Monday, February 24, 2025

Trump To The Republican Party Is Like Hitler To The Nazi Party

Both men had/have complete control of their respective parties. Both parties were/are effectively personality cults completely devoted to their respective Leaders. (Hitler was "Der Fuhrer," Fuhrer is German for leader, thus "The Leader.")

Trump has sent around a picture of himself wearing a crown. He's really shoving it in everyone's face. Because he knows he has impunity. The Congress is controlled by the Party he controls, so he cannot be impeached and removed from office. (Hell, the Republicans wouldn't even convict him after he was impeached for the violent coup attempt of January 1, 2021. Republican politicians in the Capitol had to flee for their lives. The Republican vice president, Pence, was in mortal danger.) And the Supreme Court paved the way for his dictatorship before the election, first by sabotaging the criminal cases against him for the coup and the theft of classified documents, then gratuitously declaring that the president of the U.S. CANNOT BE GUILTY OF A CRIME, as long as what he does is an "official act." That was the Nixon doctrine, "when the president does it, it's legal." That didn't fly back in the 1970s. Now it's official Constitutional Law, thanks to the Republican Supremacist Court.

Not the first time in history a "King" has crowned Himself.

 It's obvious that revolutionary changes are necessary. The Supreme Court has to be overthrown, for starters. But instead of revolution we're getting revanchism, an attempt to return to the 19th century. Trump pines for the 1890s, which he cites as a golden era. That's when the U.S. conquered the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the far off Philippines, and assorted other Pacific and Caribbean islands. His hankering to absorb Canada and Greenland into the U.S. and "renaming" the Gulf of Mexico Gulf of America, Denali in Alaska as Mt. McKinley (his new second favorite president after himself) and threats to seize the Panama canal are all of a piece of anachronistic imperialism. It is a regression to an earlier form of U.S. Imperialism.

We've seen this kind of U.S. arrogance before. Drunk on power, our rulers think they can do anything. George Bush (Bush the Younger) thought the U.S. could "remake" the Middle East (and Afghanistan) more to his liking. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon tried to cut Vietnam in two and create a permanent client regime in the southern half.

The U.S. is certainly very powerful, but it has more success picking on very small and defenseless countries like Grenada (invaded by Reagan) or Panama (invaded by the Bush the Elder). And yes, it has won major wars- against Mexico (1846), a senile Spanish empire (1896), and with help (the World Wars against mostly Germany). 

The one thing on foreign policy Trump is doing right is trying to end the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, which is destroying Ukraine. THAT is the one thing the Democrats hate! They are fine with his support for Israeli genocide, and they don't actually oppose his anti-immigrant policy- which is really just an extension with much nastier rhetoric of the policies of Biden, and Barack "Deporter in Chief" Obama, who set a record for deportations (over 8 years) that Trump has yet to match (but give him time). But the Democrats (and Euroscum like UK prime minister Keir Starmer, who has criminalized anti-genocide protest in Britain) are determined to fight on to the last Ukrainian.

However, the way Trump is trying to end the Ukraine war is unethical. He's cutting the Ukrainians out of the process, same as he sold out the Afghan client regime by dealing only with the Taliban, stabbing the Afghan government in the back. In both cases, the parallel historical analogy is Munich 1938, when Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany at a conference from which the Czechs were banned (not invited- same thing). And yet, the Democrats haven't invoked that analogy. It is an analogy that has been speciously invoked ad nauseam to justify U.S. violence, subversion, and imperialist aggression innumerable times since World War Two, yet not now, when it is actually appropriate, with Trump! Amazing.

With Ukraine cut off from U.S. arms, that would leave the Europeans and the warmongering Keir Starmer, loathing British prime minister, to keep sacrificing Ukrainians if they so choose- Starmer has even said he'd send British "peacekeeping" troops to Ukraine.

But to return to the start of this essay: Trump To The Republican Party Is Like Hitler To The Nazi Party.





 

Saturday, February 15, 2025

DEI Replaced By HIE

 Diversity Equity Inclusion flushed down the toilet by the racist Trump regime and the eager to conform and comply U.S. corporate bosses, replaced by HIE: Homogeneity, Inequality, Exclusion.

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

NYC Strongman Eric Adams Gets His Reward From Trump

 [Oh, by the way, we are now effectively living under a dictatorship, ruled by Trump and Elon Musk. I will get to that in another essay.]

