التعديل القضائي يراكم أزمات “جيش” الاحتلال.. مئات العناصر يستصعبون أداء خدمتهم

الجمعة 3 آذار 2023

المصدر: وسائل إعلام إسرائيلية + الميادين نت

وسائل إعلام إسرائيلية تفيد بأنّ 130 ضابطاً وعنصراً في الاحتياط من وحدة للمهمات الخاصة في “جيش” الاحتلال الإسرائيلي، يبلغون وزير الأمن بأنهم يجدون صعوبة بالخدمة في حال تمت التعديلات القضائية.

130 عنصراً من “جيش” الاحتلال يجدون صعوبة بالخدمة إذا تم إقرار التعديل القضائي

أفادت وسائل إعلام إسرائيلية بأنّ 130 ضابطاً وعنصراً في الاحتياط من وحدة “يهلوم” الهندسية للمهمات الخاصة في “جيش” الاحتلال الإسرائيلي، وقّعوا على رسالة يبلغون فيها وزير الأمن في حكومة الاحتلال يوآف غالانت، “أنّهم يجدون صعوبة بالخدمة إذا تم إقرار التعديلات القضائية”.

وصدّق “كنيست” الاحتلال بالقراءة الأولى، الثلاثاء الماضي، على مشروع “قانون التعديلات القضائية”، وفي نصه الأول يقر أنّ محكمة الاحتلال العليا غير مؤهّلة لإلغاء أي تعديلٍ للقوانين الأساسية.

أمّا النص الثاني، فيتمثل في إدخال بند “الاستثناء” الذي يسمح للكنيست بإلغاء بعض قرارات المحكمة العليا، بغالبية بسيطة تبلغ 61 صوتاً من أصل 120 عضواً في البرلمان.

وذكرت صحيفة “يديعوت أحرونوت” عبر موقعها الإلكتروني أنّ مشروع القانون “ينص على تغيير آلية تشكيل لجنة اختيار القضاة، لتكون للائتلاف الحكومي سيطرة كاملة عليها”.

اقرأ أيضاً: التعديلات القضائية و”الجيش” الإسرائيلي: تصدّعات في تشكيل الاحتياط

ويتفاقم النزاع الإسرائيلي الداخلي بشأن الخطة القضائية، في حين يتصاعد الاحتجاج السياسي ضدّها، في الكنيست والشارع.

وحتى هذه اللحظة، وقّع الآلاف في خدمة الاحتياط على عرائض حذّروا فيها من أنّهم لن يلتحقوا بالاحتياط إذا مرّت التعديلات القضائية التي يريدها رئيس حكومة الاحتلال بنيامين نتنياهو.

كما تظاهر نحو 2000 من جنود الاحتياط في القدس المحتلة خلال شهر شباط/فبراير الماضي ضد التعديلات القضائية.

وفي هذا السياق، حذّر المئات من ضباط الاحتياط بوحدة المخابرات العسكرية “8200” في “جيش” الاحتلال، من أنّهم “لن يتطوّعوا لأداء الخدمة إذا تم تمرير خطة التعديل القضائي” التي تتبناها حكومة نتنياهو.

كما وقّع ما يزيد على 100 ضابط ومقاتل في “منظومة العمليات الخاصة” التابعة للاستخبارات العسكرية، ومن بينهم لواءات، على عريضة قالوا فيها محذرين: “إذا ما تواصل التشريع، فلن نستمرّ في الخدمة، ولن نخدم بعد ذلك في الاحتياط”.

ويسود القلق لدى جيش الاحتلال من وقوع أزمة خطرة في جهاز الاحتياط.

وصرّح غالانت، بأنّ كل دعوة لرفض الخدمة في “جيش” الاحتلال هي مسّ بأمن “إسرائيل”.

من جهته، صرّح وزير أمن الاحتلال الإسرائيلي السابق عومر بار ليف، بأنّ التوقف عن الخدمة في الاحتياط أمرٌ وارد في حال جرت الموافقة على ما سمّاه “الثورة القضائية”.

اقرأ أيضاً: حكومة نتنياهو الجديدة: ستُضعف الجيش الإسرائيلي وستزيد التوترات في الضفة الغربية

مارك ميلي يصل الأراضي الفلسطينية المحتلة لبحث “التحديات الإقليمية”

يأتي ذلك بالتزامن مع وصول رئيس الجيوش الأميركية المشتركة الجنرال مارك ميلي إلى الأراضي الفلسطينية المحتلة لبحث “التحديات الإقليمية وفرص التعاون والتنسيق بين الجيشين”.

وسيلتقي ميلي خلال زيارته، رئيس الأركان الإسرائيلي هرتسي هليفي، ويعتزم لقاءات مع وزير الأمن وكبار مسؤولي المؤسسة الأمنية.

وكان رئيس المعارضة الإسرائيلية يائير لابيد قد حذّر سابقاً من أن “تمرير قانون التعديلات القضائية سيُفقد إسرائيل الولايات المتحدة ويلحق الضرر بالاقتصاد”، مؤكداً أنّ “واشنطن مرعوبة مما يحدث في إسرائيل”.

ولاقى مشروع نتنياهو القضائي “كلمات تحذير من إدارة الرئيس الأميركي جو بايدن وأعضاء الكونغرس الأميركي المؤيدين لإسرائيل”.

ورأت صحيفة “واشنطن بوست” الأميركية أنّ “حكومة نتنياهو، في اعتداءاتها العدوانية على المحاكم ووسائل الإعلام والمؤسسات الديمقراطية الأخرى، وفي خطابها الحارق تجاه الفلسطينيين، إلى جانب التساهل مع المستوطنين، تخاطر بتمزيق العلاقات مع أقوى مؤيديها”. 

اقرأ أيضاً: رئيس “الشاباك” السابق: قد نصل إلى “حرب أهلية” في غضون أسابيع

Abortion and the Culture War

About me

August 8, 2021 

An Analysis by Lawrence Davidson

Part I—Competing Rights

For those American readers not old enough to remember a time before the nationwide legalization of abortion through the court case known as Roe v. Wade (1973), let me remind you of some of the attributes of that era. The prevailing law made it very difficult to get an abortion in the United States, but not impossible. The real question was how much danger a pregnant woman was willing to face in the illegal “back alley” operations that were available. You see, as with most things illegal, a “black market” existed which would not only eliminate the unborn fetus, but often kill the distraught mother as well. If you were well off and determined, you could go abroad and have the operation performed with relative safety—often making the whole issue one of class privilege. Behind the scenes, one found two dramas played out: (a) the frantic, sometimes near-suicidal despair of the pregnant woman, often only a teenager, and (b) the sanctimonious prattle of those anti-abortionists —mostly men—who said they represented the will of an imagined deity.

Having said this, I do not want the reader to believe that there is no moral question when it comes to abortion. From an evolutionary standpoint, the fetus is a potential human being upon conception and may well have a “moral right” to that life trajectory. Yet that right exists within a broader context which requires that it should be balanced against a woman’s “moral right” to control her own body and the child’s “moral right” not to be born into an environment where he or she is basically unwanted. If we were to deal with this issue logically, the real answer to the dilemma of competing rights is surely free and universally available contraception—along with sensible sex education.

Part II—Anti-Abortion and Gun Mania—An Eerie Connection

There is yet another relevant fact to consider. Remember that the whole anti-abortion movement assumes that human life is uniquely valuable. However, our societies often do not act as if human life is something special—morally or otherwise. Take a look at the essay I wrote in June 2019 entitled “The Alleged Preciousness of Human Life.” I think it lays this failing out clearly and convincingly. Here in the United States, this fact is most obviously brought home by the society’s glorification of guns and the resultant deadly mayhem.

Actually, there is an eerie connection between the abortion issue and gun mania. It runs, of course, through the Republican Party. At the end of July 2021, “228 Republican members of Congress told the Supreme Court that it should overturn Roe v. Wade and release the court’s ‘vise grip on abortion politics.’” These are the same politicians who have sworn loyalty to the official Republican party platform that states “We uphold the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, a natural inalienable right . . . secured by the Second Amendment. Lawful gun ownership enables Americans to exercise their God-given right of self-defense.” In other words, the Republicans who demand that the courts subscribe to their view of the “right to life” of unborn children are the same ones who insist that each citizen has a right to possess society’s chief instrument of death. In this effort they invoke, once again, the approval of that imagined deity. They also misinterpret the Second Amendment, and play fast and loose with such words as “natural” and “inalienable.” Well, as it is often said of American politics, hypocrisy is the name of the game.

Part III—Culture War

Both abortion “rights” and gun “rights” are parts of a continuing American culture war—which also includes other hot topics such as real equality for Blacks, Native Americans, women in general, homosexuals, and transgender people, as well as other questions such as multiculturalism.

None of these issues existed as publicly divisive ones before the 1960s. Before that time, the misleading though strongly promoted image of American society was white, male, heterosexual, and benevolent. For those old enough to recognize it, the benign version of this model was given in a classic TV show called The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which aired from 1952 to 1966. The resulting false picture of the near-perfect American family dwelling in a community where there were no serious social problems became so iconic that, subsequently, many Americans came to idealize the 1950s. One strongly suspects that the anti-abortion and pro-gun lobbies still do.

The Ozzie and Harriet model had broken down by the second half of the 1960s. What shattered the iconic image were (a) the demand for equal rights, both in social and political terms, for, initially, the country’s Black minority and female majority—that is, the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement and (b) opposition to the Vietnam War, which shredded any claims of “God-given” moral exceptionalism for the nation.

The “excrement hit the fan” the moment these campaigns for equal rights and peace began to gain political backing. People knew this was happening because new laws came into existence: anti-discrimination laws and others like the “war-powers act” which sought to limit presidential power to wage undeclared war. These were seen as progressive moves attuned to a different, if yet unfulfilled, humane canon of American ideals.

From that general moment until today, the progressive equality camp has been engaged in a culture war—really a struggle for political power—with the camp that favors the traditional white-male-heterosexual-anti-abortionist setup.

Part IV—Fascist Potential

For the past five years Donald Trump has been the leader of the latter camp, and this alignment helped him win the presidency in 2016. During this time Trump has been accused of racism, misogyny and sexual harassment, being a deadbeat, tax evasion, nepotism, blackmail, compulsive lying, encouraging police violence, subversion and insurrection, and being an advocate for the destruction of the world’s climate, among other things. If even half of these allegations are true, it means that the white-male-heterosexual-anti-abortionist crowd is quite willing to have a criminal personality with fascist leanings as their leader.

One way to interpret this is that, for this camp, democracy is not an important issue. It was democracy that led to the progressive change they hate and fear, and democracy that seems unable to reverse this course as quick as they would like. If voter rolls expand and gerrymandering is corrected, their influence will shrink. Under these circumstances this side in the culture war is willing to throw democracy out in favor of an authoritarian government run by thugs. We already see intimations of this in Arizona, Florida, and Texas, to say nothing at the U.S. capital on January 6, 2021.

One might ask, can the sane citizens of the U.S. take hope in Trump’s defeat in 2020? The answer is, perhaps not. If Donald Trump keeled over from a fatal coronary tomorrow, we would still be in trouble as a nation. One indicator of this, relevant to the abortion question, is that, in his brief stay in the White House, he was able to appoint to the Supreme Court three reactionary judges—making the balance 6 to 3 in favor of decisions turning the clock back to a pre-progressive time. The constitutional argument these six judges will most likely use toward this end is “states rights”—turning important social decisions over to state legislatures even if these bodies are filled with anti-democratic, conspiracy-theorist, paranoid, irrational politicians.

Part V—Democratic Party Weakness

This brings us full circle back to Roe v. Wade. “At issue before the court is a Mississippi law that bars most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy [Roe v. Wade set the cut off at 24 weeks when most experts believe fetus viability occurs.] There is no exception for rape or incest. The court will render its decision by next June, in the lead up to the mid-term elections.” Upholding the Mississippi law would invalidate Roe v. Wade and the legal status of nationwide abortion.

If legal precedent was a factor in this contest, there would be no doubt that Roe v. Wade would be upheld. For over forty years both lower court and past Supreme Court decisions have upheld the present law affirming the “woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability.” But, because the Trump administration managed to shift the balance of power on the high court, most observers now expect that Roe v. Wade will fall. Like wolves circling a wounded prey, various states with Republican legislatures have “introduced more than 500 restrictions on abortion over the past four months, a huge increase from previous years.”

In the meantime, the Democratic administration of Joe Biden has not spoken out strongly about the possible demise of Roe v. Wade. In fact, President Biden, who is Catholic and perhaps fears increased criticism by the Catholic Church, has refused to use the word “abortion” in public. His administration has also chosen not to challenge other conservative icons, such as the issue of gun control (or lack thereof). Put it all together and one suspects that President Joe Biden is a man bypassed by time. He is a politician of an age when bipartisan cooperation, and thus meaningful compromise, was possible. Yet this ended with the Obama presidency (2009-2017), when the Republican leadership, which is still in place, systematically attempted to defeat or stall everything President Obama attempted to accomplish. Biden was a witness to all of this in his role as vice president, but he seems to have learned nothing from that experience.

Part VI—Conclusion

So here is the situation: (1) An ex-president with a sociopathic personality leads a Republican minority of mostly white, heterosexual, male conspiracy theorists who have also taken up the cause of outlawing most abortions and, given half the chance, are perfectly willing to selectively overthrow the U.S. Constitution; (2) the defense of the realm is in the hands of Democratic Party leaders who, for the most part, have misjudged the current situation and rely on traditional bipartisanship—to wit: they are trying to compromise with those who do not respect the present democratic system; (3) as a consequence, leaders like Joe Biden have probably lost that part of the nation’s progressive achievements encoded in Roe v. Wade, and perhaps a lot more; (4) finally, in 2022 there will be mid-term elections for the Congress—to reelect the Republicans as they now exist is to put into power the bigoted, the prevaricators, and often the deranged.

It is anyone’s guess if, devoid of able and forceful Democratic leadership clearly articulating what is at stake, enough voting American citizens will understand the risk or have the motivation to stop a reactionary takeover.

Mind blowing hypocrisy!

Mind blowing hypocrisy!

January 06, 2021

The Saker

I just listened to Trey Gowdy and a few others GOP big-shots condemn the “terrible violations of the law” committed by the protestors today and I take my hat off to these folks: they are truly world class hypocrites.

When cops and mayors refuse to protect the innocent, the rule of law is doing great!

When the letter soup agencies spend millions on a typical witch hunt, the rule of law is doing great!

When the First Amendment is being destroyed by Big Tech, the rule of law is doing great!

When the corporate legacy ziomedia brazenly silences the President, and simply does not report on crucial events, the rule of law is doing great!

When elections are stolen, the rule of law is doing great!

When courts refuse to enforce the law, the rule of law is doing great!

When the Supreme Court refuses to defend the Constitution, the rule of law is doing great!

But when the people, literally, those whom the elected officials are supposed to represent, demonstrate all day peacefully and then a few, not necessarily even Trump supporters (false flags are very easy to organize with crowds!), storm the halls of Congress, then the GOP bigshots take to the air and lament the “tragedy” of the law being violated.

No country and no regime can stand on such truly galactic levels of doublethink, hypocrisy and cowardice.

This is the beginning of the end of this regime.

My thoughts tonight are with the “deplorables”.  In the prophetic words of George Orwell:

“If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.”  

Orwell’s “proles” are our “deplorables”.  And for all the self-evident weaknesses and delusions, they are the only ones left, literally, and they will have to be the soil from which the liberation of the USA will have to begin.

The rest of them make me feel nauseated.

The Power of Confusion

The Power of Confusion

December 30, 2020

By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog

It now seems certain that we have a Jon Bidet for president. For if a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a Biden, metaphorically speaking, by any other name still smells like a poorly maintained sanitary device, however many euphemisms the imagination may body forth out of the forms of things unknown.

