctional over-focus on who’s sitting in the White House — yes, the horrific Boss Tweet right now, maybe Kirsten Gillibrand (or Oprah or Michelle or Andrew Cuomo or Kamala Harris) in 2021— is sustained between election spectacles by the cable news talking heads and the late-night comedians, for whom Trump is a gift that keeps on giving. It is fed by hopes for impeachment on grounds of collusion with Russia in the subversion of our supposed great democratic electoral process.
All the evils that Hedges mentions would survive the impeachment and removal of Trump. Nothing of substance would change. The removal of Richard Nixon from the U.S. presidency in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal was followed by a deepening descent into the long neoliberal era, which has culminated in the current New Gilded Age of shocking economic disparity and abject, richly bipartisan plutocracy.
Zinn and Hedges’ wise words belong in the front of the minds of all citizens and workers who want to see democracy break out and take hold at long last in the oligarchic United States. They help us keep our eyes on the real prize: changing policy in a progressive direction and radically restructuring society beneath and beyond the biennial and quadrennial big-money, major-media, candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” (Noam Chomsky) that are sold to us as politics, “the only politics that matters.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/12 ... mp-effect/
Mostly good.
And I just gotta say, 'Shithole', cause every motherfucker on the news is saying it, no doubt to the amusement of Lenny Bruce's shade. They bin wanting to do that their whole careers...and regardless of everything else this another little bitty indicator of...(drumroll) the decline and fall of Bourgeois Democracy.
by PAUL STREET
Photo by Taymaz Valley | CC by 2.0
Liberals and other Democrats are getting dumber by the day. I keep running into them and hearing the same story over and over: things are bad because Trump is the president.
That’s it. It’s all you have to know. It’s the only thing that matters to these unstable dolts. It’s all about Trump. It’s Trump this, Trump that. All day long. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and Trump some more.
CNN and MSNBC et al. keep up the drumbeat. Trump tweeted this. Trump said that. Everything is trumped by Trump, Trump, Trump (with a strong overlay of Russia, Russia, Russia, of course).
Now we have the Michael Wolff book – an orgy of revelations on the madness and dysfunction of the Insane Clown President.
There’s no social and power structures that matter. There’s no underlying class rule or longstanding capitalist ecocide, no dominant oppressive institutions, no ideologies that matter….no history that matters.
Racism? It’s cuz of Trump.
Sexism? Trump did it.
Threat of nuclear holocaust? Blame Trump.
Inequality and plutocracy? The handiwork of Boss Tweet, that bastard.
Climate change? You know the answer: big stupid Trump. Damn him!
Look, I dislike the Stable Genius as much as does anyone left of Paul Ryan. But this is crazy. It’s every bit as dotard-like as the Donald his own mad self. Liberals have fallen prey to what one of my Canadian correspondents, Gabriel Alan, calls “the Trump Effect of whitewashing and absolving this rightwing system.” (The “Trump Effect,” Alan notes, is used “being applied by corporate [neo]liberals in other countries. For example, the Liberal government in Canada is casting corporate ‘free trade’ as a progressive feature of economic governance by virtue of the fact that Trump’s NAFTA negotiators are trying to change the accord to eliminate the corporate courts thru which governments can be sued for any law or action that hinder ‘future expected profits.’”)
“Their fixation on Trump,” Vivek Jain writes me from Virginia, “allows them to ignore the wickedness of capitalism and of the US government.”
“Trump is a great distraction,” Tom Wetzel writes me – a “cover for elite interests: ‘if only there wasn’t some obviously racist clown in the white house everything would be cool.’”
It’s a richly bipartisan wickedness. Droves of liberals and Democrats think that things were just great when the Neoliberal Drone King, Wall Street bailout champion, single-payer deep-sixer, Libya bomber, and offshore drilling and fracking fan Barack Obama was president. And that things would be just super if the Wall Street War Hawk and arch-elitist “Queen of Chaos” was back in the White House. You betchya!
The orange-tinted Awful One has helped turn of untold millions of liberals into sputtering morons every bit as idiotic as some FOX News “deplorable” who thinks that global warming is a Chinese conspiracy. It’s a just a different, blue brand of stupid.
Liberals have gone down a childish, presidentially and electorally obsessed black hole. It’s more extreme now because of the peculiar freakishness of the arch-narcissistic and Twitter-weaponized El Donito, but it’s nothing new, really. This went on with George W. Bush, too, to some degree. And Reagan.
The solution to everything wrong in the world for liberals is getting a corporate military Democrat in the White House. It’s all about rallying around some new shining star from the Inauthentic Opposition Party (the late Sheldon Wolin’s excellent for the dismal dollar-drenched Dems) into the Oval Office. Then it’ll be blue-zone liberals turn to feel good while red state Republicans stew.
Hey, maybe Oprah Winfrey. Or Michelle Obama, who said this to the new presidential hopeful Oprah on CBS five weeks after Trump was elected: “color, wealth, these things that don’t matter…It’s our values; it’s how we live our lives.” Leaving aside the fact that U.S. domestic oppression structures of class and race generate savagely unequal life chances for hundreds of millions of Americans, just what good and progressive “values” were suggested by the following key parts of the record of the Obama administration: bailing out the parasitic elites who crashed the national and global economy but not the working-class majority and the poor; taking the U.S. drone campaign to new levels of planetary hyper-terrorism; passing a health care reform that only the big insurance and drug companies could love; doing nothing to make it easier for workers to form unions; lecturing poor Black people on their own supposed personal responsibility for their own poverty; serving as a shield and representative of the mostly white O.1% that owns nearly more wealth than the bottom 90 percent; advancing the corporate school privatization agenda; going after whistleblowers more viciously than any other president; advancing an “all of the above” energy policy that helped keep carbon emissions and planetary warming on the rise after undermining efforts for binding global emission limits; bombing innocent villagers in Afghanistan; decimating Libya; installing a right-wing coup regime in Honduras and generally keeping the U.S. imperial machine set on kill, maim, spy, and torture.
All of this more helped set the nation and world up for the, yes, noxious and dangerous Donald Trump presidency. Three cheers to professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for this recent reflection from her recent essay in the indispensable new Haymarket Press collection U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty:
The horrors and challenges presented by the Trump administration should not obscure the very important discussion of how the administration came into power…This means locating that which connects the Trump administration to the past while allowing for what sets his administration apart.
…if we assign Trump and his band of rogues, racists, and reactionaries an exceptional or unprecedented place in American history, then we cannot make sense of the most recent past. Plainly stated, if things were so great before Trump, why did Ferguson, Missouri erupt in the summer of 2014?; why did Baltimore explode eight months later?; why, indeed, did a movement called Black Lives Matter arise during a time of the greatest concentration of Black political power in American history?
You cannot, in fact, understand the emergence of Trump without taking account of this recent history and the failure of the liberal establishment to provide a real alternative to the reactionary populism…of Trump. As wholly opposite in demeanor, aptitude, and temperament as Barack Obama and Donald Trump are, we cannot actually understand the rise of Trump without taking account of the failure of Obama to deliver on his promises of hope and change (emphasis added).