Gangsters Rule The U.S., And Corruption Is The Norm.

That reality has been made apparent every day, starting on January 20, under the Trump regime.

Yesterday, the criminal New York City strongman mayor Eric Adams was rescued by Trump from the obviously true corruption indictment against him. The Trump Department of "Justice" ordered the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of NY to drop the charges against Adams for taking bribes from the Turkish government and illegal campaign contributions camouflaged to disguise their real sources. Adams' own emails show him conspiring in these crimes. But just to ensure that Adams continues to be Trump's loyal lapdog, the charges were dismissed "without prejudice," meaning that they can be refiled in the future, brought back to life as it were, giving Trump a weapon to hold over Adams' head.

Adams, aggressively self-promoting and very much a big fan of himself, summoned the media to record him praising Trump and referring to the aborted indictment as "this cruel episode." This puffed-up reactionary oppressor of anti-genocide protesters predictably preened himself yet again in public as is his habit, and continues to arrogantly believe he can be reelected as mayor this year. A truly nauseating prospect which hopefully will prove delusional on his part. Much more decent Democratic politicians are running against him for the party's nomination.


The evidence that Adams is guilty is indisputable. (At least by honest, rational people. Hey, some people dispute the Holocaust. And establishment drones pretend Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK, and the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center, and Building 7, fell by magic.)

The handwriting for Adams to beat the rap has long been on the wall. Adams for months has been sucking up to Trump, attacking immigrants, parroting Trump's hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric, going to Trump's Florida lair, Mar-a-Lago, to kiss his ring, and attending his inauguration January 20 as an invited guest. Adams ordered his staff not to criticize Trump. Worse, he ordered all city workers to cooperate with the ICE terror raids hunting "illegal immigrants" the "murderers, rapists, worst of the worst" Trump claims they all are. (ICE- Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)

Adams' corrupt circle of confederates haven't been so lucky. Seven or more have been forced to resign- I've lost count- some for coercing sex from subordinates, and one just pled guilty to Federal charges. Guess they had nothing to offer Trump. Adams is on his third or fourth police commissioner, a member of the plutocratic class, a Tisch. Too bad New York State tolerates corrupt politicians. It could prosecute them, theoretically, under state laws.

 

 The Supremely Self-Satisfied New York City Strongman Eric Adams, Oppressor of Anti-Genocide Protesters.

 Trump himself is notoriously corrupt, as are many of his accomplices, like World's Richest Person Elon Musk, The Four Hundred Billion Dollar Man. Trump learned corruption from his father, Fred, who greased the palms of politicians like Mayor Abe Beame, who Fred was close with, in return for bending and breaking city rules.

Trump knows he's corrupt. That's why he fired a slew of Inspector Generals of government departments, and cashiered the heads of the Government Ethics Office and of the Whistleblower Protection Office. (Not that whistleblowers had great protection anyway. They were criminally prosecuted by the regime of Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama.)

Ironically, cynically, Trump constantly justifies his destruction of government agencies and functions by claiming they are "totally corrupt." That adds a layer of additional outrageousness to the destructive behavior of this malign, vicious, racist anti-human being.

Trump and his hatchet man Musk branded USAID "totally corrupt," a cesspool. This has been a pattern in their attacks on parts of the government they are destroying or coopting. Contrary to Trump's repeated assurances that he would protect Social Security and Medicare, his partner in crime Musk claims that those programs are rife with fraud, which is his justification for seizing control of the Treasury Department database, which makes the payments to recipients of those programs. How Musk and his dozen or so young fascist and racist computer nerds plan to uncover unworthy recipients among the 70 million is not explained.

But it is very easy to identify what is by far, in dollar terms, the place where you will find the overwhelming bulk of government waste and corruption.

The Department of "Defense," aka the Pentagon. 

Here's just one example of thousands, that I just read about. The U.S. military was using a system to coordinate aerial refuelings of planes from World War II. During operations over Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria there were 1,500 such refuelings every day. So military weaponry corporation Northrop Grumman was given a contract to modernize the system. After ten years, Grumman had scarfed up $745 MILLION in taxpayers' money, twice the original "estimate " (which are generally bogus in the war industry) and had produced nothing. 