The American election campaign with its arcane modalities, along with the contemporary pandemic narrative, and somehow functional to it, have revealed the progress of an inextricable confusion. Statistics, medicine, health, illness, science, opinion, belief, critique, criticism, freedom, law, crime, punishment, openness, censorship, liberty, compulsion, have lost their original meanings. And the amazed world by such amazing changes, no longer knows which is which.

There are ethical bombings, therapeutic missiles, democratic assassinations and humanitarian imperialism. Even the most perspicacious reasoner may be easily bewildered, while the mythical average citizen, lost in the mental labyrinth of Newspeak, feels as if he had stumbled into the utter darkness of a starless universe.

Still, looking at the whole as impartially as we can, it cannot be denied that confusion is the raw material of power.

The general conception of power describes it as a regime of asymmetric transactions involving a strong dealing with a weaker contractor. Disrespect for the laws means jail, failure to pay bills leads to extinction of service, non-payment for ‘protection’ results in the store being burned, etc. The basis of power is then a concrete threat with the consequent fear of the threatened.

If the relationship of meanings were so straightforward, the nature of power would not require further investigation. However, reality shows that he who doesn’t comply with the laws can incur penalties, but power may and can treat much worse him who tries to comply with them.

That power is based on fear is patently clear, but fear creates assuefaction and can also be rationalized. However, a rational analysis of power does not imply the acceptance that power is rational. On the contrary, nonsense and self-censorship represent a constant of its behavior and communications, leading to the conclusion that power is schizogenic and schizocratic, as a European philosopher has determined.

Examples. Ever since Reagan and Thatcher the operating economic concept has been the oxymoronic concept of expansion with austerity, meaning, in practice, gluttony at the top and hunger at the bottom. For capitalism likes deflation along with the pauperization of the unworthy crowd. But in a regime of constant stagnation who will pay the taxes?

Inter-imperialist and inter-capitalist conflicts may explain some inconsistencies we are witnessing – e.g. demonizing and threatening China while buying all that China can sell. But there is no such conflict when considering economic policies. If Trump really wanted to defend the most national capitalistic entities against transnational ones, what was the point of indiscriminately reducing taxes to all corporations, domestic and transnational?

The Supreme Court refused to examine the charges of massive fraud in the presidential elections, brought forth and demonstrated by the plaintiff. The reasoning, in layman’s terms, is that fraud was none of the Court’s business, even when it involves the actual future of the country – of whose laws, and therefore civilized existence the Supreme Court is the supreme arbiter. One reasonable conclusion is that the majority of the Supreme Court does not feel as powerful or secure as the supremacy implied in its appellation would suggest. In laymen’s terms some of the ‘supremes’ fear for their ass. The confused citizen wonders what is ‘supreme’ about the Supreme Court.

On the other hand power does not live by planning but by power, as if in a kind of blissful irresponsibility. Where power, for maximum effectiveness, includes confusion and nonsense. During my corporate days, I remember passing by rows of cubicles in a large office hall, one cubicle for each individual, veritable monuments to the unknown employee. In some of them the dweller had hanged a poster with the script, “If you cannot dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”

And in terms of pure domination, nonsense pays off; for nonsense is more seductive than fear. US President Harry Truman is credited with the sentence summing up the principle of psycho-war, “if you cannot convince them, confuse them”. In reality power prefers to confuse rather than convince, since beliefs can change. Both fear-based domination and conviction-based consensus are uncertain and transient, while a confusional state can perpetuate itself indefinitely over time, establishing a sense of permanent loss and fragility and thus a lasting dependence. Covid-19 docet.

Another classical example. Communism in Russia died 30 years ago. And yet the US cabal sees Russia as the same threatening power of yonder years. The proverbial average citizen, more interested in the sexuality of royals and of show-people than in the actual world around him, will depend on the televisual ministry of truth for actual news, the shorter the better, leading to the average citizen’s assured and lasting dependence on lies.

Some psychopaths, though not being in a position of strength, can establish dominant relations over other people; this is achieved through a behavioral pattern where an attitude of giving an exaggerated importance to the other is alternated with an exactly opposite attitude, contempt and ridicule. By so dong the victim is persuaded that he lost the benevolence of the other because of some personal mistake. While fear can be rationalized, this confusional state, instead, leads to an uncritical identification with one’s aggressor.

The development of the Covid emergency demonstrates the principle. Power has alternated an exaggerated attention to the health and lives of citizens with callous disregard for their economic survival. Even the most sordid business connected to the emergency is presented to public opinion with a communications technique already described in literature. Power can be angry at you for harboring suspicion while, at the same time, it makes you feel that what you suspect is certain.

Hence the ordinary citizen today does not know what power wants from him. He strives to literally follow the most absurd rules, at times nonsensical, at times draconian, at times falsely permissive. Yet, the more he strives to comply, the more he is threatened with imminent new dangers (e.g. new strains of the same virus requiring more coercion and (?) new vaccines). In the end the situation dampens the desire for rebellion, while it reinforces, in the most part, the feeling of having something wrong within oneself. For a confusional state, therefore, creates more dependence than fear or consent.

Equally, a confusional state blocks the individual’s mind from perceiving the massive buffoonery of which he is the target. In this sense, and from the point of view of power, buffoons are a godsend – because they don’t understand what they are doing, believe everything which is in the domain of personal interest, know how to lie because their whole life is a dissimulation, and create enough confusion to disorient people and prevent the birth of a coordinated and widened opposition.

The instrumental use of the virus has been contradicted and exposed by many. Who are competent, illustrious people, credible on paper at least as the ensigns of the virus, and have provided mountains of evidence for an operation with horrible or at least questionable ends. Just to quote an example, during the last 30 years, the US government had to indemnify people damaged by vaccines for a total amount of 4.4 billion $. A proportionate indemnity applied for people equally damaged by vaccines in the UK. Yet, as it is widely known, Pfizer is legally exempted from compensating patients damaged by the vaccine.

As for the highly paid, highly visible and highly wrong ‘scientists’ pontificating on sundry viruses, they are living proof that no estimates are more in danger of erroneous calculations then those by which a man computes the force of his own genius.

Regarding the concurrent goals of the pandemic, the operation is not even hidden, so much so that the term ‘The Great Reset” (attributed to the Caliban-looking Karl Schwab, mastermind of the World Economic Forum) has almost become part of the common parlance. Yet, such is the mental and moral armor that confusion, conformism and fear have instilled into most, that the extraordinary conjuncture (virus-great reset) is either overlooked at large or mostly relegated to the limbo of so-called conspiracy theories.

From such a perspective, the parallels between the American elections and the Covid phenomenon are more meaningful than random. Can there actually be a straight connection? As long as the inquirer is not asked to resort to crude generalizations and vulgar simplifications such as a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ he may be allowed to proceed. For history (and indeed life) can be compared to a Byzantine mosaic, composed of an apparently endless number of tiles. A single independent tile could not possibly suggest or enable to imagine the whole. Yet the mosaic would lose its completeness if that tile were missing.

I will therefore collect some ‘tiles’ of the “Great Reset,” which encompasses events intrinsically connected, namely the fraudulent recent presidential elections, the pandemic as a means for crowd and mass control, the practical elimination of the middle class, the fight against Western Christian civilization, the ethnic replacement in Europe and America of the white race via mass third-world in-migration, corresponding to the final stage of the Kalergi plan.

Known to many, I will just repeat here the end goal of the plan, the substitution of the white Western ethnicity with a Negroid race via miscegenation. Images of men on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs will give the idea of how the “new European” will look, writes Kalergi. And ruling over this new inferior race will be the Jews, the best of whom will have, in the meantime, intermarried with the best and most successful whites, to amend some racial characteristics among the chosen people, produced by millennial intertribal marriages.

The previous paragraph may sound anti-Semitic were it not an actual quote from the book “Praktischer Idealismus” published by Kalergy, the recognized founder of the European Union, whose work was massively supported by Jewish bankers both in Europe and America.

Still, all this could be thought of as a bold hypothesis, were it not confirmed by palpable evidence that only willful mental blindness could ignore or contradict.

Just one example among many, concurrent with the elections and the pandemic, the New York Times, under ownership of the chosen people since 1895, carrier of the ‘official’ political American opinion, and best known newspaper in the world, published an article by Roger Cohen titled, “Trump’s Last Stand for White America.” (Oct 16, 2020) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/opinion/trump-2020.html

Yet, historically, we are approaching the end of a project whose roots sink into what for us is a bare faint remembrance of things past. Still, there is no shortness of evidence. For example, thus writes Emperor Claudius, in 41 AD, “I command the Jews not to agitate for anything beyond that which they have hitherto enjoyed, and not from henceforth, as if they lived in two cities, to send two embassies — a thing which never occurred before now – nor to intrude themselves into games and elections, but to profit by what they possess and to enjoy in a city, not their own, an abundance of all good things, and not to introduce or invite others of their race who make voyages to Alexandria from Syria or Egypt, thus compelling me to conceive the worst suspicions; otherwise I will by all means take vengeance upon them, as fomenting a general plague upon the whole world.”

Claudius made this proclamation, in response to riots between Greeks and Jews in Alexandria. He thought that peace in the city would be restored if the Jews ceased certain negative behaviors. Meaning agitating for heightened and special privileges (“to agitate for anything beyond that which they have hitherto enjoyed”); attempting to circumvent established practices of representative politics (“to send two embassies — a thing which never occurred before now”); attempting to intrude into, and disrupt, the cultural life of the Alexandrians (“to intrude themselves into games and elections”); attempting to manipulate the demographic balance of the city (“to introduce or invite Jews who make voyages to Alexandria from Syria or Egypt”); and finally, abusing and exploiting the advantage of their diaspora condition to cause problems internationally (“fomenting a general plague upon the whole world”).

Next, it may be instructive to compare the pronouncement of Emperor Claudius with the following very recent speech by the good Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi, which some have titled, “God will bury America.” It is a transcription but the original can be found here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkuofEh-5c8&feature=youtu.be

“The Jews run the show in the world. Not because they want to but because that’s what God wants. And it’s written in the Torah that the non-Jew admit that this is the word of God. And if they did not admit what is the proof?

But in the Torah it says that in every nation you, the Jews, will be always the highlight of the place. Even though we are only a small part of the community compared to America, 300 million Americans, 5 million Jews, no comparison. But the Jews are everywhere. All the systems of Trump, Jews. All of the system of the Sleepy Joe, Jews. Obama? Jews. Everyone around them Jews, conservative Jews, “Habat knit (?)” Jews. All somehow, same thing was in Spain, same thing was in many different countries. When a country hosts the Jews, and the Jews live in that country with freedom, God blesses this place thanks to the Jews. As soon as they torture them, or kill them, or throw them out of the country, the end of the empire shortly comes to them one by one.

The Roman empire, when it started with (messing with) the Jews that was the end. After the Jews no more Roman Empire. The Greeks? Same story. Babylonia disappeared. Persia (inaudible) in Iran modern days.

The Iranian Shah was very good to the Jews. Iran was the fourth powerful country in the world, in his time. After Russia, America, I think Germany. Iran, who was selling oil, controlling the market. Iran was an empire several years ago. The Jews ran away when Khamenei came and Iran went back in time 1000 years. The end of Iran came. Germany, they killed the Jews. It used to be a massive empire – they are now one more country, nothing special. Spain, same thing. the Jews were in power, then they did the Spanish Inquisition. Spain and Portugal? There is nothing left from them. Russia… there were many hundreds of thousands of Jews there. Russia was a powerful empire. The Jews left Russia, the USSR collapsed. the Jews in America have assimilated and have nothing to worry. But the Jews that are religious will have to get away within a year or two or five – all have to run away from here. Once we would leave this place Hashem (God) will bury America. That’s what is going to happen. Not because I am some kind of a prophet. I am not giving you any prophecy, I am just describing to you a divine formula. The chosen people when they (the locals) are going to be good and nice to them I (God) will bless you from that place.”

Many have described but relatively few have given logical explanations for the overwhelming power that Zionists hold in the countries they are hosts of. Recently I heard one that, in my view, merits consideration. It goes as follows. Like any other group or people or nation, Jews contain a criminal element. But their criminal element is exceptional and uniquely different from any other criminal entity, because of their historicity as a global travelling group. This always gives the criminal element an advantage as long as they operate in the criminal ground, and that’s why they occupy positions of power and control. As the good rabbi said, “All the systems of Trump, Jews. All of the system of the Sleepy Joe, Jews. Obama? Jews. Everyone around them Jews, conservative Jews, “Habat knit (?)” Jews. All somehow, same thing was in Spain, same thing was in many different countries.”

It’s not because of just skill, it’s because of coercion, bribery, blackmail, corruption and deceit that many of these people end up in positions of power. The host nation is not capable of resisting them once they are brought into the pen, when the wolf has been allowed among the sheep.

Joe Bidet is a ‘Catholic’ sheep who excels at applying his tongue with gusto to the buttocks of his masters. Besides, 30 pieces of silver will buy more than one Judas. In various occasions he has defined himself an ardent Zionist. There is no depth of flattery he did not resort to. As when he told one of the many Zionist organizations in the country that, “The Jews have been major contributors to the success of America.”

In this context, it may be interesting to examine an extract from one of his very recent declarations to an audience of African Americans.

Biden said he wants to appeal to Trump’s 75 million voters but not by “giving them anything.” He repeatedly drew parallels between white Trump supporters and the Ku Klux Klan, and further suggested he was planning to use the bully pulpit to harass white Trump supporters for their “racism” as though they’re KKK members.

He also said he got a call from the Pope to congratulate him on his victory and the Pope told him that “the most important thing you have to do is to deal with racism.”

As a side note, Pope Bergoglio said that migrants are ‘God’, that European must miscegenate because the Madonna was a mulatto. And as a symbolic sign of a more-than-symbolic subservience of the Catholic church to the New World Order, the most recent Nativity Scene in St. Peter’s square was made up of Startrek characters. And in the Nativity Scenes of some Italian churches Joseph and Mary wear anti-Covid masks. It may be more colorful than meaningful but many Catholics openly call Bergoglio the “Antichrist.”

Biden talked about the deluge of biracial couples in commercials as evidence of progress and an indicator of where society is heading“Fifteen years ago could you turn on the television and see few commercials being biracial.”

“You want to know where society’s going?” Biden said“Watch entertainment, watch the profit motive.”

“Why are these commercials, so many of them biracial? The young generation is changing, they’re demanding more, they don’t come with the baggage — maybe 10, 20, 25 percent of them are pure racists, who knows — but the vast majority, the vast majority, are not at all (as) when I was coming up.”

It was interesting to hear Biden talking so forthrightly. Unlike Trump, he’s coming with plans (read, those of his masters). Unfortunately, they are disgusting and, as he said, “This country is doomed” (meaning, unless it opens the border to the third world and whites miscegenate).

Trump did much to promote Zionist objectives, including the recognition of Jerusalem as capital of the Jewish state and of the occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory, the assassination of eminent and respected Iranian leaders, the acquiescence in considering ISIS a ‘terrorist’ organization – whereas it is/was but a Saudi setup with strong Israeli participation. Yet it is astonishing that Zion did not find it sufficient – maybe short of a public circumcision, possibly performed by the aforementioned Rabbi Mizrachi.

Given Biden’s plans, the pandemic is a perfect tool of confusion and a tile in the mosaic of the Kalergi plan. As well as a perfect test of how much and how far elites can go in (effectively) emasculating entire populations, preventing or eliminating the risk of upheavals – in the style of the now-all-but-forgotten Gilets Jaunes. For the pandemic has brought the threat – no matter whether real or narrated – to the biological level of pure existence. A state to which attempts are made to reduce us, so as to erase the resistance and the consciousness that were beginning to emerge.