Since their opposition is inauthentic, the neoliberal Dems hand the White House to the horrid GOP once every four or eight years. The White House swings between the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems (the 4Ds) and the radically regressive and reactionary Repugs (the 4Rs). Back and forth it goes, with both sides calling their electoral victories “change” in different but inseparably linked partisan and identity-politicized dialects – two sides of the same bourgeois-electoral coin and “two wings of the same bird of prey” (Upton Sinclair, 1904). Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs, Exxon, Citigroup, and Lockheed Martin always win, racist mass incarceration persists, inequality widens (as it did under Obama), wages stagnate, and the planet tips closer to terminal geocide.
“The greatest evil,” one correspondent writes me, “is the theory of the lesser-of-the-two evils.” Not for me. The top evil I’m trying to bring attention here is the obsession with (to paraphrase Howard Zinn) who’s sitting in the White House as opposed to the more urgent politics of who’s sitting in the streets, in the factories, in the offices, in the town halls, etc. My concern with that evil is why I check the Des Moines Register statewide election poll to make sure the presidential race is already a done deal in Iowa before I cast my third party presidential votes in that state. If it looks like the state is in play, I’ll vote for the 4D party to block the 4R party (I haven’t felt compelled to do that since 2004, the first time I ever voted in a “contested state”).
I have a different reason than standard left “less evil-ism” for preferring Democrats in the White House. . With a Republican in the White House, liberals and progressives fall into the standard trap of thinking that the only thing wrong with the country is that “those insane evil Republicans are in charge” and that the cure to the nation’s ills is to trek off to the polls for two minutes in a voting book once every four years and try to put a Democrat back in the White House. I’ve seen it again and again. It’s happening right now, with a vengeance
It’s pathetic and it’s what the brilliant Howard Zinn tried to warn people against in an essay on the “Election Madness” he saw “engulfing the entire society including the left” in the year of Obama’s ascendancy. An “election frenzy,” Zinn wrote, “seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to [falsely] believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls. …” Zinn acknowledged that he probably would support one major-party candidate over another “for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.” But then, he wrote:
[O]ur time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice. … We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism. … Before [elections] … and after … we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. … Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
This is why I resisted the temptation to be awestruck by the remarkable outpouring of U.S.-Americans who protested the inauguration of Donald Trump in January. Cable news talking heads marveled at the marches, calling them the “biggest social movement since the 1960s.” But what were those massive but polite, pink-hatted marches all about? While many of the chants and signs heard and seen at the historic marches indicated policy concerns, the clear and simple thing that had put millions in the streets was the awful man who is now sitting in the White House. It was about an election outcome. The new president hadn’t even made any policy yet. What he’s actually done as president has yet to generate protests remotely on the scale of the ones sparked by the Awful One’s entrance into the Oval Office.
Most of the millions who hit the streets to voice outrage against the election of Trump would have stayed home if it had been the dismal arch-corporatist and “lying neoliberal warmonger” Hillary Clinton being inaugurated. And that is very telling. As Chris Hedges noted in the summer of 2016:
The predatory financial institutions on Wall Street will trash the economy and loot the U.S. Treasury on the way to another economic collapse whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Poor, unarmed people of color will be gunned down in the streets of our cities whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. The system of neo-slavery in our prisons, where we keep poor men and poor women of color in cages because we have taken from them the possibility of employment, education and dignity, will be maintained whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Millions of undocumented people will be deported whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Austerity programs will cut or abolish public services, further decay the infrastructure and curtail social programs whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Money will replace the vote whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. And half the country, which now lives in poverty, will remain in misery whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton becomes president. This is not speculation. We know this because there has been total continuity on every issue, from trade agreements to war to mass deportations, between the Bush administration and the administration of Barack Obama. … The problem is not Donald Trump. The problem is capitalism. And this is the beast we are called to fight and slay. Until that is done, nothing of substance will change. … To reduce the political debate, as [Bernie] Sanders and others are doing, to political personalities is political infantilism. We have undergone a corporate coup. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will not reverse this coup. They, like Barack Obama, know where the centers of power lie. They serve these centers of power.
The atmosphere of the planet, Hedges might have added, would be continuing its disastrous, capitalogenic march towards 500 carbon parts per million by 2050 if not sooner (please see my latest report on Truthdig) with Hillary Clinton in the White House.
The dysfunctional over-focus on who’s sitting in the White House — yes, the horrific Boss Tweet right now, maybe Kirsten Gillibrand (or Oprah or Michelle or Andrew Cuomo or Kamala Harris) in 2021— is sustained between election spectacles by the cable news talking heads and the late-night comedians, for whom Trump is a gift that keeps on giving. It is fed by hopes for impeachment on grounds of collusion with Russia in the subversion of our supposed great democratic electoral process.
All the evils that Hedges mentions would survive the impeachment and removal of Trump. Nothing of substance would change. The removal of Richard Nixon from the U.S. presidency in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal was followed by a deepening descent into the long neoliberal era, which has culminated in the current New Gilded Age of shocking economic disparity and abject, richly bipartisan plutocracy.
Zinn and Hedges’ wise words belong in the front of the minds of all citizens and workers who want to see democracy break out and take hold at long last in the oligarchic United States. They help us keep our eyes on the real prize: changing policy in a progressive direction and radically restructuring society beneath and beyond the biennial and quadrennial big-money, major-media, candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” (Noam Chomsky) that are sold to us as politics, “the only politics that matters.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/12 ... mp-effect/
Mostly good.
And I just gotta say, 'Shithole', cause every motherfucker on the news is saying it, no doubt to the amusement of Lenny Bruce's shade. They bin wanting to do that their whole careers...and regardless of everything else this another little bitty indicator of...(drumroll) the decline and fall of Bourgeois Democracy.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
excerpt
***********************************
What is this Trump phenomenon all about in the U.S.? Now Donald Trump occupies the presidential post of the world’s most powerful country. How does his rule affect the domestic and international political landscape?
The Trump phenomenon is really about the crisis of liberal democracy in the United States and throughout the world capitalist core. This is a product of the structural crisis of capital in our time, evidenced by stagnation, financialisation, and monopolisation, and by the activation of all of capital’s absolute limits, most clearly with respect to the environment. The structural crisis, which has been building for decades, has now evolved to the point that we are seeing crisis of the liberal-democratic state. Neoliberalism, which has reached its limits, is giving way to neo-fascist tendencies, which threatens liberal democracy itself. In the U.S. these conditions are worsened by the decline of U.S. hegemony in the world economy.
Trump’s political base, as in all movements in the broad fascist genus, is the result of an alliance between an enraged, reactionary, predominantly white lower-middle class (or petty bourgeoisie) and the very top echelons of monopoly (today monopoly-finance) capital. The alt-Right political phenomenon, as it is called, is now in its early phases, though it occupies the White House. It was aggressive in its early months, with Steve Bannon as Trump’s chief strategist, but experienced a push-back from liberal elites and the deep state. It has been stabilised in recent months with Bannon out and generals such as John F. Kelley taking charge of who has access to Trump. Trump himself, though, is volatile, acting with impunity, and not easily controlled by Kelley or anyone else.