At the time, there was an experimental procurement company named DIUx, set up as a sort of thimble to try to empty the bathtub of corruption. It managed to come up with an actual software solution that cut planning time for planning refuelings from several days to under 1 minute. Rather than being hailed, the Air Force and House staffers working on "defense" stubbornly resisted the innovation. Eventually it was forced through, but the DIUx people faced constant resistance and retaliation. [1]

Because you see, there is big money in military contracting corruption. Military officers and Congressional staff and politicians who play ball can expect to be lucratively rewarded later on. "Retired" generals and admirals commonly go to work for the corporations for high "compensation," and in addition some are paid by U.S. media companies to be shills for the military and its expensive, underperforming weaponry.

Here's an even very very much larger example: the trillion-dollar F-35 fighter plane. There is too much to describe about how this plane is a giant scam, the propaganda for it a pack of lies, how it falls short (to put it charitably) on all the fulsome claims made for it by the weapons makers and repeated by the media and politician parrots. Just go online and use duckduckgo or another search engine (or do you still use spyware Google?) and do some research on "problems with the F-35" or "criticism of the F-35." Lockheed Martin has failed to get the various systems and software to work on the plane. Pierre Sprey, a great warplane designer with credit for the F-16 (which defeated the F-35 in a mock dogfight) and the A-10 Warthog, an excellent close ground support plane being scrapped, its role now to be filled by the F-35, which it cannot do at all well, has been scathing in his critique of the F-35.

I will be surprised if fire-breathing Godzilla Trump and hitman Musk mess with the military-industrial-Congressional complex, however. (President Eisenhower was convinced to drop "Congressional," his original intent, from that famous farewell 1961 speech.)


 1] Source: "Rebooting the Pentagon," The New York Review of Books, February 27, 2025 issue.




Monday, February 3, 2025

New York Doctor indicted in Louisiana for abortion pills. Trump exercises dictatorial power, shuts down USAID. And Elon Musk has your Social Security Number now.

1]- If Louisiana can get their hands on her, the doctor  faces 15 years in a medieval type Louisiana prison and a $200,000 fine. The mother of the teenager who needed the abortion faces that fate.

2]- Trump shut down an agency created and funded by Congress, which he has no right- or legal authority- to do. Elon Musk, his de factor right hand man, called it a "criminal organization," and "radical left," -insane bullshit- and motivated Trump to take the illegal action. Trump said USAID "is run by radical lunatics." Of course it is an arm of U.S. foreign policy, that provides the parsimonious amount of NON-MILITARY foreign aid the U.S. provides. The agency goes back to 1961. The idea that ANY part of the U.S. government employs left-wing radicals is as preposterous as Hitler's claim that Germany didn't lose World War I, but was stabbed in the back on the home front.

One of the last hospitals in Gaza is shutting down- it received USAID funds.

20 million people around the world with AIDS are kept alive with medicines paid for by USAID. Maybe some other nation or nations or international organization will step into the breach. They better do so quickly, or there will be sicker people- and deaths.

Not that the white racists Trump and Musk care about murdering Africans.

These are just 2 of the important stories from the headlines feature of democracynow.org

For ten minutes, 5 days a week, of your time, you will be vastly better informed than you can be from relying on the power establishment's propaganda system if you follow headlines there. Plus they have longer stories on various topics. The website is very well oaid out, and their archive goes back years and the search function works very well- much better than I've experienced at the New York Times or the New Yorker, for example. 

Don't make me have to inform you of what's going on. Take responsibility for knowing what's going on in the world YOU LIVE IN.

Obviously the remedy here is impeachment and removal from office of Trump. But the Republican Party controls both houses of Congress, and the Republican Party has degenerated into a political cult with Trump at its head.

Some think mass protests are somehow the answer. In his last round as president, Trump ordered then Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to have troops shoot protesters in the legs. Esper refused. But Defense Secretary this time, Peter Hegseth, will be glad to. In fact, this time the order will probably be to aim at heads and chests.

Too bad the lame and feckless Democratic Party helped allow this situation. The Biden regime could have indicted Trump in early 2021 for the failed coup and theft of a massive amount of classified documents. Instead they dragged their feet for several years, by which time Trump rebuilt his popularity and the Republican-controlled Federal judiciary effectively stalled the cases until they were killed or dropped. 

For the story about Elon Musk, here's the link:

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/3/elon_musk_gov#transcript

 For more on the shutdown of USAID, go to:

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/3/usaid_shutdown