In summary, if multinational, pharmaceutical and banking cartels make up the laws, if America accepts the verdict of falsified elections (which means accepting the death of representation), if Europe and America are driven by lobbies and cartels still seeking all sorts of hegemonies, then we live in a perfect tyranny, because it is a tyranny that successfully hides itself.

Finally, the present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful. But we think, therefore we are, and thought is still free from the extant censorship, unthinkable just a few decades ago.

We can take the view that so long as Heaven has condemned us to suffer, patience is a virtue. On the other hand, we can hope and work at creating the anger required to destroy tyranny. For, as Thomas Aquinas said, “The absence of anger is a sign of the absence of reason.”

Biden won? 2016-2020 showed what the US does to even mild reformers

US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (L) talks with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a rally with fellow Democrats before voting on H.R. 1, or the People Act, on the East Steps of the US Capitol on March 08, 2019 in Washington, DC. (AFP photo)

Friday, 18 December 2020 11:21 AM  [ Last Update: Friday, 18 December 2020 12:07 PM ]

Biden won? 2016-2020 showed what the US does to even mild reformers
Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

by Ramin Mazaheri and cross-posted with PressTV

What the four-year epoch of Donald Trump has made staggeringly clear to non-Americans is that no one – not even a democratically-elected American – will be able to even moderately alter the US capitalist-imperialist foreign policy trajectory without undergoing a no-holds barred attack aimed at bringing that person down.

What the election of Joe Biden (although “installation” is clearly more accurate) shows is that the current American elite is wrongly yet firmly guided by the the self-serving and evangelical ideas which have dominated US foreign policy since the implosion of the USSR in 1991: “the end of history”, unipolar dominance and “humanitarian interventionism”.

Trump’s defeat is still an assumption, but – given that the Supreme Court will likely continue to sidestep the issue of state executive orders for mail-in ballots that bypassed a democratic check and balance by the legislative branch – the staggering burden of proof on those who claim a criminal conspiracy of electoral fraud have a lot of proving to do, and in a very short period of time.

What’s certain is that Trump was undoubtedly the one person who put fear into the all-smothering US establishment in my lifetime, and probably yours. He dared to cast mainstream doubt on the elites’ versions of free trade (neoliberal capitalism) and foreign policy (imperialism), and he progressed the American conversation from Eisenhower’s seemingly technocratic “military-industrial complex” to the far more nefarious yet accurate “Deep State”.

Yes, Trump has weakened America domestically via his policies of deregulation and liberal (not neoliberal) capitalism, but this column talks about the new post-Trump realisations now breaking over the non-American world:

Trump has irrevocably changed foreign perceptions of America – in it’s cultural, social, political and economic totality – because the world witnessed the shocking extremism the US establishment/1%/Deep State/military-industrial-media complex/etc. was willing to use day after day just to take him down.

Trump showed the world who they are really dealing with: forces much stronger than even the US executive

Few Americans wanted to openly admit that what Trump initially suggested to the world was actually a new type of global competition, instead of one predicated on the usual American, “You’re either with us and for goodness and progress, or against us and for the terrorists”. But that was a major change, and it was predicated on Trump’s non-mainstream politician admission that America had fallen so far that people had to actually do some work to “Make America Great Again” – he essentially admitted it was no longer a unipolar world.

Trump openly promised death to Iran, Palestine and Cuba, but in 2016 part of his shock was that he clearly had accepted a multipolar world as he shockingly talked about extending an olive branch to Russia and a purchase order to China.

Trump saw that because of the financial crimes and corruption of the US elite, as well as their failed neoliberal response to the Great Recession, it was undeniable that America (and it’s European allies) had degraded and been equalled, or in some areas surpassed by, China and Russia. Trump admitted this, and thus the businessman wanted to “do business” with America’s two recalcitrant peers while still crushing revolutionary, sovereignty-demanding or just smaller nations with the competitive might the US still had held on to.

Trump – of course – was not just unhindered but applauded by the US Deep State in expanding upon the existing policy of crushing revolutionary countries, but he was clearly forced into antagonising those two American equals when initially he obviously did not want to.

So what does Trump’s ousting now mean for those two major countries? It means normal, peaceful relations with the US are now impossible for at least four years. How can they possibly conclude otherwise?

Why would China, Russia, or the other undoubted enemies of Washington possibly expect any detente with the US from 2021 onwards when the Trump era has unequivocally proven to them that such detente will never be permitted by the US elite at any cost?

It is now crystal clear that the US president does not shape foreign policy – he only implements it. If he doesn’t we see what happens: the US establishment was aghast at his calls to prosecute “crooked Hillary”, but Trump looks like he will be the first ex-president to ever face prosecution.

Who is actually giving the foreign policy orders? Feel free to guess my opinion, but we know it is certainly not public opinion. Trump obviously tried to please public opinion and pull out of Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere and we all saw what happened – he was absolutely vilified for it in all the US power circles.

There are countless articles in American mainstream media which prove this analysis right; which confirm that Biden will be even more belligerent to China and Russia; which confirm he will use the same drones and sanctions on all “un-invadable” nations as Trump did. It’s clear from Biden’s statements and cabinet choices that – in policies towards non-Americans – he is going to deploy the worst of Trump’s tools but, crucially, combine them with the worst of phony Clintonian “humanitarian interventionism”.

So why would China or Russia kowtow to Biden when the 2016-2020 era shows that total belligerence is the only possibility Washington permits? Why would China or Russia expect Biden to extend mutually-beneficial cooperation? It’s not going to arrive, and part of Trump’s downfall was that he even tried.

One must look at it from the perspective of non-Americans: 2016-2020 has been incredibly shocking in the way that a political newcomer who seemed to want peace in some places was pulled down by a myriad of rabid and hysterical monkeys. Biden and the US establishment wants the non-American to act as if 2016-2020 never happened, but who could possibly forget what shockingly terrible actions were on display in the US over the past four years to prevent any new policies, especially in foreign relations?

Obama was a successful ‘brand change’, but Biden will not be

In 2016 the US was already so weakened by its Great Recession-inducing financial crimes that Trump came to the fore. In 2020 the US is even more gutted, due to this spectacularly awful year. So why would Russia and China not meet the confrontations which Washington is clearly still intent on posing to them?

Biden has none of Obama’s charisma, youth, acting ability, etc. He behaves like an old grandfather who will do anything to earn the attention and admiration of his grandchildren, not someone who can credibly back up claims of being the competent leader of the self-appointed “leader of the free world”.

That is why China is now showing a shocked Australia who really needs who economically via unprecedented tariffs. It’s why Russia is sending the S-400 defense system to Turkey and is having their ambassador to Israel stick up for Iran no matter who it offends. It’s not a question of America being too “weak” nor realpolitik but common sense – the fall of Trump emphatically proves detente with the US is simply not going to be permitted.

More of these challenges to the US will occur in the next four years because that is all Washington wants. Of course the American people don’t want that: half the American people voted for Trump, after all, and we know that they meant nothing to the American elite for four years; the half-leftist Bernie Sanders supporters were similarly shut out once their vote has been used to push out Trump.

When we consider that 2016-2020 was more an American cultural era of “Trump, the ousting” rather than “Trump, the democratically-elected leader” it’s clear that for non-Americans Trump truly heralded the end of global cultural domination by the US, which started after World War II. Didn’t everybody say that would happen in 2016, after all? They were right, but usually for the wrong reasons. It’s no coincidence that the Iranian term gharbzadegi – or “Westoxification” – goes back to the 1940s.

Yet despite their increased division and overall weakness Washington still expects non-American nations to accept the exact same amount of smothering domination as in 1991, 2001, 2007 and even 2015.

But why?

The US is trending in the right direction economically and culturally? The election of Biden has restored US prestige? The manner in which he won inspires confidence? Biden has a foreign policy agenda which is going to be less belligerent than Trump’s unprecedented call to end America’s endless foreign wars? The US has a Belt and Road Initiative which I don’t know about?

Let’s take this moment to realise that an unprecedented, four-year confusion has come to an end: It’s clear that US reformism lost.

It wasn’t a great reformism, but it was something different and positive in some ways. To stop it the US elite gutted their own nation’s psyche, culture, integrity, friendships, families and communities.

On a visceral level, which is not yet registered intellectually, the world saw that proposing changes away from US unipolar domination inspired shocking, debasing cultural war every day for the last four years – is that a system to have faith in, or a system to give in to?

The weakest nations of the world will be pushed into line with post-Trump US leadership, but the strong nations wouldn’t be strong if they had faith in the restoration of the Washington establishment, which Biden represents. Biden is certain to keep challenging strong nations, no matter how unjust or foolish that is.

However, it’s obviously incredibly unfortunate that the moderate reforms suggested by Trump – especially the peaceful ones in foreign policy – could not even be attempted. Maybe some other American will try, but they should now be prepared to undergo the Trump treatment.

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Dispatches from the United States after the presidential election

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2) – November 5, 2020

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (2/2) – November 6, 2020

4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fight – November 7, 2020

US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized – November 9, 2020

A 2nd term is his if he really wants it, but how deep is Trump’s ‘Trumpism’? – November 10, 2020

CNN’s Jake Tapper: The overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2) – November 13, 2020

‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state? (2/2) – November 15, 2020

Where’s Donald? When 40% of voters cry ‘fraud’ you’ve got a big problem – November 17, 2020

The 4-year (neoliberal) radicalisation of US media & Bidenites’ ‘unradical radicalism’ – November 22, 2020

80% of US partisan losers think the last 2 elections were stolen – December 3, 2020

Trump declares civil war for voter integrity in breaking (or broken) USA – December 5, 2020

Mess with Texas via mail-in ballot? States secede from presidential vote – December 8, 2020

Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

Mess with Texas via mail-in ballot? States secede from presidential vote

Mess with Texas via mail-in ballot? States secede from presidential vote

December 09, 2020

by Ramin Mazaheri and cross-posted with PressTV

The United States corporate-dominated media has found that the easiest way to shape news coverage on the scores of legal challenges to the 2020 presidential election is to only report on them when the cases have lost.

After all, the more newspaper inches given to objective discussions of widespread voter fraud allegations equals the more chances an average American starts to think the election was rigged. This theory presumes that the average American is so docile and programmable that they have already completely forgotten the mainstream claims which dominated the previous four years: that the election was rigged (by Vladimir Putin).

Not reporting until a court rejects an integrity challenge also allows for a superior “I-knew-it-all-along” tone, combined with open accusations of lunacy on the part of the aggrieved party.

More than a month after the vote the party (Republicans) remains tremendously aggrieved: top pollster Gallup just reported that 83% of Republicans say that reports of Biden being the president-elect are not “accurate”. Yes, it’s an oddly-worded poll, but so many US wordsmiths have been purposely opaque since election day.

It’s always been easy to roll one’s eyes at the smug tone because such condescension will drop to the ground lack a bag of bricks with just one Supreme Court loss, after all.

Yes, the widespread US belief prior to November 3, 2020, was that their elections were poorly designed, poorly funded, poorly run, poorly counted and porous in many other ways besides, but I always thought the biggest post-election day challenge would be over the exact issue which has led to the totally unprecedented situation of states suing other states over accusations of ruining the election’s integrity:

Texas – now joined by Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas – is suing the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin over mail-in ballots.

I’ll show that the US Constitution makes it clear their case should at least be heard by the Supreme Court. The state-on-state nature already takes the case directly to the top.

The Supreme Court always had to rule on the unprecedented expansion of mail-in balloting

What’s so interesting about “democracy with US characteristics” is how the nine justices of the Supreme Court are allowed to be so very, very removed from US society. They debate in private, they grant media interviews very rarely, they don’t have to say much in court (Justice Clarence Thomas went from 2006 to 2016 without publicly asking a question), nor do they even have to give public reasons for many of the momentous decisions they make (they just rejected a key vote fraud case in Pennsylvania with one sentence, but more accurately only one word: “denied”). It’s not the Holy See of Rome, but it’s close.

But it’s not close regarding the holiness, because what this unaccountable and unelected regime of nine holds sacred is merely the 18th century US Constitution, something which is currently losing lustre worldwide by the minute.

Some, not all, of these justices are Wahhabi-like in their insistence that the document is “dead” (and perfect in its deadness), in that it must be followed both to the letter and in the spirt of the bygone (allegedly golden) age in which it was written.

Given this ideological reality doesn’t it seem clear that executive branch orders by some governors, or even just their secretaries of state, to massively and controversially flood their states with mail-in ballots violated the US Constitution – even if these actions were approved by some in the judicial branch – because they often did not get legislative branch approval? Article 1, Section 4 of the US Constitution states: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature …

Texas’ lawsuit thus asserts: “The four states exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to justify ignoring federal and state election laws and unlawfully enacting last-minute changes, thus skewing the results of the 2020 General Election. The battleground states flooded their people with unlawful ballot applications and ballots while ignoring statutory requirements as to how they were received, evaluated and counted.” The suit claims the vote in Texas was tainted by the vote in Pennsylvania, etc.

People may notice that Article 1, Section 4 does not talk about “Elections for President”, but the US elects their president by an Electoral College, not direct vote. It is regularly inferred that this clause also applies to the presidential vote, but it is actually addressed in Article 2, Section 1: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors….” Again it’s the state legislature which decides how to decide to “appoint” (not “elect”) Electoral College “Electors”, and Article 2, Section 1 is cited in Texas’ lawsuit.

I wish I could find more good media reports on this case to better inform my opinion but – as I began – you just can’t find much objective journalistic discussion on the US voter fraud causes. No well-known anti-Trump media I saw ever even broached Article 2, Section 1 – even though it was named in the lawsuit – all they had was hysterical and completely unobjective denials that the Texas lawsuit doesn’t even attempt to make a coherent argument. And yet: the Supreme Court gave the defendant states less than 48 hours to respond to Texas’ lawsuit – by 3pm on December 10.

The suit also says the expansion made the vote insecure, but forget about all the alleged vote machine tampering, the purported “smoking gun” videos, the reported 1,000 testimonies making accusations of election malfeasance – all of that either has the evidence or it doesn’t. Maybe there was a huge conspiracy of voter fraud, or maybe there wasn’t. The nation’s top intelligence official, the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, just said that all issues of election fraud must be investigated and only then would we see “whether there is a Biden administration”. Will they all be properly investigated? This is America, so all we can say for sure is that no matter what happens America will insist that they are the spotless beacon the world should follow.

But the question of mail-in ballots – this enormous change to the US voting system which inspired seemingly thousands of complaints by Donald Trump on Twitter, as well as from many regular American citizens – this is the dispute which has the power to immediately invalidate the 2020 vote.

I say: yes, it should invalidate the vote – that is, if Americans want to follow the rules of the antiquated and fundamentally aristocratic American system.

America is not a modern democracy, nor is it accountable – don’t expect the Supreme Court to rule in favor of the outsider Trump

Yes, pro-Trumpers were wrong to wait until after the election – to see if their candidate lost – before bringing this suit, but who’s to say that elite Democrats wouldn’t have forced some of their own governors to do the same thing if Biden was the projected loser? How can judges rule on a case which was never brought before them? The bottom line is that checks and balances are what make democracy “democracy”, whether that democracy is Athenian, American, Chinese socialist or Iranian Islamic, and one person should not be able to change the fundamental nature of how elections are held, even if that person is a state governor or secretary of state, and even if a state judge says their change is ok.

Modern democracies have (at least) three branches for a reason, but it’s ok that mail-in ballots were often routed around the legislative branch?

(I often say Iranian democracy has revolutionarily created a “Supreme Leader branch”. I’d also say the massive influence of the internet/digital age gives more credence to making the unofficial “Fourth Estate” – the media – an official branch. What’s wrong with more than three branches, other than: But the bourgeois West doesn’t do it?)