Bannon, as head of Breitbart News, together with elements on the extreme or neo-fascist Right, is now organising, quite successfully, to drive the less extreme, traditional Republicans out of office and to put in place outright neo-fascists/white supremacists like Roy Moore in Alabama. In a recent defence of Moore, Trump listed the military, the police, border guards, and the Second Amendment (the right of individuals to carry arms) as his four reasons, all pointing toward repression. All of this is shaking up the U.S. body politic.
The effects of Trump’s rise on the mode of operation of U.S. imperialism are not huge, given that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been a very hawk-like one. U.S. imperialism today is governed almost exclusively by strategies aimed at increasing U.S. geopolitical power as a way of countering its diminishing relative economic power in the world. Clinton was tied to what is called a “neoconservative” strategy directed principally at expanding U.S. power in the Middle East [West Asia] and along the perimeter of the former USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]—a policy first articulated in the George H.W. Bush administration and pursued by both Democrats and Republicans to the present day. This has led to increasing conflict with Russia and a New Cold War. The initial, distinctive strategy of the Trump administration was to create a kind of detente with Russia and to move away from the war in Syria and probably the conflict over the Ukraine, while going after ISIS [Islamic State], and then focussing on what was to be Washington’s real object: China, the growing economic power of which was considered the main objective threat to U.S. hegemony. This represented a shift in the U.S. global posture and a weakening of the Atlantic Alliance with Europe. It was for these reasons that Trump came under heavy attack for so-called Russia-gate (mainly from those who opposed any detente with Russia), and it was the conflict over this that has mainly put a check on his power. There are two things that are especially noteworthy here: (1) This is to be regarded as a conflict within the imperialist elites in the U.S.; (2) the Trump emphasis on a detente with Russia (a strategy that seems to have been developed by associates of Henry Kissinger, some of whom were connected to the Trump administration) with the goal of concentrating U.S. forces for a struggle with China—an issue that lies below the surface in present conflicts within U.S. foreign policy.
Trump is, of course, more nationalist in his approach to trade, explicitly supporting protectionism, and more extreme in his attack on immigrants. All of this, though, was already present in neoliberalism and simply takes a more explicitly nationalistic form in Trump’s neo-fascist stance. The greatest worry at present is a growing irrationalism with Trump’s finger on the nuclear button.
http://www.frontline.in/politics/the-se ... 008399.ece
Yeah, it's John Bellamy Foster, a bit dated as pre-'Fire&Fury' but pretty correct, though I question that Trump had a strategy at all. Mebbe a conversation at dinner or something.....
***********************************
What is this Trump phenomenon all about in the U.S.? Now Donald Trump occupies the presidential post of the world’s most powerful country. How does his rule affect the domestic and international political landscape?
The Trump phenomenon is really about the crisis of liberal democracy in the United States and throughout the world capitalist core. This is a product of the structural crisis of capital in our time, evidenced by stagnation, financialisation, and monopolisation, and by the activation of all of capital’s absolute limits, most clearly with respect to the environment. The structural crisis, which has been building for decades, has now evolved to the point that we are seeing crisis of the liberal-democratic state. Neoliberalism, which has reached its limits, is giving way to neo-fascist tendencies, which threatens liberal democracy itself. In the U.S. these conditions are worsened by the decline of U.S. hegemony in the world economy.
Trump’s political base, as in all movements in the broad fascist genus, is the result of an alliance between an enraged, reactionary, predominantly white lower-middle class (or petty bourgeoisie) and the very top echelons of monopoly (today monopoly-finance) capital. The alt-Right political phenomenon, as it is called, is now in its early phases, though it occupies the White House. It was aggressive in its early months, with Steve Bannon as Trump’s chief strategist, but experienced a push-back from liberal elites and the deep state. It has been stabilised in recent months with Bannon out and generals such as John F. Kelley taking charge of who has access to Trump. Trump himself, though, is volatile, acting with impunity, and not easily controlled by Kelley or anyone else.
Bannon, as head of Breitbart News, together with elements on the extreme or neo-fascist Right, is now organising, quite successfully, to drive the less extreme, traditional Republicans out of office and to put in place outright neo-fascists/white supremacists like Roy Moore in Alabama. In a recent defence of Moore, Trump listed the military, the police, border guards, and the Second Amendment (the right of individuals to carry arms) as his four reasons, all pointing toward repression. All of this is shaking up the U.S. body politic.
The effects of Trump’s rise on the mode of operation of U.S. imperialism are not huge, given that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been a very hawk-like one. U.S. imperialism today is governed almost exclusively by strategies aimed at increasing U.S. geopolitical power as a way of countering its diminishing relative economic power in the world. Clinton was tied to what is called a “neoconservative” strategy directed principally at expanding U.S. power in the Middle East [West Asia] and along the perimeter of the former USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]—a policy first articulated in the George H.W. Bush administration and pursued by both Democrats and Republicans to the present day. This has led to increasing conflict with Russia and a New Cold War. The initial, distinctive strategy of the Trump administration was to create a kind of detente with Russia and to move away from the war in Syria and probably the conflict over the Ukraine, while going after ISIS [Islamic State], and then focussing on what was to be Washington’s real object: China, the growing economic power of which was considered the main objective threat to U.S. hegemony. This represented a shift in the U.S. global posture and a weakening of the Atlantic Alliance with Europe. It was for these reasons that Trump came under heavy attack for so-called Russia-gate (mainly from those who opposed any detente with Russia), and it was the conflict over this that has mainly put a check on his power. There are two things that are especially noteworthy here: (1) This is to be regarded as a conflict within the imperialist elites in the U.S.; (2) the Trump emphasis on a detente with Russia (a strategy that seems to have been developed by associates of Henry Kissinger, some of whom were connected to the Trump administration) with the goal of concentrating U.S. forces for a struggle with China—an issue that lies below the surface in present conflicts within U.S. foreign policy.
Trump is, of course, more nationalist in his approach to trade, explicitly supporting protectionism, and more extreme in his attack on immigrants. All of this, though, was already present in neoliberalism and simply takes a more explicitly nationalistic form in Trump’s neo-fascist stance. The greatest worry at present is a growing irrationalism with Trump’s finger on the nuclear button.
http://www.frontline.in/politics/the-se ... 008399.ece
Yeah, it's John Bellamy Foster, a bit dated as pre-'Fire&Fury' but pretty correct, though I question that Trump had a strategy at all. Mebbe a conversation at dinner or something.....
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
"Shithole President": Donald Trump has been declared persona non grata in the Caribbean
Nearly 100 representatives of Pan African organizations and members of the Caribbean Socialist popular forces proclaimed US President Donald Trump a non-grata person in the Caribbean, Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) of Barbados reported Monday.
According to the source, all of them were committed to demand their respective governments to strongly protest any visit by Trump and support popular activities to prevent US President from coming to the Caribbean.
CMC said that Trump is not well received in the Caribbean, because of his racist and outrageous comments and actions made last Thursday against African countries, Haiti and El Salvador. The measure was promoted by Barbados' Clement Payne Movement, Pan African Caribbean Network and People's Empowerment Party.
It is also supported by Saint Lucia International Committee of Black Peoples, the Jamaica-Cuba Friendship Association, Trinidad-Tobago Freedman's Emancipation Group and the Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago.The measure was also supported and the document, signed by the Organization for the Victory of the People and the Black Consciousness Movement, both from Guyana, among other organizations.