The re-routing (and some state legislatures, such as Nevada, did approve a sweeping expansion to mail-in ballots) of democratic processes into the hands of one person should be seen as a continuation of what Western democracy truly is: liberal strongmanism. This process became out in the open with Dubya Bush’s phony war on Iraq and the Patriot Act, continued with the ignored anti-austerity elections in Greece, is part and parcel of Emmanuel Macron’s “rubber bullet liberalism” war on France’s Yellow Vests, and was seen in 2020 when some US governors essentially said: We want Trump out so badly that we’ll change the elections by fiat to do it.

(Corona was not a valid excuse in November, because by then 2020 had seen many nations successfully and safely hold elections.)

A coronavirus vaccine was announced just two days after Biden declared victory; after months of refusals – which have fiscally disemboweled the US lower classes – Democrats finally agreed to negotiate on their heretofore totally inflexible 2nd stimulus position as soon as the calendar turned from election November to December; Facebook, Twitter and the US mainstream media currently censor the average Republican’s election reflections as if these citizens were calling for a second Holocaust.

Those are not conspiracy theories but are listed to reveal how truly terrible and power-monging the political and cultural elite is in the United States. They overreach their power time and time again, no matter how negative the effect on their domestic public or the rest of the world.

Such persons wanted Trump out, and I’m not saying that they engaged in a massive conspiracy of election fraud to do so – I’m saying that they obviously changed the fundamental nature of the election to do so.

In the US states decide individually how elections are run, but there should have been formal legislative debate about any huge changes to the election format and not merely a gubernatorial order reflected upon in private by a judge. It was undemocratic political overreach in a nation full of people who have been conditioned to believe that the boss/CEO/president can and should be able to fire/personally enrich/sanction at will.

There are enough “strict constructionists” ,”originalists” or (as I call them) “American Salafists” currently on the Supreme Court to see the logic of Texas’ argument. However, I do not think the Supreme Court will find in favor of Texas – the power-holders in the US system are fundamentally anti-Trump, I think 2016-2020 has proven ad nauseam.

Trumpism was vindicated in a grassroots way – like it or not – on November 3rd, but there are no “Trumpist” judges in the top court. Who knows, maybe Trumpism will last long enough that one day there will be, but for now what all Supreme Court judges are is merely typical American conservatives. The idea that even though Supreme Court justices are the most untouchable persons in American society and yet they will bend over backwards to please Trump is, I think, a major (but common) fallacy.

It’s clear that the 2020 election was drastically changed (just look at how voter turnout suddenly was the highest in 120 years), and it’s clear that legislatures often did not fulfil their check and balance role, and it’s clear that “strict constructionism” was not something invented by Justice Anthonin Scalia but is an ideology which has been widely discussed since the very beginning of the American republic… all that will be thrown out to throw out Trump, I predict.

This article has not been pro-Trump or anti-Trump, it is reminding how very drastic the actions of anti-Trump power-holders in the US have been. They changed the nature of the 2020 vote, and they don’t want to admit that, and the Supreme Court is not likely to unconservatively ok a shocking, once-in-three-lifetimes reversal to the 2020 presidential vote – not because of the chaos and alienation it would cause among the 99%, but because American democracy is and has always been expressly designed to protect the elite, not the people/workers/lower classes.

By the way, the only presidential vote which ever mattered at all takes place in less than a week – the Electoral College votes on December 14th. I think this year’s general election on the presidential vote has provided a more interesting – yet legally meaningless – diversion than it normally does, don’t you?

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Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2) – November 5, 2020

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (2/2) – November 6, 2020

4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fight – November 7, 2020

US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized – November 9, 2020

A 2nd term is his if he really wants it, but how deep is Trump’s ‘Trumpism’? – November 10, 2020

CNN’s Jake Tapper: The overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2) – November 13, 2020

‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state? (2/2) – November 15, 2020

Where’s Donald? When 40% of voters cry ‘fraud’ you’ve got a big problem – November 17, 2020

The 4-year (neoliberal) radicalisation of US media & Bidenites’ ‘unradical radicalism’ – November 22, 2020

80% of US partisan losers think the last 2 elections were stolen – December 3, 2020

Trump declares civil war for voter integrity in breaking (or broken) USA – December 5, 2020

Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire

 December 5, 2020

We’re now living in an age of opacity, as Rudy Giuliani pointed out in a courtroom recently. Here was the exchange:

“‘In the plaintiffs’ counties, they were denied the opportunity to have an unobstructed observation and ensure opacity,’ Giuliani said. ‘I’m not quite sure I know what opacity means. It probably means you can see, right?’

“‘It means you can’t,’ said U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann.

“‘Big words, your honor,’ Giuliani said.”

Big words indeed! And he couldn’t have been more on the mark, whether he knew it or not. Thanks in part to him and to the president he’s represented so avidly, even as hair dye or mascara dripped down his face, we find ourselves in an era in which, to steal a biblical phrase from Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, all of us see as if “through a glass darkly.”

As in Election Campaign 2016, Donald Trump isn’t the cause but a symptom (though what a symptom!) of an American world going down. Then as now, he somehow gathered into his one-and-only self so many of the worst impulses of a country that, in this century, found itself eternally at war not just with Afghans and Iraqis and Syrians and Somalis but increasingly with itself, a true heavyweight of a superpower already heading down for the count.

Here’s a little of what I wrote back in June 2016 about The Donald, a reminder that what’s happening now, bizarre as it might seem, wasn’t beyond imagining even so many years ago:

“It’s been relatively easy… — at least until Donald Trump arrived to the stunned fascination of the country (not to speak of the rest of the planet) — to imagine that we live in a peaceable land with most of its familiar markers still reassuringly in place… In truth, however, the American world is coming to bear ever less resemblance to the one we still claim as ours, or rather that older America looks increasingly like a hollowed-out shell within which something new and quite different has been gestating.

“After all, can anyone really doubt that representative democracy as it once existed has been eviscerated and is now — consider Congress Exhibit A — in a state of advanced paralysis, or that just about every aspect of the country’s infrastructure is slowly fraying or crumbling and that little is being done about it? Can anyone doubt that the constitutional system — take war powers as a prime example or, for that matter, American liberties — has also been fraying? Can anyone doubt that the country’s classic tripartite form of government, from a Supreme Court missing a member by choice of Congress to a national security state that mocks the law, is ever less checked and balanced and increasingly more than ‘tri’?”

Even then, it should have been obvious that Donald Trump was, as I also wrote in that campaign year, a wildly self-absorbed symptom of American-style imperial decline on a planet increasingly from hell. And that, of course, was four years before the pandemic struck or there was a wildfire season in the West the likes of which no one had imagined possible and a record 30 storms that more or less used up two alphabets in a never-ending hurricane season.

In the most literal sense possible, The Donald was our first presidential candidate of imperial decline and so a genuine sign of the times. He swore he would make America great again, and in doing so, he alone, among American politicians of that moment, admitted that this country wasn’t great then, that it wasn’t, as the rest of the American political class claimed, the greatest, most exceptional, most indispensible country in history, the sole superpower left on Planet Earth.

An American World Without “New Deals” (Except for Billionaires)

In that campaign year, the United States was already something else again and that was more than four years before the richest, most powerful country on the planet couldn’t handle a virus in a fashion the way other advanced nations did. Instead, it set staggering records for Covid-19 cases and deaths, numbers that previously might have been associated with third-world countries. You can practically hear the chants now as those figures continue to rise exponentially: USA! USA! We’re still number one (in pandemic casualties)!

Somehow, in that pre-pandemic year, a billionaire bankruptee and former reality TV host instinctively caught the mood of the moment in an ever-less-unionized American heartland, long in decline if you were an ordinary citizen. By then, the abandonment of the white working class and lower middle class by the “new Democrats” was history. The party of Bill and Hillary Clinton had long been, as Thomas Frank wrote recently in the Guardian, “preaching competence rather than ideology and reaching out to new constituencies: the enlightened suburbanites; the ‘wired workers’; the ‘learning class’; the winners in our new post-industrial society.”

Donald Trump arrived on the scene promising to attend to the abandoned ones, the white Americans whose dreams of better lives for themselves or their children had largely been left in the dust in an ever-more-unequal country. Increasingly embittered, they were, at best, taken totally for granted by the former party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton didn’t even consider it worth the bother to visit Wisconsin and her campaign underplayed the very idea of focusing on key heartland states.) In the twenty-first century, there were to be no “new deals” for them and they knew it. They had been losing ground — to the tune of $2.5 trillion a year since 1975 — to the very billionaires whom The Donald so proudly proclaimed himself one of and to a version of corporate America that had grown oversized, wealthy, and powerful in a fashion that would have been unimaginable decades earlier.

On entering the Oval Office, Trump would still offer them blunt words, which would ring bells in rally after rally where they could cheer him to death. At the same time, with the help of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, he continued the process of abandonment by handing a staggering tax cut to the 1% and those very same corporations, enriching them ever so much more. So, of course, would the pandemic, which only added yet more billions to the fortunes of billionaires and various corporate giants (while granting the front-line workers who kept those companies afloat only the most meager and passing “hazard pay”).

Today, the coronavirus here in the United States might be more accurately relabeled “the Trump virus.” After all, the president really did make it his own in a unique fashion. Via ignorance, neglect, and a striking lack of care, he managed to spread it around the country (and, of course, the White House itself) in record ways, holding rallies that were visibly instruments of death and destruction. All of this would have been clearer yet if, in Election Campaign 2020, he had just replaced MAGA as his slogan with MASA (Make America Sick Again), since the country was still going down, just in a new way.

In other words, ever since 2016, Donald Trump, wrapped up eternally in his own overwrought self, has come to personify the very essence of a bifurcated country that was heading down, down, down, if you weren’t part of that up, up, up 1%. The moment when he returned from the hospital, having had Covid-19 himself, stepped out on a White House balcony, and proudly tore off his mask for all the world to see summed up the messaging of this all-American twenty-first-century moment perfectly.

Waving Goodbye to the American Moment

Unique as Donald Trump may seem in this moment and overwhelming as Covid-19 might be for now, the American story of recent years is anything but unique in history, at least as so far described. From the Black Death (bubonic plague) of the fourteenth century to the Spanish Flu of the early twentieth century, pandemics have, in their own fashion, been a dime a dozen. And as for foolish rulers who made a spectacle of themselves, well, the Romans had their Nero and he was anything but unique in the annals of history.

As for going down, down, down, that’s in the nature of history. Known once upon a time as “imperial powers” or “empires,” what we now call “great powers” or “superpowers” rise, have their moments in the sun (even if it’s the shade for so many of those they rule over), and then fall, one and all. Were that not so, Edward Gibbon’s classic six-volume work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, would never have gained the fame it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Across the planet and across time, that imperial rising and falling has been an essential, even metronomic, part of humanity’s story since practically the dawn of history. It was certainly the story of China, repeatedly, and definitely the tale of the ancient Middle East. It was the essence of the history of Europe from the Portuguese and Spanish empires to the English empire that arose in the 18th century and finally fell (in essence, to our own) in the middle of the last century. And don’t forget that other superpower of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, which came into being after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and grew and grew, only to implode in 1991, after a (gulp!) disastrous war in Afghanistan, less than 70 years later.

And none of this, as I say, is in itself anything special, not even for a genuinely global power like the United States. (What other country ever had at least 800 military garrisons spread across the whole planet?) If this were history as it’s always been, the only real shock would perhaps be the strikingly bizarre sense of self-adulation felt by this country’s leadership and the pundit class that went with it after that other Cold War superpower so surprisingly blew a fuse. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union’s plunge to its grave in 1991, leaving behind an impoverished place once again known as “Russia,” they engaged in distinctly delusional behavior. They convinced themselves that history as it had always been known, the very rise and fall and rise (and fall) that had been its repetitious tune, had somehow “ended” with this country atop everything forever and beyond.

Not quite three decades later, in the midst of a set of “forever wars” in which the U.S. managed to impose its will on essentially no one and in an increasingly chaotic, riven, pandemicized country, who doesn’t doubt that this was delusionary thinking of the first order? Even at the time, it should have been obvious enough that the United States would sooner or later follow the Soviet Union to the exits, no matter how slowly, enveloped in a kind of self-adoration.

A quarter-century later, Donald Trump would be the living evidence that this country was anything but immune to history, though few then recognized him as a messenger of the fall already underway. Four years after that, in a pandemicized land, its economy a wreck, its military power deeply frustrated, its people divided, angry, and increasingly well-armed, that sense of failing (already felt so strongly in the American heartland that welcomed The Donald in 2016) no longer seems like such an alien thing. It feels more like the new us — as in U.S.

Despite the oddity of The Donald himself, all of this would just be more of the same, if it weren’t for one thing. There’s an extra factor now at work that’s all but guaranteed to make the history of the decline and fall of the American empire different from the declines and falls of centuries past. And no, it has next to nothing to do with (blare of trumpets!) Donald Trump, though he did long ago reject climate change as a “Chinese hoax” and, in every way possible, thanks to his love of fossil fuels, give it as much of a helping hand as he could, opening oil lands of every sort to the drill, and dismissing environmental regulations that might have impeded the giant energy companies. And don’t forget his mad mockery of alternative power of any sort.

I could go on, of course, but why bother. You know this part of the story well. You’re living it.

Yes, in its own distinctive fashion, the U.S. is going down and will do so whether Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or Mitch McConnell is running the show. But here’s what’s new: for the first time, a great imperial power is falling just as the earth, at least as humanity has known it all these thousands of years, seems to be going down, too. And that means there will be no way, no matter what The Donald may think, to wall out intensifying stormsfires, or floodsmega-droughtsmelting ice shelves and the rising sea levels that go with them, record temperatures, and so much more, including the hundreds of millions of people who are likely to be displaced across a failing planet, thanks to those greenhouse gases released by the burning of the fossil fuels that Donald Trump loves so much.

Undoubtedly, the first genuine twist in the rise-and-fall version of human history — the first story, that is, that was potentially all about falling — arrived on August 6th and 9th, 1945 when the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It soon became apparent that such weaponry, collected in vast and spreading arsenals, had (and still has) the power to quite literally take history out of our hands. In this century, even a “limited” regional war with such weaponry could create a nuclear winter that might starve billions. That version of Armageddon has at least been postponed time and again since August 1945, but as it happened, humanity proved quite capable of coming up with another version of ultimate disaster, even if its effects, no less calamitous, happen not with the speed of an exploding nuclear weapon, but over the years, the decades, the centuries.

Donald Trump was the messenger from hell when it came to a falling empire on a failing planet. Whether, on such a changing world, the next empire or empires, China or unknown powers to come, can rise in the normal fashion remains to be seen. As does whether, on such a planet, some other way of organizing human life, some potentially better, more empathetic way of dealing with the world and ourselves will be found.

Just know that the rise and fall of history, as it always was, is no more. The rest, I suppose, is still ours to discover, for better or for worse.


By Tom Engelhardt
Source: Tom Dispatch

Trump’s Last Hurrah?

THE SAKER • NOVEMBER 25, 2020 

There seems to be a quasi consensus that Trump will not prevail and that Biden and Harris will get into the White House no matter what. To my surprise, even the Russian media seems to be considering that the Trump presidency is over.

Yet, I am not so sure at all.

Why?

Because at this point in time, I think that it would fair to conclude that anybody actually willing to look at what has been revealed by this election will have to agree that this election was stolen, rigged, falsified – chose your expression – and that going to the courts to challenge this obscene miscarriage of the democratic process is a fundamental civil right and something which any democrat (small “d”) should support.

And yet, because we live in a media-created pseudo-reality in which absolutely crucial things like the rule of law seem to have become secondary to ideological imperatives, no matter how extreme, there are those who simply refuse to see the obvious. Yes, the 9/11 false flag trained the western societies well and many now simply lack the lucidity and courage to face reality.

Courts, however, are bound by the rule of law, at least in theory, and don’t have the luxury to simply pretend like crucial evidence presented to them simply does not exist.

True, the lower, state, courts are unlikely to resist the pressure put upon them to come up with the “right” conclusions, but never say never – all it takes is one single principled judge and Trump or, more accurately, the Giuliani team, might get the break they need. Still, it is pretty obvious that Giuliani’s real hopes are with the Supreme Court. This makes sense, local judges are much easy to influence and sway than Supreme Court Justices who are unassailable and who realize that they will make history, the only question being is: how till they go down in history books, as a “profile in courage” or as impotent cowards who betrayed their oath?

I will say that I am, to put it mildly, not impressed by Trump’s demeanor during these crucial days: he completely ceded the narrative to his opponents (a couple of incoherent and poorly phrased “tweets” do not qualify). True, Trump never displayed the qualities of a real leader, so this is hardly surprising.

Giuliani, however, is a tough SOB and he seems to be determined to take this fight right up to the Supreme Court. This is why I believe that it is very dangerous to make any assumptions about what the Justices might or might not do. Is it possible that even the Supreme Court justices would betray their oath and cave in to the Dem’s pressure? Yes, I suppose so. Concepts such as truth, honor, integrity, courage and heroism are very much out of fashion in the modern world, especially in the US. This is why the traditionally hallowed term “hero” is applied left and right to every bureaucrat or civil servant simply doing his/her job: real heroes are long gone.

Then consider this: if the SC sides with Trump and overturns the hundred of thousands of illegal votes, the US will be immediately plunged into an orgy of chaos and violence, all of it encouraged and coordinated by the legacy corporate ziomedia à la CNN. The thugs of Antifa/BLM will immediately engage in Kristallnacht-like rampages in “protest” against the “racist system”. Their main target? White, Christian, males, of course!

Some justices might even feel torn between standing up for what is both legal and moral and the practical considerations of the consequences of an adjudication in Trump’s favor. Their oath ought to be their guiding principles, but considering how often the SC voted along party/ideological lines in the past, I am not very confident that the Justices will strictly do the only legally and morally right thing: uphold the law and vote their conscience.

Finally, whatever we may think of the election itself, it is obvious that the US elites have created the appearance of a fait accompli, hence the kind of nonsense like, say, Biden and his “Office of the President Elect”. It is therefore reasonable to assume that even if the Supreme Court fully sides with the Trump campaign, the US elites will never accept this. They will try to find a way to impeach, legally or otherwise, those Justices who voted “wrong”.

I think that there is also another consideration which we have to remain aware of: Trump’s entire presidency is been one long and never ending prostitution of the United States to the desires and whims of Netanyahu and his gang of thugs. True, as Israel Shamir pointed out, the Israelis failed to deliver anything in return to Trump. And yet, as Philip Giraldi recently explained, Trump is still very much Israel’s prostitute, which is why there are an increasing number of Israeli experts (see here and here) who believe that Trump might strike at Iran as a “farewell” present to the Israelis.

Is that really possible? Could Trump really do something so crazy?

You betcha he could!

One one hand, I have always maintained that Trump is the Zionists’ “disposable president”, meaning a one term president who will do everything the Likudniks want of him and who will then be jettisoned and replaced by a truly “kosher president” like Biden/Harris. On the other hand, however, there is the precedent of the US meekly taking the Iranian missile attacks in retaliation for the murder of General Soleimani which seems to indicate that the Pentagon just does not have the stomach for a full-scale war against Iran.

So which will it be?

Nobody knows. The only thing we can be sure of is that we are certainly entering very dangerous times.

Those who hope that a Biden/Harris presidency might be better are deeply deluded.

Why?

Because, as many have already pointed this out, even if Trump is ejected from the White House, “Trumpism”, as an ideology, is here to stay. Even if you believe that Biden/Harris beat Trump in a fair election, surely must you still realize that there are tens of millions of Americans who feel that the election was stolen and that Biden/Harris are usurpers.

Personally, I take a very dim view of “Trumpism”, but whatever its (many) flaws, this ideology, however vague, has “redpilled” millions of Americans who now realize that they are living in a fake democracy or, to use a Russian expression, “democracy” in the US only means “power of the Democrats”. Simply put: we can call them “1%ers” or the “US Nomenklatura” or the “deep state” or whatever other term which comes to mind, but the bottom line is obvious: the US is not a democracy or a republic, it is a dictatorship of the few over the many, the “best democracy money can buy” and a system based not on one man one vote, but one dollar one vote. Whether they realize it or not, most Americans are serfs of an occupying parasitic regime which sees them solely as a (cheap) commodity.

These ideas used to be corralled into what the Ziomedia liked to call the “extremist fringe” but now millions of Americans are becoming aware of this reality, CNN & Co notwithstanding. Put the Biden/Harris ticket into the White House and millions of people will go into some kind of “resistance mode” – whether that be political activism, civil resistance, local/state insubordination to the Federal power or even armed resistance.

One of the top priorities of the Dems in power will be to crack down, hard, on the First and Second Amendments to the US Constitution. Right there we can expect a lot of local/regional/state resistance because, unlike their ruling “elites” (i.e. masters), most Americans passionately care for what are really the cornerstones of the US political system. Yes, there is a reason why the Founding Fathers placed the First Amendment in first position and the Second one right after!

The Dems will castrate the First Amendment through their control of all the major Internet platforms (YouTube, Google, FaceBook, Twitter, Amazon, etc.) and, since this will not be government censorship, at least technically, but decisions of the private sector, even the ACLU will have nothing to say about this.

The Second Amendment will be trickier to deal with, because there is no private or non-governmental institution which can do to the Second Amendment what big tech companies have done to the First one. However, all it takes is a few well-orchestrated “shootings” or any armed refusal to be disarmed, and the label “domestic terrorist” will be swiftly applied to those who dared to resist Uncle Shmuel.

Again – we are about to enter an extremely dangerous period, both inside the US and on the international front.

Trump’s handlers must realize that the AngloZionist Empire is already finished and that all that’s left is an agonizing United States. The same probably goes for the Biden/Harris handlers. Hence both parties have a huge interest in, first, creating some crisis which can distract from what is really going on and, second, in using whatever power they still have to “fire their last shells” before the ammo box goes empty.

Conclusion: too many variables to call it

The truth is that absolutely anything can happen next. There are simply way too many variables to try to make a prediction. Will Trump attack Iran? I want to believe that this ship has sailed, but I will never say never to something as evil and stupid as an attack on Iran. However, under pretty much any scenario, we can be pretty sure that come January there will be a power vacuum in the Executive and roughly half of all Americans will consider that the election has been stolen. That kind of power vacuum, or even a duopoly, is very dangerous and typically results in even more chaos and violence. Eventually, some kind of “tough” regime comes to power. But this is a threat that we can discuss further down the road.

The recent divide in U.S. is due to decline of family values: professor

November 11, 2020 – 10:45

Source

By Mohammad Mazhari

TEHRAN – An American academic attributes the recent divide in the American society to the decline of family and religious values that have taken place in the country since 1963.

In an interview with the Tehran Times, Dr. William Jeynes, a professor of education at California State University, notes that the Americans are often not as tolerant of each other as was the case in past generations. 
“A likely cause of this is the decline of the family- and Bible-based- values that have taken place in the United States since 1963,” Jeynes says. “Since 1963, divorce rates skyrocketed, and the U.S. Supreme Court removed Bible-based character education out of the public schools.”


The following is the text of the interview:


Q: What did make the November 3 election a controversial issue?

A: Yes, the election in 2020 is controversial. However, it does not call into question whether the U.S. can preserve its democracy. Rather, what it does highlight is two facts. First, the American electoral system was not prepared to handle so many absentee ballots that resulted from COVID-19. It is apparent that the U.S. will need to reform its absentee ballot system so that it is more uniform from state to state. Especially controversial has been the issues of whether non-postmarked ballots that arrive up to three days after election day will be counted and whether ballots in which the signature does not appear to match the one on record should be counted. Second, President Trump is no doubt very angry that Hillary Clinton previously claimed that President Trump was an “illegitimate president” who, she claims, in essence, stole the 2016 election from her.
After the 2016 election, certain media outlets claimed that Russia was a primary force that made President Trump’s victory possible. Nevertheless, such an accusation requires a certain amount of proof. However, the Mueller hearings that followed never produced a sufficient amount of evidence. President Trump, after going through the emotional strain of those accusations, is now angered. He asserts that various suspicious events regarding ballot counting constitute fraud and make the 2020 election results illegitimate. Granted, there are numerous suspicious ballots counting events. However, the Trump Administration needs to present sufficient evidence that:  a) the events are systemic and not isolated individual events and b) that enough ballots were affected to have influenced the ultimate outcome of the election. That will be very difficult to achieve.

Q: Is Trump an exception in America’s history? Could he gain the hearts of millions of Americans?

A: President Trump is an unusual person, who has also been through a prodigious amount of stress from the Democratic- and media-accusations that the Russians helped him get elected in 2016. That combination of being an unusual person and the accumulation of stress and anger likely caused him to claim victory in the 2020 election prematurely. He should have said that there was a plethora of irregularities in the counting of absentee ballots that must be thoroughly investigated and corrected right away before he can accept the results of the election. Although President Trump’s approach is unique, reform to count absentee ballots more precisely is needed to prevent a repeat occurrence in the future.

Q: How can the U.S. bridge the recent gap, which has divided the country into two opposing poles?

A: It is very unfortunate that the Americans are often not as civil and kind to each other, as was the case in past generations. A likely cause of this is the decline of the family- and Bible-based- values that have taken place in the United States since 1963. Since 1963, divorce rates skyrocketed, and the U.S. Supreme Court removed Bible-based character education out of the public schools. Before the U.S. Supreme Court decisions, love, compassion, civility, loyalty, and respect were major moral pillars taught by teachers in the public schools. The behavior of many American adults towards each other reflects this absence of character education and family values. The only way to heal the divisions is to emphasize shared character once again- and family- values returning to American society.

“Since 1963, divorce rates skyrocketed, and the U.S. Supreme Court removed Bible-based character education out of the public schools. Before that, love, compassion, civility, loyalty, and respect were major moral pillars taught by teachers in the public schools.”

 
Q: Do you agree with this view that the Supreme Court has an outsized role in elections because it has become politicized? 
 A: The U.S. Supreme Court realizes it must do all it can to remain to limit its role in this political controversy. What is interesting is that the three Trump U.S. Supreme Court appointees believe in “judicial restraint.” This means that justices should avoid getting involved in these matters, except when it is absolutely necessary. Hence, unless the Trump Administration presents a great deal of evidence indicating corruption in counting absentee ballots, the U.S. Supreme Court will likely do their best not to order a “do-over” election in some states, etc. They will try to limit themselves to giving direction to what ballots arrived too late to be counted and similar issues.
 
Q: It seems that the president in the American political structure has vast authority that may tempt him to exploit the power for his own benefits. What is your comment?
 

A: Potentially that is true, but there is one quality that it is important for people to understand about Americans. Since our independence in 1776, U.S. citizens have never had a king, queen, emperor, etc. As a result, Americans have a deep distrust of one person having too much power. Built into the American system are “checks and balances” that will likely allow President Trump to “state his case,” but not “get his way,” unless there is widespread evidence of corruption in the counting of ballots. Either Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or the U.S. Supreme Court will likely stop him before he goes too far. Instead, I believe the ultimate result will be the recounting of ballots, an investigation, hearings about possible fraud in counting late ballots, and President Trump will allow the transition to Joseph Biden becoming the next president.

Q: Don’t you think that electoral votes threaten the future of democracy in the United States? 
 

A: The Electoral College is designed to protect American democracy. It is specifically designed to protect areas of low population. Otherwise, politicians will only seek to fulfill the desires of people living in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, etc. It is much the same reason why in the United Nations, even nations with a low population such as Qatar and Liechtenstein each have one vote in the General Assembly. Some might say that the U.N. arrangement in the General Assembly is unfair, but the consensus is that this structure protects small nations. For example, one issue that is becoming a major one is that Southern California, a dry area, is draining the Colorado River beyond California’s border, which is reducing the water supply in 6 other states, which have lower populations than California. Should California be able to demand its way because its population is larger than all those six states combined? Americans would say “no,” that the people from other states have rights too. In so many countries, people in the main cities are very rich, but people living outside the cities are very poor. This is true in most countries around the world. The electoral college is designed to prevent this from happening. It is not a perfect system, but even the poorest families in America have 2 or 3 cars. This year, the vote count is very close between Joseph Biden and Donald Trump. Biden only has 50-51% of the vote, but his electoral advantage will probably be 55% or more. Usually, the electoral college system works well.

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The Deep State vs the Deep Country

THE SAKER • NOVEMBER 9, 2020 

I need to begin with the obvious: in spite of all the deep state, propaganda and “deep empire” (transnational) resources being used to declare that “Biden” (i.e. Harris) has won, as of right now nobody knows who got most votes and where.

I would even suggest that we will never really find out who won, because who won depends on a large number of local laws and regulations and because it will probably never be possible to separate the fake votes from the legal ones.

Finally, neither side will ever gracefully admit to having lost the contest. So now the country will enter a profound crisis.

That is the bad news.

But there is also very good news.

First, it has now become clear to the entire planet that the US “democracy” is anything but: the US is an oligarchic plutocracy, plagued with a myriad of antiquated laws and corrupt to the bone. The special “trick” of this US oligarchic plutocracy is that is masquerades as an ochlocracy: there is pretend mob rule which serves as the microscopically small fig leaf hiding the real nature of the regime.

Second, while the Dems did their best to hide this, and they still are, it is now becoming evident that the sheer magnitude of the fraud made it impossible to conceal it. Now if we think of how the AngloZionist Empire has handled equally non-believable nonsense (9/11, Syrian gas attacks, Skripal, Navalnii, etc.) we know what they are going to do next: double down, which will reassure the brainwashed zombies, but will even further infuriate those still capable of critical thought.

Third, the behavior of the US media in this entire operation is so obviously disgraceful that nobody will ever take them seriously again (at least amongst the thinking people, the zombies glued to the Idiot Tube are beyond any rational arguments anyway). This is particularly important in regards to FoxNews who has shown that it was a pseudo-conservative propaganda outlet which, in reality, is completely committed to the political agenda of Rupert Murdoch and his family.

At this point in time, it is impossible to predict what will happen next, but the murder of JFK or the 9/11 false flag strongly suggest that the US deep state will win. There seems to only be one way for Trump to stay in power and it will probably look similar to this:

Giuliani, who I was told won over 4,000 lawsuits in his career, is a very tough guy (look at what he did to the mob in NY!) and he must realize that the lawsuits he will file this week will be the most important ones in his career. They will even probably define his legacy. The notion that he would go to the courts with no solid evidence in his files is simply ridiculous. I don’t see any mechanism which can stop Giuliani now, so the ball will now go to the state and federal courts next and, after that, to the Supreme Court. There the situation is hard to predict.

In theory, Trump probably has enough conservative Justices, especially with Ruth Bader Ginsburg gone and Amy Coney Barrett replacing her. That’s only in theory. In reality, things are much more complex. On one hand, the pressure of the deep state on the Justices will be immense, but on the other hand, once you are a SC Justice you cannot be attacked, at least not legally. Amy Coney Barrett will also face immense pressure to “prove” her “independence” (meaning, if she sides with Giuliani’s side she will be called a Trump shill and even much worse than that!). One thing is certain, any Justice siding with Giuliani will face immense pressures followed by a vicious denigration campaign. Who knows how many Justices would have the courage to face this?

However, there is also the possibility that any Justice siding with Giuliani’s conclusions will go down in history as yet another “profile in courage”, so I would not completely discard that possibility either.