CMC recalled that the peoples of the Caribbean, in the light of world history, resisted and survived the most horrendous forms of slavery and colonialism, and also stated that the Caribbean nations are icons in defense of dignity and the human rights. The organization also said all the Caribbean countries defend the zero-tolerance principle on any racist or discriminatory manifestation against black people. “We, the under-signed representatives of the sovereign people of the Caribbean, hereby declare that President Donald Trump of the United States of America is 'persona non-grata' in our Caribbean region,” the declaration said.
“We further declare that as a 'persona non-grata,' President Donald Trump is NOT welcome in any territory of the Caribbean; and we hereby confirm that we — the Caribbean people — will petition our governments, vehemently protest against any Trump visit, and engage in popular demonstrations designed to prevent President Donald Trump's entry into any portion of the sovereign territory of our Caribbean region,” it adds.
“As sons and daughters of the Caribbean, we hereby affirm that the continent of Africa is the revered motherland of a sizable majority of our people and that the Republic of Haiti — the seminal architect of the destruction of the system of chattel slavery that held our ancestors in bondage — is the foundational cornerstone of our Caribbean civilization,” the declaration continues. “And we, therefore, consider that any insult or attack that is directed at the African continent or at the Republic of Haiti is intrinsically an insult and attack that is directed at us as well.
“We further affirm that we Caribbean people — in light of our history of experiencing, resisting and surviving the most horrendous forms of enslavement and colonialism — consciously regard ourselves as champions and defenders of the dignity and fundamental human rights of all Black or African people, and that we are guided by an over-arching and non-negotiable principle of zero tolerance of any manifestation of anti-Black or anti-African racism or discrimination,” it said.
https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2018/0 ... p-has.html
Nearly 100 representatives of Pan African organizations and members of the Caribbean Socialist popular forces proclaimed US President Donald Trump a non-grata person in the Caribbean, Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) of Barbados reported Monday.
According to the source, all of them were committed to demand their respective governments to strongly protest any visit by Trump and support popular activities to prevent US President from coming to the Caribbean.
CMC said that Trump is not well received in the Caribbean, because of his racist and outrageous comments and actions made last Thursday against African countries, Haiti and El Salvador. The measure was promoted by Barbados' Clement Payne Movement, Pan African Caribbean Network and People's Empowerment Party.
It is also supported by Saint Lucia International Committee of Black Peoples, the Jamaica-Cuba Friendship Association, Trinidad-Tobago Freedman's Emancipation Group and the Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago.The measure was also supported and the document, signed by the Organization for the Victory of the People and the Black Consciousness Movement, both from Guyana, among other organizations.
CMC recalled that the peoples of the Caribbean, in the light of world history, resisted and survived the most horrendous forms of slavery and colonialism, and also stated that the Caribbean nations are icons in defense of dignity and the human rights. The organization also said all the Caribbean countries defend the zero-tolerance principle on any racist or discriminatory manifestation against black people. “We, the under-signed representatives of the sovereign people of the Caribbean, hereby declare that President Donald Trump of the United States of America is 'persona non-grata' in our Caribbean region,” the declaration said.
“We further declare that as a 'persona non-grata,' President Donald Trump is NOT welcome in any territory of the Caribbean; and we hereby confirm that we — the Caribbean people — will petition our governments, vehemently protest against any Trump visit, and engage in popular demonstrations designed to prevent President Donald Trump's entry into any portion of the sovereign territory of our Caribbean region,” it adds.
“As sons and daughters of the Caribbean, we hereby affirm that the continent of Africa is the revered motherland of a sizable majority of our people and that the Republic of Haiti — the seminal architect of the destruction of the system of chattel slavery that held our ancestors in bondage — is the foundational cornerstone of our Caribbean civilization,” the declaration continues. “And we, therefore, consider that any insult or attack that is directed at the African continent or at the Republic of Haiti is intrinsically an insult and attack that is directed at us as well.
“We further affirm that we Caribbean people — in light of our history of experiencing, resisting and surviving the most horrendous forms of enslavement and colonialism — consciously regard ourselves as champions and defenders of the dignity and fundamental human rights of all Black or African people, and that we are guided by an over-arching and non-negotiable principle of zero tolerance of any manifestation of anti-Black or anti-African racism or discrimination,” it said.
https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2018/0 ... p-has.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
‘Trump’s hostile words signify the weakness and desperation of a dying system’
“Although Trump's rhetoric is hostile, at least he is honest in revealing that America seeks to continue as a racist white-controlled state,” Abayomi Azikiwe, the editor of the Pan-African News Wire, told Balkans Post.
Abayomi Azikiwe, the editor of the Pan-African News Wire
“These utterances by Trump are not a manifestations of the self-assuredness of the West. It is a clear sign of the weakness and desperation of a dying system gasping for breath seeking to project its declining power amid an irreversible decline,” Mr. Azikiwe added.
Here’s the full transcript of the interview:
U.S. President Donald Trump has provoked fresh controversy after allegedly asking a group of senators why the U.S. had to allow in immigrants from “s***hole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean. What could you say about this?
Abayomi Azikiwe: This was not surprising at all considering the history of racism, xenophobia and sexism within the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump. It reflects the fears of many whites in the United States that the growing numbers of people of color from African, Latin American, Asian, Middle Eastern and Indigenous heritages combined will become a majority within America around 2050. This portends much for the overall economic, political and cultural character of the country. The only way the racists can maintain control over the U.S. in the coming decades is to once again rationalize and justify white dominance of institutional and social life. Hence we see efforts to reverse the gains of the Civil Rights, Black Power, labor and women's rights movements of the last six decades. The reform of immigration laws in the U.S. only took place in conjunction with the advent of the Civil Rights Movement led by African Americans during the 1950s and 1960s. Historically immigration policy within the country has favored Europeans at the expense of people who are from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Trump’s comment caused a backlash among African governments and people, with African Union countries demanding that Donald Trump “retract and apologize”. How important do you think the world’s reaction is regarding the U.S. president’s racism? And in what way do these comments affect the world, especially African nations?
Azikiwe: This is an important development on the international scene. Despite the continuing control of U.S. imperialism over the financial and economic world system, various states and regional organizations have come forward to denounce Trump. The African Union (AU), representing 55 member-states, has spoken out strongly against this explicit and repugnant form of racist discourse. Haiti, although a poor country which is still exploited by the U.S., expressed its opposition to American policy. Haitians who received protective status stemming from the earthquake eight years ago and other issues, are now being threatened with deportation. The same situation applies to El Salvadorians whose country was negatively impacted by a U.S. instigated genocidal war during the 1980s. The Republic of Botswana in Southern Africa has rejected Trump's racist rants about Africa. The African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party of the Republic of South Africa, held a press conference to express their dissatisfaction with Trump's views. The racist comments are designed also to further provide a cover for escalating Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) attacks on African states such as Libya, Somalia and Niger. These military operations are carried out under the guise of fighting terrorism when many of these so called terrorist cells are a manifestation of Pentagon and CIA policy to defeat genuine progressive and revolutionary movements in Africa as well as other regions of the world.