During my student years in the US I had the chance to meet, and study with, such US officials as Paul Nitze or Admiral Zumwalt and I was always amazed at how candid former US officials were, but only once they retired. USSC Justices are not retired, of course, but, like retired officials, they are beyond the reach of any legal reprisals, and that might strengthen their willingness to honestly follow their conscience and speak their minds.

Giuliani will certainly fight hard, but looking at the political correlation of forces I can’t see an outcome where Trump would successfully defeat a much stronger opponent. Think about it, the only possible ally for the Trump campaign would be the Supreme Court: the GOP, Congress, the Deep State, the legacy ziomedia, and even members of the Trump Administration (think Bolton or Esper here) all hate him with a passion. And now that Trump appears to be losing, they are not shy about it.

Still, as the proverb says, we need to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

That is, obviously, a Harris Administration in control of the Executive.

So what can we expect from these folks?

First and foremost, a sustained campaign to completely negate the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. Considering how truly sacred these two cornerstones of the US Constitution are for millions of US Americans, we can expect a lot of resistance from the “deplorables”, both legal and violent.

Second, the control of both the Executive and all the major IT giants will mean that free speech will be driven even further underground. This new reality will require a lot of thinking in the development of a strategy to protect the voices which the regime in DC will now openly try to silence.

Possibly the dumbest mistake made by Trump was not to create his own TV channel. He had the money, he could have found allies, but he simply lacked the intelligence to see the danger. Instead, this narcissistic fool thought that Twitter was the way to bypass the legacy media. Is there a possibility that if he is thrown out of the White House we might finally understand that what the US now so urgently needs is, at the very least, a free TV channel and at least one free social media option? Maybe, but I am not holding my breath, Trump always had this ability to disappoint…

Third, on the international front, we can expect even more hysterical Russia bashing (the Dems all hate Russia with a passion, especially since they have brainwashed themselves for four years that “Putin” had “attacked” the US elections). But there is really nothing the US can do to Russia, it is way too late for that. So I would expect even more hot air than from the Trump Administration, and probably not much more action, although that is by no means certain, since a braindead nominal President like Biden would not have Trump’s intelligence to understand that a war against Russia, China or Iran would end in a disaster: Dems always start wars to try to convince the public that they are “tough” (Dukakis in his M-1 tank). Now that they not only appears as weak, but also illegitimate and even senile (did you see Biden trying to run to the podium?), they will have to prove their “virility” and send some cruise missiles flying somewhere (that kind of attack is what these cowards always use first).

As I mentioned in the past, the outcome of this election will not have much of an impact on US foreign policy: first, the US elites more or less all agree on continuing a policy of violent imperialism; but even more crucial is the fact that the Empire is as dead as the Titanic was when it hit the iceberg: not all passengers realized what was taking place, but that did not affect the outcome in the least.

Furthermore, as those familiar with Hegelian dialectics know, each action eventually results in a reaction and the notion that 70,000,000+ voters will simply accept what is self-evidently a coup against not only Trump, but also the US Constitution itself, is ridiculous. If anything, these people will now come to realize that while the US is facing no real foreign threats at all (except those it created itself), there is most definitely an internal threat, in the sense of the United States Uniformed Services Oath of Office, and that this reality gives them the right, and even duty, to “resist tyranny”.

You have probably heard Joe Biden declaring that he wants to heal the wounds, restore unity, rule for all US Americans and the like. I don’t think that this is only empty political rhetoric, though that is part of it too. Mostly, I believe that the Dems are terrified because they know for a fact that they stole the election and this is why after four years of the most divisive and irresponsible rhetoric against Trump, “the racist system” and all the rest of the crap, they are now making a 180 (they are experts at that!) and pleading for calm, peace and unity.

That ain’t going to happen.

Finally, a word to those who like to say that there is no difference between the Dems and the GOP, that this is all a fake conflict: friends, you are both right and massively wrong. You are right when you say that the DNC and the RNC are like indistinguishable twins. But what you are missing are two crucial things:

  1. Factions inside one party can actually go after each other much harder than against their common enemies. I think of the SS vs the SA in Nazi Germany or the Trotskysts vs the Stalinists in the Soviet Union and during the Spanish Civil war.
  2. But, even more crucially, this is not a contest between the Democrats and the Republicans, it is a contest between a “rejected outsider” and both the DNC and RNC!

Conclusion: not the RNC vs the DNC but the Deep State vs the Deep Country

A quick look at a map tells the story: this struggle is most one of the deep state vs the deep (real) country. Yeah, I know, Trump is hardly a miner from West Virginia or a farmer in Alabama. But that doesn’t matter one bit. What does matter is that the deplorables from the “overfly country” felt that Trump speaks for them and that he is all that stands between them and the (pseudo-) Liberals of CNN, the Antifa/BLM thugs and the destruction of the United States as we all knew them. And yes, this is a simplistic view, but it is fundamentally correct one nonetheless.← Cui Bono from the Situation in France

US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized

November 09, 2020

US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized
Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

by Ramin Mazaheri and crossposted with PressTV

It’s impossible for the US presidential election to have gone worse for the empire: America now has two presidents.

That can’t be denied, yet their mainstream media is spinning like mad the idea that there is no problem: The election is over and that Democrat Joe Biden is the president-elect. This is likely a biased view, but it’s certainly terrible journalism. Journalists have the right to do whatever they want – project election winners, ignore half the electorate, talk about “partition” – but we have no legal power to decide who actually won.

Not only has a certainly narrow vote not been certified, but the votes aren’t even all counted yet. And it’s not as if this vote wasn’t already disputed for months in the public eye. And it’s not as if there were’t several hundred lawsuits filed before the vote even took place. And it’s not as if there won’t be many lawsuits dated after the November 3rd vote.

But to their clearly anti-Trump mainstream media: “Nothing to see here, move along.”

Seriously? American journalism in action is really something to see.…

The media keeps pointing out that all the lawsuits have failed so far, but it just takes is one and it goes to the top – the Supreme Court deciding this election continues to look not just possible but probable. The idea that American judges are mostly liberal rebels and not by-the-book conservatives is preposterous – they are judges, after all. Record absentee balloting and an incumbent who focuses on his rights and benefits first, last and always both remind us how very not by-the-book this election is.

The ultimate fault for the current “Avignon Papacy” situation – the Roman Catholic church had two popes for most of the 14th century – lays not with the media but with the candidates, and especially Joe Biden. For months he bemoaned the unpredictability of Trump, and yet Biden declared victory Saturday based merely on an AP projection. It was an incredibly self-interested, dangerous, destablising and confidence-shaking move to make – it was a very Trumpian.

If the very slim numbers (Biden is up by an average of just 30,000 votes in three different states) were flipped and Trump declared early the mainstream media would be up in arms, and rightly so. Biden continues to – as the first debate reminded us – willingly jump down to the Trumpian unpresidential gutter, and yet because Trump licks the gutter’s floor Biden is somehow given a free pass.

Red state/blue state now officially outdated: it’s Trumpism vs. ‘universal values’ holdouts

The former was based on two things: a nation divided by new wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a nation with huge inequalities between rural and urban/suburban citizens (in access to technology, cultural influence and standard of living). It was rural Americans who fought in these wars of imperialism (and not mere revenge for 9/11), which drastically shaped the communities they lived in, thus making the divide especially inflamed.

However, in 2020 Texas almost flipped Democrat?! Arizona – the proud home of reactionary radical John “Bomb bomb bomb Iran” McCain – is currently flipping Democrat?! Several Great Lakes states have already flipped back and forth in the Trump era. Trumpism has – for better or for worse – obviously changed American politics in a major way because unthinkable realignments are happening, and this forces us to eject old paradigms if we want to understand what is going on here.

The new partition is “brazen imperialism” versus “soft imperialism”.

But here’s our dilemma: Which party represents which? That we pause is entirely the change to grasp in 2020.

Democrats have become the party which backs the Deep State, “humanitarian interventions”, “universal values” which are a code phrase for their preferred values, free trade (which benefits the rich the most), censorship and which evinces a dangerous evangelism and hysterical self-righteousness (as their failed three-year Russophobia campaign showed). Violent evangelism is forbidden in Islam, but not in the Protestant or Catholic West.

What can we call French President Emmanuel Macron’s unprecedented declaration that Islamophobia is now state policy but a hysterical evangelism in favor of Western secularism? It’s hardly as if secularism has produced more moral or just governance than in religious-inspired nations, yet Macron’s faith cannot be shaken no matter how many innocent people his anti-Muslim tirades get killed.

And who is more globalist, “universal values” and pro-European Union than “neoliberal strongman” Macron, no matter how many French Yellow Vests lose an eye just for insisting that neoliberalism means the colonisation of the average of Westerner by an international 1%, and also that the post-1991 EU is a “neoliberal empire”?

I broaden out the US experience because in the other Western imperialist nations we clearly see similar cultural movements – engaging in imperialism inherently produces exceptional and distorted cultures. Ex-Labor chief Jeremy Corbyn was just suspended by his own party for absurd anti-Semitism allegations because that is what hysterical imperialists do to those who don’t embrace 1%-led globalisation. It used to be that such denigrations were limited to conservatives, but Corbyn proves how flexible our analysis needs to be precisely because traditional Western paradigms have become outdated.

Trump has signalled the start of a new era: the Cold War ended in 1991, US unipolar dominance (and thus Western dominance) ran from 1992-2016, and Trumpism coincides with the Great Recession-era propelled return to a multipolar era.

The undeniable electoral rejection of a “Democratic Blue Wave” in favor of “Trumpian Republicans” – where Trump increased his vote totals with every ethnic group and gender except White males – shows that the concept of White male supremacism being the foundation of Trumpism is as false as the labels of anti-Semitism pinned on Corbyn and the Yellow Vests. Trumpism is something bigger: it certainly must now include the idea of a Western domestic rebellion against their politicians who have presided over (or caused) the establishment of our new multipolar era.

The digital era does not seem to lend itself to the values still required to thrive in rural areas, so far, but last week’s vote totals prove that we cannot say that Trumpism is simply a “red state” phenomenon anymore.

This is not new: heads are divided in the US metaphorically, and maybe soon literally

Trump is planning to hold “recount rallies”, to publish the obituaries of dead people alleged to have voted in the election, to sue various state election boards, and to generally keep refusing to play by the rules of the globalist/“universal values” dominated US establishment (which is the basis of Trump’s popularity). You might be shocked by all that, or oppose all that, but you cannot say that Trump supporters should be frozen out of how this election concludes unless you openly prefer unilateral declarations to democracy with checks and balances.

A concession speech by one candidate is not legally required, but it is obviously a cultural necessity. How long can US media pretend that the election is over even though there has been no concession speech?

That’s an incredibly dangerous question to ask, and undoubtedly terrible journalism, and more proof that this election could not have gone worse for Americans if it had tried.

What would have happened Saturday in Chicago if pro-Trump supporters had gone to Trump Tower, where all day and night there were hundreds of people celebrating Biden’s “victory”? I can tell you, as I was there: a whole lot of innocent young people would have gotten their heads split open.

That’s the danger Biden just caused, and which is being increased by poor journalism and which has only just begun.

Biden set off this era of two presidents rather than counselling patience and faith in the process amid crisis. Biden has also set the stage for dramatic domestic disillusionment with their electoral process and political structure. Trump voters are incensed, and Biden just trolled them even though the US mainstream media was already doing exactly that for him.

In 2009 the moderate candidate declared early in Iran’s presidential election and after periods of peaceful rallies and counter-rallies it got violent. America should have learned from Iran’s experience (shared by countless other examples in modern history) but apparently Biden is not smart enough despite 47 years experience as a public servant. Nobody ever assumes great public service and intelligence from Trump, and certainly not the virtue of forbearance, but Biden promised better yet failed to deliver on what he said was his Day 1.

Biden was supposed to be better than Trump, but this was the worst start possible.

He can smile for the cameras, and create a corona task force which can’t start until January 21, and ignore the calls to finish counting the vote and to certify it, but the simple reality is that 70 million Trump voters are not going away in 2020 any more than they went away after they won in 2016. They need to be understood – they were unexpected, at the very least, and seem to herald a new era, at the most.

Trump’s re-election would probably not be good for the same countries as in 2016 – Iran, Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela and any other of the few nations with a socialist-inspired revolution/movement – and so we see why leaders and diplomats from these nations especially want him gone: Trump cannot be reasoned with regarding these revolutionary (unique) nations. Who knows what a Trump second term would bring? But Biden continues to show plenty of worrying evidence that he plans to get away with the same unilateral nonsense Trump set the precedent for, rather than re-establishing basic decorum, concern for others and diplomacy. I examined this notion last month in an editorial titled, “US debate debacle shows Democrats will adopt Trumpian self-interest globally”, and Biden’s reckless premature declaration shows the idea has a worrying amount of merit.

Unilateral nonsense is not good for the American 99% or the 99% of any other nation. With two presidents, American nonsense has only doubled.

*************************************************************

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2) – November 5, 2020

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism wasn’t a cult of personality (2/2) – November 6, 2020

4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fight – November 7, 2020

Ask yourself the crucial question: why?

The Saker

November 07, 2020

Ask yourself the crucial question: why?

Why is it that US news channels censored a press conference by a President of the United States?

Why is it that tech giants feel the need to censor Trump’s tweets?

Why is it that in key Dem states the GOP observers were not allowed to actually observe anything?

Why did the Dems counter-sue just to try to prevent GOP observers from observing the ballot count?

Why do the media conglomerates all declare Biden the victor even though they all know for a fact that this is false (only the courts can declare a victor)?

Why is it that FoxNews was spearheading the anti-Trump cheering during this entire week?

Why is it that the US deep state needs EU leaders to suddenly all congratulate Biden on a victory?

Think of what is coming next: lawsuits in state and federal courts, right?

Then IF the Dems felt confident that the Trump campaign had no case, why not simply relax, wait and see the courts reject the Trump campaign’s petitions?

But no, instead, they are acting exactly as if they were all terrified that the courts might do something which would compromise the victory of the Biden campaign!

The very fact of the need for such extreme haste and such un-retractable statements can only be explained by the fear of the Dems that something in their coup plans might go wrong.  And, after all, it is said that Giuliani won over 4000 lawsuits in his career, and he would scare me too 🙂

So, in a way, we could consider the Dems massive push to win in the court of public opinion a clear sign that they are much more afraid of a court of law.

Good.

Will they succeed?  Yeah, probably, Trump’s “aggregate power” is dwarfed the the power of the multi-billion dollars interests who are using all their “propaganda firepower” to settle the issue before the courts get to.

Yet another proof that the Dems are no democrats at all, but a completely immoral gang of USA-hating thugs who are willing to destroy their own country to defeat any outsider, good or bad, daring to challenge them.  They very much remind me of Kerensky and his own gang of masonic plutocrats.

Still, until we actually see that the USSC is also willing to betray the people of the USA, we can still keep a tiny little sense of hope in our hearts.

But we now all better prepare for the worst, because if the USSC also caves in, it will be the end of the United States as we know them.

The Saker

Statement from President Donald J. Trump

Statement from President Donald J. Trump

November 07, 2020

“We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed. The simple fact is this election is far from over. Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor. In Pennsylvania, for example, our legal observers were not permitted meaningful access to watch the counting process.  Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media.

“Beginning Monday, our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated. The American People are entitled to an honest election: that means counting all legal ballots, and not counting any illegal ballots. This is the only way to ensure the public has full confidence in our election. It remains shocking that the Biden campaign refuses to agree with this basic principle and wants ballots counted even if they are fraudulent, manufactured, or cast by ineligible or deceased voters. Only a party engaged in wrongdoing would unlawfully keep observers out of the count room – and then fight in court to block their access.