Could you tell us about the United States’ foreign policy regarding African countries? How has the long history of U.S. intervention in Africa affected the region?
Azikwe: The U.S. was built on the forced removal and extermination of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. That is the actual history of how the ruling class became the world's leading imperialist state. Washington and Wall Street have always been in opposition to genuine independence and sovereignty of African people over their land, resources, waterways and labor. The wealth of the imperialist nations was the direct result of the super exploitation of African people from the 15th century to the present. Consequently, the total liberation and unification of Africa is part and parcel of the world revolutionary movement which will inevitably result in the destruction of imperialism.
How has the U.S. foreign policy regarding Africa changed since Trump became president?
Azikiwe: There has been no fundamental change in policy, only in rhetoric. The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was formed under President George W. Bush, Jr. and has been strengthened and enhanced through the successive administrations of Barack Obama and now Donald Trump. Although Trump's rhetoric is hostile, at least he is honest in revealing that America seeks to continue as a racist white-controlled state. Nonetheless, these ideas are unsustainable and will be defeated through the organized resistance of the masses and the inherent contradictions within imperialism as a global system. These utterances by Trump are not a manifestations of the self-assuredness of the West. It is a clear sign of the weakness and desperation of a dying system gasping for breath seeking to project its declining power amid an irreversible decline.
Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He serves as a political analyst for Press TV and RT worldwide satellite television news networks as well as other international media in the areas of African and world affairs.
http://www.balkanspost.com/article/411/ ... mperialism
“Although Trump's rhetoric is hostile, at least he is honest in revealing that America seeks to continue as a racist white-controlled state,” Abayomi Azikiwe, the editor of the Pan-African News Wire, told Balkans Post.
Abayomi Azikiwe, the editor of the Pan-African News Wire
“These utterances by Trump are not a manifestations of the self-assuredness of the West. It is a clear sign of the weakness and desperation of a dying system gasping for breath seeking to project its declining power amid an irreversible decline,” Mr. Azikiwe added.
Here’s the full transcript of the interview:
U.S. President Donald Trump has provoked fresh controversy after allegedly asking a group of senators why the U.S. had to allow in immigrants from “s***hole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean. What could you say about this?
Abayomi Azikiwe: This was not surprising at all considering the history of racism, xenophobia and sexism within the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump. It reflects the fears of many whites in the United States that the growing numbers of people of color from African, Latin American, Asian, Middle Eastern and Indigenous heritages combined will become a majority within America around 2050. This portends much for the overall economic, political and cultural character of the country. The only way the racists can maintain control over the U.S. in the coming decades is to once again rationalize and justify white dominance of institutional and social life. Hence we see efforts to reverse the gains of the Civil Rights, Black Power, labor and women's rights movements of the last six decades. The reform of immigration laws in the U.S. only took place in conjunction with the advent of the Civil Rights Movement led by African Americans during the 1950s and 1960s. Historically immigration policy within the country has favored Europeans at the expense of people who are from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Trump’s comment caused a backlash among African governments and people, with African Union countries demanding that Donald Trump “retract and apologize”. How important do you think the world’s reaction is regarding the U.S. president’s racism? And in what way do these comments affect the world, especially African nations?
Azikiwe: This is an important development on the international scene. Despite the continuing control of U.S. imperialism over the financial and economic world system, various states and regional organizations have come forward to denounce Trump. The African Union (AU), representing 55 member-states, has spoken out strongly against this explicit and repugnant form of racist discourse. Haiti, although a poor country which is still exploited by the U.S., expressed its opposition to American policy. Haitians who received protective status stemming from the earthquake eight years ago and other issues, are now being threatened with deportation. The same situation applies to El Salvadorians whose country was negatively impacted by a U.S. instigated genocidal war during the 1980s. The Republic of Botswana in Southern Africa has rejected Trump's racist rants about Africa. The African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party of the Republic of South Africa, held a press conference to express their dissatisfaction with Trump's views. The racist comments are designed also to further provide a cover for escalating Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) attacks on African states such as Libya, Somalia and Niger. These military operations are carried out under the guise of fighting terrorism when many of these so called terrorist cells are a manifestation of Pentagon and CIA policy to defeat genuine progressive and revolutionary movements in Africa as well as other regions of the world.
Could you tell us about the United States’ foreign policy regarding African countries? How has the long history of U.S. intervention in Africa affected the region?
Azikwe: The U.S. was built on the forced removal and extermination of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. That is the actual history of how the ruling class became the world's leading imperialist state. Washington and Wall Street have always been in opposition to genuine independence and sovereignty of African people over their land, resources, waterways and labor. The wealth of the imperialist nations was the direct result of the super exploitation of African people from the 15th century to the present. Consequently, the total liberation and unification of Africa is part and parcel of the world revolutionary movement which will inevitably result in the destruction of imperialism.
How has the U.S. foreign policy regarding Africa changed since Trump became president?
Azikiwe: There has been no fundamental change in policy, only in rhetoric. The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was formed under President George W. Bush, Jr. and has been strengthened and enhanced through the successive administrations of Barack Obama and now Donald Trump. Although Trump's rhetoric is hostile, at least he is honest in revealing that America seeks to continue as a racist white-controlled state. Nonetheless, these ideas are unsustainable and will be defeated through the organized resistance of the masses and the inherent contradictions within imperialism as a global system. These utterances by Trump are not a manifestations of the self-assuredness of the West. It is a clear sign of the weakness and desperation of a dying system gasping for breath seeking to project its declining power amid an irreversible decline.
Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He serves as a political analyst for Press TV and RT worldwide satellite television news networks as well as other international media in the areas of African and world affairs.
http://www.balkanspost.com/article/411/ ... mperialism
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
No Confidence!
- from Greg Godels is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
The big losers in the recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist confidence polling (January 08-10-2018) are Congress, the two parties, and the media. Based on the poll, most people in the US have “not very much” or “no confidence” in the legislative body, corporate news and entertainment, or the Democratic or Republican parties. In fact, over two-thirds of those surveyed lack confidence in the media and nearly three-fourths show little or no confidence in Congress!
In light of these numbers, one can only wonder when the pitchforks are coming out. Clearly, dissatisfaction with major US institutions extends very broadly. Yet these results are not new. Nearly a decade ago, a similar Gallup poll showed that only 11% of respondents had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in 2014 showed that both parties earned a decidedly more negative than a positive image. That same poll put the approval rate for Congress at 12%.
Those pundits and political operatives who discount the depth of dissatisfaction and disregard the festering anger in the US are doomed to misread the meaning of past and most-recent elections. The mainstream media mock Trump’s “fake news” charges while blithely ignoring the negative sentiments of the population toward the news industry. Don’t media elites see that “lack of confidence” is, in fact, a scathing indictment of their own collective performance in delivering the truth?
Failure to recognize the widespread disdain for core US political institutions hinders the understanding that Trumpism is not merely a malignant political alternative, but the consequence of a long history of malignant political alternatives; Trump isn't the cause of the problem, he's the result of the problem. As much as Trump disgusts with his vulgarity, he openly expresses thoughts shared by other powerful people who voice them only behind the walls of their mansions or private clubs. As much as Trump attacks the living standards of working people and degrades their safety net, he stands at the end of a relentless, unrelieved half-century of assault on the gains won in the New Deal era. As much as Trump has embraced belligerence and aggression in his foreign policy, he has only belatedly and somewhat reluctantly fallen in line with the imperialist agenda crafted and executed by his predecessors in the post-Soviet era.
He has Defense Secretary ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis to remind him of the agenda. The Wall Street Journal tells us (January 19, 2018) that Trump recently proposed to call off joint ROK/US military exercises as a pacifying gesture to Kim Jung Un. Mattis stepped in and purportedly flattered him with “Your instincts are absolutely correct,” while cajoling him into betraying those same instincts and going forward with the exercises. Incredibly, Mattis is the figure that many liberals cite as the restraining force in the Trump White House.
“Making America Great Again” is the mark of an empire facing increasingly effective threats from imperialist rivals as well as anti-imperialist resistance. While the dream of a Pax Americana imposed on the world is now discredited, Trumpism clings to the illusion that robust, blustery nationalism is the answer to an increasingly fruitless globalism.
Last year, in his lengthy, candid valedictory interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic magazine, one will find many hints of Obama’s lost confidence in the aggressive reordering of the world that he inherited and that was represented in his administration by Clinton, Rice, Power, and Rhodes. Mattis and General Kelly play that same role of sabre-rattlers and war-instigators in the Trump administration despite the popular caricature of them as wise counsel to a wild man.
With Trump, the missionary mask, so long a feature of US imperialism, is cast off. The “humanitarian, human rights” pose used so skillfully by Clinton and Obama’s war makers is of little interest to Trump and his consort. Any renegade thoughts Trump may have of exercising his self-proclaimed “deal” skills or imagined “charm” in negotiating with rivals are quickly squashed by the two pillars of militarism (Mattis and Kelly) within the Trump administration.
In better times, one could count on a sizeable segment of activist liberals to stand with the anti-imperialist left against US militarism and aggression. But, today, they have been mesmerized by a phantasmagoric anti-Russia campaign framed to distract attention away from real issues and the chronically flawed democratic process.
Apart from the demonstrated thinness of liberal principles, the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll explains exactly why RussiaGate could gain traction despite a lack of evidence. Behind the hysteria are two institutions that retain a great deal of misplaced confidence with the public: the FBI and the military. And behind that confidence is a glorifying and romanticizing of the two in popular culture, especially since the onset of the Mission Impossible-like War on Terror. Network and cable television feature drama of attractive, upright, and diligent FBI agents standing between the US public and chaos, night after night. Similarly, the military enjoys a heroic stature nourished by the media, the entertainment industry, and the chicken-hawk elites whose children never see the enlistment office.
Glenn Greenwald clarifies the self-deception lurking behind this cult of self-righteousness, while speaking in Santa Fe recently: “Every time Trump says or does something that is xenophobic, or bigoted, or militaristic, or threatening, people always say, ‘This is not what America is about,’... I always react to that by saying, ‘It’s not?’”
The RussiaGate mania is now runaway paranoia, perfectly suited to turn the populace from its real problems. Democratic Party operatives have crossed over to insanity, detecting Russia behind the announced candidacy of Chelsea Manning for US Senate. Neera Tanden, prominent head of the Center for American Progress, smelled a Kremlin plot behind Manning running against a corporate Democratic Senator. It may be a long wait for the soft left and the identity Democrats to render support to the heroic Manning. But then they wouldn’t comprehend the real heroism of serving jail time for exposing US war atrocities.
Emboldened by its success in fabricating RussiaGate from nothing, the FBI has turned its scrutiny on the People's Republic of China. Our intrepid spy hunters are casting their vigilance on Rupert Murdoch’s ex-trophy wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch, a prominent DC socialite. According to “sources” friendly to The Wall Street Journal, Ms Murdoch lobbied for a Chinese garden funded by the PRC at the National Arboretum. The FBI explained that the Arboretum was less than 5 miles from the White House and the Capitol. And, if that were not enough, the plan included a 70-foot tower that the FBI feared might be used for surveillance!
As if the Chinese could not rent a room in a six- or seven-story building in downtown DC to further their nefarious plot without spending $100 million on a Chinese garden.
So, we have a prominent figure who might have lobbied for a project that might have served PRC intelligence purposes by constructing a 70-foot tower that might have a surveillance purpose. But this twisted conspiracy tale goes further-- Ms Murdoch socialized with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner! The FBI has a picture of them together! Of course, that is the point of this inane exercise: meddling in US politics. Let’s see if deranged liberals buy this, too.
And we have the NBC story that reports that a CIA agent who retired in 2007 has been arrested for collaborating with the PRC. But there is a hitch: “U.S. officials told NBC News they don't believe Lee ever will be charged as a spy, in part because they don't have all the proof they might need, and in part because they would not want to air the evidence they do have in a public courtroom.” A careful read of the NBC article might lead one to believe that the CIA is embarrassed because their PRC counterparts broke the secret communication system that the CIA used to communicate with their covert agents. One might further surmise that Jerry Chun Shing Lee is the patsy for this failure. But the uncritical, trusting media report the damaging charge even though sources admit that “...they don't have all the proof they might need…” A fine example of a responsible press in the age of Trump!
As the US empire undergoes further and further stress, more and more dysfunction, the search for scapegoats and distractions will only intensify, and the barbarism of apocalyptical conflict will grow even more probable.
It is not enough to take a small step or two back from the brink, as liberals and the compromised left would like. Delivering a world two steps from catastrophe is a feckless award to future generations.
An angry, disappointed public that has lost confidence in its institutions is searching for a new, more promising road forward. Isn’t it the time to bring the promise of democracy and social justice embedded in socialism before the US public?
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
For some damn reason windows is blocking me from accessing ZZ's blog directly, nobody else that I've noticed, yet. Any clues for this dumb ass?
Gotta note Godel's comment about 'imperialist competitors'. I don't see them, and to call China such is slander engendered by idealism.
- from Greg Godels is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
The big losers in the recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist confidence polling (January 08-10-2018) are Congress, the two parties, and the media. Based on the poll, most people in the US have “not very much” or “no confidence” in the legislative body, corporate news and entertainment, or the Democratic or Republican parties. In fact, over two-thirds of those surveyed lack confidence in the media and nearly three-fourths show little or no confidence in Congress!
In light of these numbers, one can only wonder when the pitchforks are coming out. Clearly, dissatisfaction with major US institutions extends very broadly. Yet these results are not new. Nearly a decade ago, a similar Gallup poll showed that only 11% of respondents had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in 2014 showed that both parties earned a decidedly more negative than a positive image. That same poll put the approval rate for Congress at 12%.
Those pundits and political operatives who discount the depth of dissatisfaction and disregard the festering anger in the US are doomed to misread the meaning of past and most-recent elections. The mainstream media mock Trump’s “fake news” charges while blithely ignoring the negative sentiments of the population toward the news industry. Don’t media elites see that “lack of confidence” is, in fact, a scathing indictment of their own collective performance in delivering the truth?