“So what is Biden hiding? I will not rest until the American People have the honest vote count they deserve and that Democracy demands.”

– President Donald J. Trump

source: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/statement-from-president-donald-j.-trump/

This is absolutely amazing: the EU leaders follow the Ziomedia and declare Biden the winner!!

This is absolutely amazing: the EU leaders follow the Ziomedia and declare Biden the winner!!

November 07, 2020

Dear friends,

When I saw this I could not believe my eyes: “European leaders congratulate Joe Biden, after media count declares him victorious in US presidential election“.

This is truly unheard of: foreign leaders declare a winner in a US election even BEFORE the vote count has been certified by US courts!!!  Talk about “interference in US elections” – this really takes the prize!

Yeah, I know, these EU knuckleheads also declared Guaido and Tikhanovskaia had won.  But let’s be realists here: it is one thing to declare some victor in small and extremely weak countries, and quite another to do that with the supposed Sole Hyperpower and Planetary Hegemon.

Wow!  Just wow!

We have to wonder what the point of these declarations are and I think the answer is obvious: put the maximal pressure on USSC Justices to accept the fait accompli (which, of course, is neither a fait, nor is is accompli, but nevermind that!).

Just the fact that the US Deep State has the power to force the EU leaders into that kind of blatant intervention is the best proof that there are no real democracies in the West – all we are dealing with is a transnational plutocracy.

Bottom line: the struggle for the liberation of the West from this gang of corrupt megalomaniacs is now on.  Yes, right now the resistance in the West looks very week, poorly organized and even very corrupt (just think of how corrupt the GOP is!).  But those who are familiar with Hegelian dialectical analyses will immediately see that this is an unstable situation which cannot and will not last.

The Saker

Legacy Ziomedia declares victory (+ Open Thread) (+UPDATE)

Legacy Ziomedia declares victory (+ Open Thread) (+UPDATE)

The Saker

November 07, 2020

In a closely coordinated move, the Dems and their legacy Ziomedia have declared Biden the victor of the presidential race. Likewise, the main US TV channels have cut off Trump during a White House press conference.

Before all the votes are counted and before the courts could decide which votes count or not.  In simple legal terms, this election is not over.

But we know that Dems don’t give a hoot about facts or the law.

I won’t even bother going into all the details about fraud here, I simply don’t have the time to do so, and other will do that much better than I could.  I will simply say that there is no doubt in my mind that with so many states and counties reporting both tiny differences between the two candidates AND observers reporting how the Dems used what is called the “administrative resource” in Russia (i.e. their control of key states, voting locations and of the USPS), I personally am convinced that Trump and Giuliani are correct in their assessment that massive fraud has taken place.

This is an extremely dangerous situation for the USA.  Why?  Because whether Trump prevails in the courts or not, the Dems have already declared victory and are now celebrating.  So there are two main options ahead:

  1. Trump loses in the courts, and half of the country will feel that this election has been stolen
  2. Trump wins in the courts, and the other half of the country will feel that this elections has been stolen

Bottom line is this: the Dems will probably prevail in the end, I don’t believe that Trump has what it takes to prevail against the united US Nomenklatura, he is no Putin, that is for sure.  But Biden would make a very convincing Eltsin (if not Chernenko), and from the ensuing chaos other, far more courageous and charismatic individuals will emerge.

This is clearly the worst possible outcome for this country and the only thing standing between this outcome and us is the US Supreme Court.

I am not optimistic but, who knows, maybe a miracle will happen.

The Saker

PS: Giuliani’s latest statement:

UPDATE:

I just took a look at what Fox News is reporting and, thankfully, they are openly celebrating!!!

Which, yet again, goes to prove that most of Fox also hates Trump (with a few exceptions) and that Murdoch’s channel never was even remotely pro-Trump.  Chris Wallace, especially, could not contain his joy and he actually openly said that considering the pressure created by the news announcement that Biden had won, it would be very hard for any judge to disagree.  So, finally, we have it.  Trump and his “deplorables” on one side, the entire US Nomenklatura on the other.  Trump, in spite of being the President, could not use any “administrative resource” whereas his enemies did.  For four years.  Nonstop.  And after 4 years of incredibly divisive, and completely false accusation, Biden took to the air yesterday and declared that he wants to unite the nation.

How stupid does he (meaning his handlers, of course) think the “deplorables” are?

I would be surprised of the judges on the USSC would have the courage to uphold the law.  Thus I have to assume that by hook or by crook the Dems will take the White House and President Harris will run the country come January.  Trump will probably not only be gone, the regime will attack him and his supporters full force and try to get him convicted of something (since “beating Hillary” is not a criminal offense, they will try to get him for something else).

There will be an especially virulent attack on the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution, which is most distressing since these two amendments are the cornerstones of the entire US Constitution.

The USA as we knew it until now are dead, we now will live under a very different regime.

But half of the country, tens of millions of people, will not disappear.  The resistance will probably go to the state level next, and to the courts.  Last, but not least, a lot of US Americans will feel that they are now living under a globalist tyranny.  I can’t say that they are wrong.  But I do fear the very serious consequences of this realization.

The Saker

PS: I want to reassure the readers about one thing: four years of Trump has given enough time for Russia to truly finalize her preparations for a full-scale war against the US/NATO/EU.  Russia’s armed forces are so far ahead of the US military that it would take a decade or more, and money which the US does not have, to even try to catch up.  That train (attack on Russia) has now left.  So while Biden and his gang will continue the Russia-hating rhetoric, the petty harassment (taking consular buildings, arresting Russian citizens, even more Russia-strengthening (yes, that has been the real effect of US sanctions) sanctions, etc.), they won’t dare to attack Russia directly, not even in Syria (which Hillary would have done, take that to the bank).  I don’t see an attack on China, Iran or Venezuela either.  An attack to “restore democracy” on Saint Kitts and Nevis or, maybe, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, is still a real possibility, I suppose.

Banana Follies: The Mother of All Color Revolutions

November 06, 2020

Banana Follies: The Mother of All Color Revolutions

by Pepe Escobar and cross-posted with Asia Times

A gaming exercise of the perfect, indigenous color revolution, code-named Blue, was leaked from a major think tank established in the imperial lands that first designed the color revolution concept.

Not all the information disclosed here about the gaming of Blue has been declassified. That may well elicit a harsh response from the Deep State, even as a similar scenario was gamed by an outfit called Transition Integrity Project.

Both scenarios should qualify as predictive programming – with the Deep State preparing the general public, in advance, for exactly how things will play out.

The standard color revolution playbook rules they usually start in the capital city of nation-state X, during an election cycle, with freedom fighting “rebels” enjoying full national and international media support.

Blue concerns a presidential election in the Hegemon. In the gaming exercise, the incumbent president, codenamed Buffon, was painted Red. The challenger, codenamed Corpse, was painted Blue.

Blue – the exercise – went up a notch because, compared to its predecessors, the starting point was not a mere insurgency, but a pandemic. Not any pandemic, but a really serious, bad to the bone global pandemic with an explosive infection fatality rate of less than 1%.

By a fortunate coincidence, the lethal pandemic allowed Blue operators to promote mail-in ballots as the safest, socially distant voting procedure.

That connected with a rash of polls predicting an all but inevitable Blue win in the election – even a Blue Wave.

The premise is simple: take down the economy and deflate a sitting president whose stated mission is to drive a booming economy. In tandem, convince public opinion that actually getting to the polls is a health hazard.

The Blue production committee takes no chances, publicly announcing they would contest any result that contradicts the prepackaged outcome: Blue’s final victory in a quirky, anachronistic, anti-direct democracy body called the “electoral college”.

If Red somehow wins, Blue would wait until every vote is counted and duly litigated to every jurisdiction level. Relying on massive media support and social media marketing propelled to saturation levels, Blue proclaims that “under no scenario” Red would be allowed to declare victory.

Countdown to magic voting

Election Day comes. Vote counting is running smoothly – mail-in count, election day count, up to the minute tallies – but mostly favoring Red, especially in three states always essential for capturing the presidency. Red is also leading in what is characterized as “swing states”.

But then, just as a TV network prematurely calls a supposedly assured Red state for Blue, all vote-counting stops before midnight in major urban areas in key swing states under Blue governors, with Red in the lead.

Blue operators stop counting to check whether their scenario towards a Blue victory can roll out without bringing in mail-in ballots. Their preferred mechanism is to manufacture the “will of the people” by keeping up an illusion of fairness.

Yet they can always rely, as Plan B, on urban mail-in ballots on tap, hot and cold, until Blue squeaks by in two particularly key swing states that Red had bagged in a previous election.

That’s what happens. Starting at 2 am, and later into the night, enter a batch of “magic” votes in these two key states. The sudden, vertical upward “adjustment” includes the case of a batch of 130k+ pro-Blue votes cast in a county alongside not a single pro-Red vote – a statistical miracle of Holy Ghost proportions.

Stuffing the ballot box is a typical scam applied in Banana Republic declinations of color revolution. Blue operators use the tried and tested method applied to the gold futures market, when a sudden drop of naked shorts drives down gold price, thus protecting the US dollar.

Blue operators bet the compliant mainstream media/Big Tech alliance will not question that, well, out of the blue, the vote would swing towards Blue in a 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 margin.

They bet no questions will be asked on how a 2% to 5% positive ballot trend in Red’s favor in a few states turned into a 0.5% to 1.4% trend in favor of Blue by around 4am.

And that this discrepancy happens in two swing states almost simultaneously.

And that some precincts turn more presidential votes than they have registered voters.

And that in swing states, the number of extra mysterious votes for Blue far exceeds votes cast for the Senate candidates in these states, when the record shows that down ticket totals are traditionally close.

And that turnout in one of these states would be 89.25%.

The day after Election Day there are vague explanations that one of the possible vote-dumps was just a “clerical error”, while in another disputed state there is no justification for accepting ballots with no postmark.

Blue operators relax because the mainstream media/Big Tech alliance squashes each and every complaint as “conspiracy theories”.

The Red counter-revolution

The two presidential candidates do not exactly help their own cases.

Codename Corpse, in a Freudian slip, had revealed his party had set up the most extensive and “diverse” fraud scheme ever.

Not only Corpse is about to be investigated for a shady computer-related scheme. He is a stage 2 dementia patient with a rapidly unraveling profile – kept barely functional by drugs, which can’t prevent his mind slowly shutting down.

Codename Buffoon, true to his instincts, goes pre-emptive, declaring the whole election a fraud but without offering a smoking gun. He is duly debunked by the mainstream media/Big Tech alliance for spreading “false claims”.

All this is happening as a wily, old, bitter operator not only had declared that the only admissible scenario was a Blue victory; she had already positioned herself for a top security job.

Blue also games that Red would immediately embark on a single-minded path ahead: regiment an army of lawyers demanding access to every registration roll to scrub, review and verify each and every mail-in ballot, a process of de facto forensic analysis.

Yet Blue cannot foresee how many fake ballots will be unveiled during recounts.

As Corpse is set to declare victory, Buffon eyes the long game, set to take the whole thing all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Red machine had already gamed it – as it was fully aware of how operation Blue would be played.

The Red counter-revolution does carry the potential of strategically checkmating Blue.

It is a three-pronged attack – with Red using the Judiciary Committee, the Senate and the Attorney General, all under the authority of codename Buffoon until Inauguration Day. The end game after a vicious legal battle is to overthrow Blue.

Red’s top operators have the option of setting up a Senate commission, or a Special Counsel, at the request of the Judiciary Committee, to be appointed by the Department of Justice to investigate Corpse.

In the meantime, two electoral college votes, one-month apart, are required to certify the presidential winner.

These votes will happen in the middle of one and perhaps two investigations focused on Corpse. Any state represented at the electoral college may object to approving an investigated Corpse; in this case, it’s illegal for that state to allow its electors to certify the state’s presidential results.

Corpse may even be impeached by his own party, under the 25th Amendment, due to his irreversible mental decline.

The resulting chaos would have to be resolved by the Red-leaning Supreme Court. Not exactly the outcome favored by Blue.

The House always wins

The heart of the matter is that this think tank gaming transcends both Red and Blue. It’s all about the Deep State’s end game.

There’s nothing like a massive psy ops embedded in a WWE-themed theater under the sign of Divide and Rule to pit mob vs. mob, with half of the mob rebelling against what it perceives as an illegitimate government. The 0.00001% comfortably surveys the not only metaphorical carnage from above.

Even as the Deep State, using its Blue minions, would never have allowed codename Buffoon to prevail, again, domestic Divide and Rule might be seen as the least disastrous outcome for the world at large.

A civil war context in theory distracts the Deep State from bombing more Global South latitudes into the dystopian “democracy” charade it is now enacting.

And yet a domestic Empire of Chaos gridlock may well encourage more foreign adventures as a necessary diversion to tie the room together.

And that’s the beauty of the Blue gaming exercise: the House wins, one way or another.

Regression as a National Theme

October 2, 2020 

Lawrence Davidson | Author | Common Dreams
Lawrence Davidson is professor of history
emeritus at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.
He has been publishing his analyses
of topics in U.S. domestic and foreign policy,
international and humanitarian law
and Israel/Zionist practices and policies since 2010.

An Analysis (2 October 2020) by Lawrence Davidson

Part I—Going Backwards

Led by a reactionary, autocratic faction of the Republican Party, the United States has taken another step backward in terms of social progress. This comes with Donald Trump’s nomination of a religiously motivated conservative, Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court. Barrett, a devout Catholic and presently a federal appeals court judge, was nominated specifically at the behest of the president’s fundamentalist Christian supporters. They, in turn, are hell-bent (this term is employed purposely) on enforcing their moral sensibilities through secular law. 

I use the words “another step” because, in multiple different forms, this slippage has been going on for a while. It started with President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) and his confused idea that the problem with American society—a society of now over 300 million people, a poverty rate of at least 10.5%, no mandated health insurance, a place where national and state regulations were the only thing standing between the citizen and environmental degradation, an unhealthy workplace and economic instability—was the size and intrusive nature of the federal government.

With occasional but always temporary pauses, the country has been following this Reaganite campaign for small government ever since. How so? All the “intrusive” rules and regulations that protect the workplace, the environment and the economy, have come under attack from people wrapping themselves in the cloak of conservatism and championing a perverted notion of individual freedom. The whole national domestic orbit has been thrown into retrograde motion.

Donald Trump is the apparent culmination of this self-destructive process. Even before he ran for president on the Republican ticket, Trump was suspected of only masquerading as a conservative to secure a political base. Subsequently, he has been described as a misogynist, narcissist, congenital liar, bully, autocrat, and con man. Nonetheless, Trump was voted into the White House in 2016.

President Trump has turned the Republican Party into a rump affair remade in his own image, essentially purging all moderate Republicans from the party ranks. His singular achievements as president have been to make the rich richer, keep the poor poor, and render most of the population more vulnerable to a range of social, economic and environmental ills. He has also sought to befriend and defend every un-American, potentially criminal outfit in the country, ranging from the Nazis and anarchist armed militias to organized religious fanatics.

In essence, Trump seeks to do to the U.S. as a whole what he has done to the Republican Party. That is why a very large number of government agencies are now headed up by henchmen whose number one job is to cripple their own agencies. For those branches not so easily sabotaged, Trump seeks to find a way to load them up with those he believes will follow his lead. Presently, he is moving to do just that to the Supreme Court.

The unfortunate catalyst for this effort at court stacking is the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg personified for many the nation’s potential to move forward. She was a progressive figure who fought for civil rights, particularly those of women. As such, she became a symbol of resistance to the Trump administration’s efforts to move the Supreme Court to the right. Afflicted with cancer, Ginsburg was, alas, unable to outlive Donald Trump’s presidency. 