Failure to recognize the widespread disdain for core US political institutions hinders the understanding that Trumpism is not merely a malignant political alternative, but the consequence of a long history of malignant political alternatives; Trump isn't the cause of the problem, he's the result of the problem. As much as Trump disgusts with his vulgarity, he openly expresses thoughts shared by other powerful people who voice them only behind the walls of their mansions or private clubs. As much as Trump attacks the living standards of working people and degrades their safety net, he stands at the end of a relentless, unrelieved half-century of assault on the gains won in the New Deal era. As much as Trump has embraced belligerence and aggression in his foreign policy, he has only belatedly and somewhat reluctantly fallen in line with the imperialist agenda crafted and executed by his predecessors in the post-Soviet era.
He has Defense Secretary ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis to remind him of the agenda. The Wall Street Journal tells us (January 19, 2018) that Trump recently proposed to call off joint ROK/US military exercises as a pacifying gesture to Kim Jung Un. Mattis stepped in and purportedly flattered him with “Your instincts are absolutely correct,” while cajoling him into betraying those same instincts and going forward with the exercises. Incredibly, Mattis is the figure that many liberals cite as the restraining force in the Trump White House.
“Making America Great Again” is the mark of an empire facing increasingly effective threats from imperialist rivals as well as anti-imperialist resistance. While the dream of a Pax Americana imposed on the world is now discredited, Trumpism clings to the illusion that robust, blustery nationalism is the answer to an increasingly fruitless globalism.
Last year, in his lengthy, candid valedictory interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic magazine, one will find many hints of Obama’s lost confidence in the aggressive reordering of the world that he inherited and that was represented in his administration by Clinton, Rice, Power, and Rhodes. Mattis and General Kelly play that same role of sabre-rattlers and war-instigators in the Trump administration despite the popular caricature of them as wise counsel to a wild man.
With Trump, the missionary mask, so long a feature of US imperialism, is cast off. The “humanitarian, human rights” pose used so skillfully by Clinton and Obama’s war makers is of little interest to Trump and his consort. Any renegade thoughts Trump may have of exercising his self-proclaimed “deal” skills or imagined “charm” in negotiating with rivals are quickly squashed by the two pillars of militarism (Mattis and Kelly) within the Trump administration.
In better times, one could count on a sizeable segment of activist liberals to stand with the anti-imperialist left against US militarism and aggression. But, today, they have been mesmerized by a phantasmagoric anti-Russia campaign framed to distract attention away from real issues and the chronically flawed democratic process.
Apart from the demonstrated thinness of liberal principles, the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll explains exactly why RussiaGate could gain traction despite a lack of evidence. Behind the hysteria are two institutions that retain a great deal of misplaced confidence with the public: the FBI and the military. And behind that confidence is a glorifying and romanticizing of the two in popular culture, especially since the onset of the Mission Impossible-like War on Terror. Network and cable television feature drama of attractive, upright, and diligent FBI agents standing between the US public and chaos, night after night. Similarly, the military enjoys a heroic stature nourished by the media, the entertainment industry, and the chicken-hawk elites whose children never see the enlistment office.
Glenn Greenwald clarifies the self-deception lurking behind this cult of self-righteousness, while speaking in Santa Fe recently: “Every time Trump says or does something that is xenophobic, or bigoted, or militaristic, or threatening, people always say, ‘This is not what America is about,’... I always react to that by saying, ‘It’s not?’”
The RussiaGate mania is now runaway paranoia, perfectly suited to turn the populace from its real problems. Democratic Party operatives have crossed over to insanity, detecting Russia behind the announced candidacy of Chelsea Manning for US Senate. Neera Tanden, prominent head of the Center for American Progress, smelled a Kremlin plot behind Manning running against a corporate Democratic Senator. It may be a long wait for the soft left and the identity Democrats to render support to the heroic Manning. But then they wouldn’t comprehend the real heroism of serving jail time for exposing US war atrocities.
Emboldened by its success in fabricating RussiaGate from nothing, the FBI has turned its scrutiny on the People's Republic of China. Our intrepid spy hunters are casting their vigilance on Rupert Murdoch’s ex-trophy wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch, a prominent DC socialite. According to “sources” friendly to The Wall Street Journal, Ms Murdoch lobbied for a Chinese garden funded by the PRC at the National Arboretum. The FBI explained that the Arboretum was less than 5 miles from the White House and the Capitol. And, if that were not enough, the plan included a 70-foot tower that the FBI feared might be used for surveillance!
As if the Chinese could not rent a room in a six- or seven-story building in downtown DC to further their nefarious plot without spending $100 million on a Chinese garden.
So, we have a prominent figure who might have lobbied for a project that might have served PRC intelligence purposes by constructing a 70-foot tower that might have a surveillance purpose. But this twisted conspiracy tale goes further-- Ms Murdoch socialized with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner! The FBI has a picture of them together! Of course, that is the point of this inane exercise: meddling in US politics. Let’s see if deranged liberals buy this, too.
And we have the NBC story that reports that a CIA agent who retired in 2007 has been arrested for collaborating with the PRC. But there is a hitch: “U.S. officials told NBC News they don't believe Lee ever will be charged as a spy, in part because they don't have all the proof they might need, and in part because they would not want to air the evidence they do have in a public courtroom.” A careful read of the NBC article might lead one to believe that the CIA is embarrassed because their PRC counterparts broke the secret communication system that the CIA used to communicate with their covert agents. One might further surmise that Jerry Chun Shing Lee is the patsy for this failure. But the uncritical, trusting media report the damaging charge even though sources admit that “...they don't have all the proof they might need…” A fine example of a responsible press in the age of Trump!
As the US empire undergoes further and further stress, more and more dysfunction, the search for scapegoats and distractions will only intensify, and the barbarism of apocalyptical conflict will grow even more probable.
It is not enough to take a small step or two back from the brink, as liberals and the compromised left would like. Delivering a world two steps from catastrophe is a feckless award to future generations.
An angry, disappointed public that has lost confidence in its institutions is searching for a new, more promising road forward. Isn’t it the time to bring the promise of democracy and social justice embedded in socialism before the US public?
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
For some damn reason windows is blocking me from accessing ZZ's blog directly, nobody else that I've noticed, yet. Any clues for this dumb ass?
Gotta note Godel's comment about 'imperialist competitors'. I don't see them, and to call China such is slander engendered by idealism.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Protests against Trump in Switzerland
January 25, 2018 | + |
Protest in Switzerland for the presence of US President Donald Trump. Photo: Taken from Euronews.
The presence of US President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, sparked a wave of protests in the streets of the city of Zurich where thousands of protesters gathered.
For this reason, the authorities of the European country initiated a deployment of five thousand police officers , in addition to securing the area.
The protests, which began just this Wednesday when US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was leading the Davos summit, continue on Thursday on the eve of the real estate tycoon's speech.
This demonstration is added to similar events that occurred on January 14 in Bern in front of the US embassy, when the administration of the northern country announced Trump's attendance at the event.
With his participation in the World Economic Forum, the Republican leader seeks to issue a speech that aims to defend his strategy "USA. First".
In addition, during his stay in Davos, the president will meet with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May .
Later, they will hold a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Trump publicly supported in the Israeli demand that Jerusalem be converted into the capital of that State.
http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2018/ ... moag_mnHtQ
January 25, 2018 | + |
Protest in Switzerland for the presence of US President Donald Trump. Photo: Taken from Euronews.
The presence of US President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, sparked a wave of protests in the streets of the city of Zurich where thousands of protesters gathered.
For this reason, the authorities of the European country initiated a deployment of five thousand police officers , in addition to securing the area.
The protests, which began just this Wednesday when US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was leading the Davos summit, continue on Thursday on the eve of the real estate tycoon's speech.
This demonstration is added to similar events that occurred on January 14 in Bern in front of the US embassy, when the administration of the northern country announced Trump's attendance at the event.
With his participation in the World Economic Forum, the Republican leader seeks to issue a speech that aims to defend his strategy "USA. First".
In addition, during his stay in Davos, the president will meet with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May .
Later, they will hold a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Trump publicly supported in the Israeli demand that Jerusalem be converted into the capital of that State.
http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2018/ ... moag_mnHtQ
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
At Davos, Rick Perry makes bizarre claim about U.S. fossil fuel exports
Exporting climate-destroying fuels is not "exporting freedom."
JOE ROMM
JAN 25, 2018, 1:10 PM
RICK PERRY WTIH KELLYANNE CONWAY MARCH 2, 2017. CREDIT: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s big push to export fossil fuels should be seen as an effort to spread freedom throughout the world — since it gives countries another choice regarding where they get their energy.
“The United States is not just exporting energy, we’re exporting freedom,” Perry said during a Fox Business interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
For Perry, giving other countries a choice of who satisfies their addiction to climate-destroying fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas is somehow increasing their freedom. But it’s really exporting dependence and exporting carbon pollution.
If the U.S. were to promote zero-carbon fuels, like solar and wind power, however, that would free countries from dependence on anyone’s dirty hydrocarbons.
Indeed, the whole point of the landmark December 2015 Paris climate agreement is that more than 190 of the world’s leading countries unanimously agreed with the overwhelming science that says the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to leave most of the world’s fossil fuels in the ground.
Today, thanks to Trump, the United States literally sits alone as the only one of those countries now saying it will abandon this global deal, after the last two other holdouts, Nicaragua and Syria, signed on last fall.
A visitor watches protest banners outside the COP 23 Fiji UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, Monday, Nov. 6, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Martin Meissner
And then there was one: Syria joins Paris agreement leaving the U.S. behind
A country in the midst of civil war is doing better on climate change than the United States.
“There’s no strings attached when you buy American LNG [liquefied natural gas],” Perry told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “So that’s world-changing.”
Well, American LNG is world-changing — or, rather, climate changing — but not in a good way.
Back in 2014, the U.S. Department of Energy released an analysis of total greenhouse gas emissions from LNG. One of the country’s top methane experts told me at the time, “a close reading of the DOE report in the context of the recent literature indicates that exporting natural gas from the U.S. as LNG is a very poor idea” from a climate perspective.
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/STEVEN SENNE
Energy Department Bombshell: LNG Has No Climate Benefit For Decades, IF EVER*
More recent research paints an equally grim picture. A study in the journal Energy last month on the overall emissions impact of “U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports,” concluded that “emissions are not likely to decrease and may increase significantly due to greater global energy consumption, higher emissions in the U.S., and methane leakage.”
Total lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions for LNG are much higher than they are for regular pipeline gas because the liquefaction process is so energy-intensive and because there are even more leaks from that process and from shipping the LNG overseas.
Remember, natural gas is mostly methane, and some 86 times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. And earlier this month, a NASA analysis found that the jump in fossil-fuel methane emissions in the past decade “is substantially larger than in previous literature.”
UK fracking protest, February 25, 2017. CREDIT: Ashley Cooper/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
NASA just made a stunning discovery about how fracking fuels global warming
Natural gas is not part of the climate solution, it's part of the problem.
And if fracked gas domestically is part of the climate problem, then liquefying that gas and shipping it to other countries is an even bigger problem.
When you add in our exports of coal and oil, then America is one of the biggest exporters of carbon pollution in the world. And that is not exporting freedom.
https://thinkprogress.org/rick-perry-ex ... 26ceb1ac2/
Exporting climate-destroying fuels is not "exporting freedom."
JOE ROMM
JAN 25, 2018, 1:10 PM
RICK PERRY WTIH KELLYANNE CONWAY MARCH 2, 2017. CREDIT: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s big push to export fossil fuels should be seen as an effort to spread freedom throughout the world — since it gives countries another choice regarding where they get their energy.
“The United States is not just exporting energy, we’re exporting freedom,” Perry said during a Fox Business interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
For Perry, giving other countries a choice of who satisfies their addiction to climate-destroying fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas is somehow increasing their freedom. But it’s really exporting dependence and exporting carbon pollution.
If the U.S. were to promote zero-carbon fuels, like solar and wind power, however, that would free countries from dependence on anyone’s dirty hydrocarbons.
Indeed, the whole point of the landmark December 2015 Paris climate agreement is that more than 190 of the world’s leading countries unanimously agreed with the overwhelming science that says the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to leave most of the world’s fossil fuels in the ground.
Today, thanks to Trump, the United States literally sits alone as the only one of those countries now saying it will abandon this global deal, after the last two other holdouts, Nicaragua and Syria, signed on last fall.
A visitor watches protest banners outside the COP 23 Fiji UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, Monday, Nov. 6, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Martin Meissner
And then there was one: Syria joins Paris agreement leaving the U.S. behind
A country in the midst of civil war is doing better on climate change than the United States.
“There’s no strings attached when you buy American LNG [liquefied natural gas],” Perry told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “So that’s world-changing.”
Well, American LNG is world-changing — or, rather, climate changing — but not in a good way.
Back in 2014, the U.S. Department of Energy released an analysis of total greenhouse gas emissions from LNG. One of the country’s top methane experts told me at the time, “a close reading of the DOE report in the context of the recent literature indicates that exporting natural gas from the U.S. as LNG is a very poor idea” from a climate perspective.
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/STEVEN SENNE
Energy Department Bombshell: LNG Has No Climate Benefit For Decades, IF EVER*
More recent research paints an equally grim picture. A study in the journal Energy last month on the overall emissions impact of “U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports,” concluded that “emissions are not likely to decrease and may increase significantly due to greater global energy consumption, higher emissions in the U.S., and methane leakage.”
Total lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions for LNG are much higher than they are for regular pipeline gas because the liquefaction process is so energy-intensive and because there are even more leaks from that process and from shipping the LNG overseas.
Remember, natural gas is mostly methane, and some 86 times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. And earlier this month, a NASA analysis found that the jump in fossil-fuel methane emissions in the past decade “is substantially larger than in previous literature.”
UK fracking protest, February 25, 2017. CREDIT: Ashley Cooper/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
NASA just made a stunning discovery about how fracking fuels global warming
Natural gas is not part of the climate solution, it's part of the problem.
And if fracked gas domestically is part of the climate problem, then liquefying that gas and shipping it to other countries is an even bigger problem.
When you add in our exports of coal and oil, then America is one of the biggest exporters of carbon pollution in the world. And that is not exporting freedom.
https://thinkprogress.org/rick-perry-ex ... 26ceb1ac2/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."