Now Trump seeks to replace her on the court with a candidate who, unlike President John Kennedy (a Catholic who was once falsely accused of being a tool of the Papacy), might indeed turn out to be more influenced by “orthodox” Catholicism than the U.S. Constitution. On the one hand, judge Barrett has asserted that legal careers ought to be seen “as a means to the end of serving God.” On the other, she says “I would stress that my personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge.” These two statements are in direct contradiction. If the first is true, the second is certainly false. This is not the kind of conflict of interest you want for an arbiter of the U.S. Constitution.

Trump, of course, does not care about religion, nor has he read the U.S. Constitution, and thus is uninterested in a mandated separation of church and state. From Trump’s point of view, Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination was made not an act of religious faith or made on conservative principle, it is rather an act of political opportunism. With it Trump hopes to garner support in the impending election among a host of Christian fundamentalist voters who fantasize that he is an agent of God. For these fanatics, Barrett’s appointment to the court would serve as proof of this absurd conviction.   

America isn’t the only place such dangerous craziness can take place, but that offers little consolation. Just how depressed should we be due to this unfortunate turn of events? It depends on whether you take a long range or short range view. 

Part II—Short Range

Ginsburg’s death was a bad break at a time of serious confrontation between progressive and regressive forces. By this I refer to the next presidential election cycle and the question whether the country will be guided by the concepts of civil and human rights espoused during the 1960s. Will its citizens support the concepts of racial egalitarianism? Will they also uphold same sex-marriage, abortion rights, fair immigration rules, health care for all, and the ongoing struggle for rational gun control? Will they make the issue of climate change a major priority? Will the citizenry even maintain the traditional economic reforms instituted by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression? In the short run, Trump’s ascendency, bolstered by millions of fundamentalist Christians (whose loyalty is to an anti-humanist religious ideology) and tens of thousands of libertarians and anarchists, makes these open questions. And now with Ginsburg’s demise, Trump will get another chance to undermine progressive standards with a reactionary appointment to the Supreme Court. 

Some might say that, despite such a court appointment, this retrograde movement will end after the upcoming November election. The assumption here is that Donald Trump and his rump Republican Party will lose the presidency and control of Congress. Then, after overcoming the illicit legal maneuvers and temper-tantrum violence the right attempts, the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, will become president. At that point, presumably, he will begin to put the country back on a progressive path. Certainly, if Biden wins the presidency and the Democrats also win both houses of Congress, the potential for forward movement on all the issues mentioned above becomes possible. However, it is not guaranteed. 

Joe Biden’s present slogan of “Make America America Again”   can mean just about anything, but it seems not to imply making the nation more progressive than it was, say, under Barack Obama. Under Obama there was moderate progress on the issue of health care and the country was dragged out of yet another Republican-facilitated recession. On the other hand, under Obama, immigrants were deported in high numbers and drones were regularly hitting wedding parties and picnics in Afghanistan. 

Can Biden go beyond Obama in a forward direction? When you consider this question keep in mind more than the fact that the country will most likely be burdened by a screwed-up Supreme Court. Joe Biden himself has issues. He is a lifetime institutional politician—a guy who believes in, and plays by, long-established political rules. In this sense, he is Donald Trump’s opposite. Trump is willing to break all such rules, ostensibly to “make America great again.” Biden will reassert the primacy of tradition—that is, play by traditional political rules—and thereby “make America America again.” Doing so will not bring with it an era of greater progress—unless circumstances force Biden and the Democrat’s to take a “great leap forward.”

Part III—Long Range

Historically, what is usually needed to usher in significant progressive change? In our modern era such change usually follows catastrophes—mostly wars, disease and economic downturns. 

Modern wars and related military research are famous for providing leaps forward in technology. Everything from ambulance services, radar, and jet engines to intravenous blood transfusions, microwave ovens and duct tape comes to us through this route. Of course, war is a horrible way of motivating technological development. It is a truly murderous tradeoff. 

Epidemic diseases can spur medical progress. The outbreaks of viral epidemics such as MERS, AIDS and now Covid-19 have encouraged treatment research for virus infections and vaccine development. Again, it is death and debilitation that moves things forward at an accelerated rate. 

And then there is economic depression. In the U.S., progressive steps such as Social Security, collective bargaining and unionization, and various forms of necessary business regulation designed to prevent both corruption and instability followed the Great Depression (roughly 1929 

 to 1941). This catastrophic economic plunge, following decades of “boom and bust” instability, also encouraged the average citizen (minus some Republicans) to accept an activist government working for the interests of society as a whole.

There are other major stimuli to progressive change but they too tend to have their origins in dire circumstances such as long-term inequality, discrimination and exploitation. Over time these conditions spur uprisings that may overcome these socio-cultural evils. Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement is an example of how this works within a democracy. Today’s Black Lives Matter may also have potential to move us in a progressive direction.

Part IV—Going Forward

Assuming Joe Biden’s election to the presidency and Democratic control of both houses of Congress, is there a catastrophic circumstance that might push him to go beyond his stated goal of simply “Making America America Again”? Well we know that Covid-19 will still be with us in 2021 but the discovery process for a vaccine is already going very fast. Here Biden may do little more than relieve us all of Trump’s self-serving confusions and provide a more trustworthy, science-based platform for the curative process to proceed—which is something we should all be thankful for. Still, there might be another potentially catastrophic situation waiting around the corner. That possibility is continued economic breakdown and a painful restructuring process.

The U.S. is presently running a $170.5 billion budget deficit as well as a $63.6 billion trade deficit. The nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) or total worth of all production was down 31.7% in the second quarter of 2020. These figures will eventually necessitate an increase in taxes if the government is to be in a position to assist the citizenry in economic recovery. Trump, of course, has a regressive policy of as little taxation as possible and no help to the states or the citizens. 

The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 8.4%, which is down two percentage points as a marginal recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic took place. However, this proved temporary and the rate is now going up. Covid-19 led to a loss of 22 million jobs in the United States, and only about half of them have been recovered. Until there is an effective vaccine, not much additional progress on this front can be expected. 

Even with a vaccine, it might turn out that the pandemic has permanently changed the structure of the economy, making It unlikely that all of the lost jobs will come back. Even before Covid-19, retail was shifting to on-line sales to the detriment of normal retail stores and malls. The pandemic has greatly accelerated this movement. Work-from-home arrangements are leaving office space unoccupied and city-based luncheon eateries near empty. Overall, the restaurant business is shrinking. All of this will lead to higher levels of bankruptcies and unemployment for the foreseeable future. 

Under President Trump the approach to these changes would be to do nothing while claiming he was doing more than anyone else could or would do. Biden and the Democrats can be expected to be more proactive. This would hopefully go beyond the reestablishment of the programs and regulations Trump has destroyed. 

So what will Joe Biden do if he becomes president? He is not an original thinker. However, the worse the economy gets, the more violence from rightwing individuals and militias will manifest itself, and the more cases of police brutality there are, the more the Democrats will be pressured to institute progressive domestic reform (i.e. infrastructural renewal, debt reduction, police reforms, gun control, universal health care, etc.) I think we can count on these pressures persisting. 

Part V—Conclusion

The reader might have noticed a certain incompleteness in the above reasoning. That is, catastrophe can encourage regression as well as progression. Wars, pandemics and economic depressions have sometimes given rise to dictatorships and repression. Worse yet, quite often, this happens to the sound of cheering crowds.  

Throughout his presidency Trump has retained the support of roughly 35% of the U.S. adult population. Presently the adult population stands at 209,128,094, thus Trump supporters may number over 73 million citizens. That implies that even after four years of destructive behavior, these millions seem to still support the leadership of an incompetent authoritarian personality.

However, the entire adult population never actually votes. In the case of the United States a relatively large number of citizens are, like the permanently unemployed, no longer active in the political marketplace. That is, they pay little attention to electoral politics and don’t show up at the polls. In modern times it is rare that the percentage of eligible voters who actually turn out for presidential elections exceeds 60%. Using this number, that puts the actual voting population at 125,476,856. If we assume that 35% of this number supports Trump consistently, we get 43,916,899.

This may not be enough for Trump to win a second term as president—a fact that may actually save the country’s democracy. Yet this number is still very disturbing. The fact that just about 44 million Americans are willing to risk their democratic traditions and a relatively progressive future to follow a man without a conscience over a political cliff—an action that puts at risk not only their own country but, arguably, the entire planet—is certainly something to lose sleep over. Finally, this picture is not unique to the United States. It is probably true that one-third of any given population is susceptible to the overtures of a cult personality. 

Perhaps this last fact gives some insight into why history is full of civil and international disturbance. A large minority of any population is easily seduced into such engagements, dragging the rest of us along with them. That may help contextualize the choice U.S. citizens have come November 3rd. 

U.S. Supreme Court Reaffirms U.S. Police State

Source

U.S. Supreme Court Reaffirms U.S. Police State

JUNE 20, 2020

by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog

On June 15th, the U.S. Supreme Court, with only the libertarian right-wing (basically anti-government) Clarence Thomas dissenting — reaffirmed that America’s law-enforcement officers have “qualified immunity” from prosecution when they do things such as to shoot an innocent person in his own yard whose unthreatening pet dog is seeking his protection from an officer who is trying to shoot it; or, as the libertarian lawyer Jay Schweikert put this matter: “the Supreme Court let stand an Eleventh Circuit decision granting immunity to a police officer who shot a ten-year-old child in the back of the knee, while repeatedly attempting to shoot a pet dog that wasn’t threatening anyone.” The officer was Deputy Sheriff Michael Vickers, of Coffee County, Georgia. He had been chasing a suspect, who happened to cross into the yard of Amy Corbitt, who at that time happened to be chatting with another adult, Damion Stewart. One of her children was referred to in the case as “SDC.” Here is how the lower court ruling stated the incident:

At some point after Vickers and the other officers entered Corbitt’s yard, the officers “demanded all persons in the area, including the children, to get down on the ground.” An officer handcuffed Stewart and placed a gun at his back. …  Then, “while the children were lying on the ground obeying [Vickers’s] orders … without necessity or any immediate threat or cause, [Vickers] discharged his firearm at the family pet named ‘Bruce’ twice.” The first shot missed, and Bruce (a dog) temporarily retreated under Corbitt’s home. No other efforts were made to restrain or subdue the dog, and no one appeared threatened by him. Eight or ten seconds after Vickers fired the first shot, the dog reappeared and was “approaching his owners,” when Vickers fired a second shot at the dog. This shot also missed the dog, but the bullet struck SDC in the back of his right knee. At the time of the shot, SDC was “readily viewable” and resting “approximately eighteen inches from Vickers, lying on the ground, face down, pursuant to the orders of [Vickers].” Barnett (the fleeing suspect) “was visibly unarmed and readily compliant” with officers. According to the complaint, “[a]t no time did SDC, or any other children … present any threat or danger to provoke … Vickers to fire two shots.” Importantly, the parties do not dispute that Vickers intended to shoot the dog and not SDCCorbitt, individually and as SDC’s parent and guardian, brought a civil action against Vickers in his individual capacity pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The complaint alleged deprivations of the right to be free from excessive force as guaranteed by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. … In response, Vickers filed a motion to dismiss pursuant to Rule 12(b)(6). He asserted that he was entitled to qualified immunity because case law had not staked out a “bright line” indicating that the act of firing at the dog and unintentionally shooting SDC was unlawful.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Deputy Sheriff Michael Vickers. The case against Vickers was one of many such, throughout the country, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling dismissed all of them for the same reason. Here is how the Rutherford Institute, which backed all of these cases against the officers, phrased the officers’ argument in one of these cases:

Qualified immunity shielded the defendants’ actions from liability because Petitioner could not point to any factually identical case clearly establishing that law enforcement officials exceeded the scope of Petitioner’s consent to enter her home when they essentially destroyed her home. That reasoning sets an impossible standard. Because courts are free to advance to the ‘clearly established’ prong of the qualified immunity inquiry without first deciding threshold constitutional questions, it is unlikely that a body of case law with closely analogous factual circumstances will ever develop.

In other words: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that unless Congress will pass a new law which will specifically apply the 4th and the 14th Amendments so as to enable prosecution of law-enforcement officers who do the specific listed sorts of things that unequivocally are identified in those new statutes as being prohibited under those Amendments, America’s law-enforcement officers are free to continue doing these sorts of things and to avoid any sort of legal liability for having done them.

Attorney Schweikert headlined on June 15th “The Supreme Court’s Dereliction of Duty on Qualified Immunity”, and wrote about the Court’s ruling:

It’s impossible to know for sure what motivated the Court to deny all of these petitions. But one possibility is that the Justices were looking closely at developments in Congress — where members of both the House and the Senate have introduced bills that would abolish qualified immunity — and decided to duck the question, hoping to pressure Congress to fix the Court’s mess. It is certainly encouraging that so many legislators have finally turned their attention to qualified immunity. But the mere fact that Congress can fix this mess doesn’t absolve the Supreme Court of its obligation to fix what it broke — the Court conjured qualified immunity out of nothing in the first place, and the Justices had both the authority and responsibility to correct their own blunders, no matter what happens in the legislature.

Qualified immunity will go down in history as one of the Supreme Court’s most egregious, costly, and embarrassing mistakes. None of the Justices on the Court today were responsible for creating this doctrine, but they all had a responsibility to fix it — and except for Justice Thomas, they all shirked that responsibility. It is now all the more urgent that Congress move forward on this issue and ensure that all public officials — especially members of law enforcement — are held accountable for their misconduct.

However, Schweikert contradicts himself there, because he simultaneously acknowledges that qualified immunity was concocted by the Court and not imposed into the law by the Congress and signed into the law by the President. So, there is disingenousness in Schweikert’s proposed ‘solution’. An evil that is introduced by the U.S. Supreme Court cannot be eliminated by the U.S. Congress and a good President. Nor can it be eliminated by successfully going through the lengthy and arduous process of passing a new Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. No matter what types of actions by law-enforcement officers would be specifically listed in any such new law or new Constitutional Amendment, it would fail. An arbitrary, basically evil, U.S. Supreme Court will always be able to place its imprimatur upon and validate new rationalizations for the police-state that they have been constructing in this country, especially after 9/11. Congress and the President can’t fix this, they can’t fix a problem that they didn’t themselves create, but Congress and the President can condemn and shame the Court — which they never do. Better yet, they can impeach all of the sitting ‘Justices’ and replace them with decent people. But each of this Court’s members was placed there by the Congresses, and by the Presidents. It’s an extremely vicious circle, and no part of it can fix other parts of it.

This isn’t a failure ONLY by the U.S. Supreme Court. It is instead an expression of the American system as it now exists, and which failure renders the U.S. Constitution itself almost meaningless, especially as regards the rights of the people and the obligations of federal officials at all levels in the government. There is no accountability; there is only blame. And, as in any authoritarian system, all blame goes downward, and all praise goes upward. That’s the reality. The U.S. Constitution is by now just a string of words. America’s Founders are dead, gone, and no longer really even an influence. That’s the reality. Pretending otherwise won’t fix anything. Drastic changes are needed. And the American public has proven itself not up to the challenge, still refuses to face the reality. This is system-failure. And the public refuses to face it.

The corruption is beyond control, and the public ends up paying for all of it. People such as Amy Corbitt and her son “SBC” are mere collateral damages in such a system. The beneficiaries from the system run the system. The least that the public can do is to call it a “dictatorship” instead of a “democracy.” The most that the public can do is overthrow it and replace it with one that has the same Constitution and none of the existing case-law, and that adds a few Amendments, such as this. Also essential would be an entirely new and more rigorous methodology for interpreting the Constitution. There is no existing rigorous methodology for Constitutional interpretation. The present chaos in that regard is virtually inviting the degeneration and predominant corruption that currently exist. Especially after World War II, the U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly taken advantage of that chaos.

Currently, the phrase “American justice” is oxymoronic.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.