Why Labor Day

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, Sep 2

 'Almost one hundred and forty-two years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.

Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. 

Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity. But for all that the war had seemed to be about defending men against the rise of an oligarchy that intended to reduce all men to a life of either enslavement or wage labor, the war and its aftermath had pushed workers’ rights backward.   

The drain of men to the battlefields and the western mines during the war resulted in a shortage of workers that kept unemployment low and wages high. Even when they weren’t, the intense nationalism of the war years tended to silence the voices of labor organizers. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” one organization declared when the war broke out, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe, or we are whipped.” 

Another factor working against the establishment of labor unions during the war was the tendency of employers to claim that striking workers were deliberately undercutting the war effort. They turned to the government to protect production, and in industries like Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields, government leaders sent soldiers to break budding unions and defend war production.

During the war, government contracting favored those companies that could produce big orders of the mule shoes, rifles, rain slickers, coffee, and all the other products that kept the troops supplied. The owners of the growing factories grew wealthy on government contracts, even as conditions in the busy factories deteriorated. While wages were high during the war, they were often paid in greenbacks, which were backed only by the government’s promise to pay. 

While farmers and some entrepreneurs thrived during the war, urban workers and miners had reason to believe that employers had taken advantage of the war to make money off them. After the war, they began to strike for better wages and safer conditions. In August 1866, 60,000 people met as the National Labor Union in Baltimore, Maryland, where they called for an eight-hour workday. Most of those workers calling for organization simply wanted a chance to rise to comfort, but the resolutions developed by the group’s leaders after the convention declared that workers must join unions to reform the abuses of the industrial system. 

To many of those who thought the war would create a country where hard work would mean success, the resolutions seemed to fly in the face of that harmony, echoing the southern enslavers by dividing the world into people of wealth and workers, and asking for government intervention, this time on the side of workers. Republicans began to redefine their older, broad concept of workers to mean urban unskilled or semi-skilled wage laborers specifically.

Then in 1867, a misstep by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio made the party step back from workers. Wade had been a cattle drover and worked on the Erie Canal before studying law and entering politics, and he was a leader among those who saw class activism as the next step in the party’s commitment to free labor. His fiery oratory lifted him to prominence, and in March 1867 the Senate chose him its president pro tempore, in effect making him the nation’s acting vice president in those days before there was a process for replacing a vice president who had stepped into the presidency.

Wade joined a number of senators on a trip to the West, and in Lawrence, Kansas, newspapers reported—possibly incorrectly—that Wade predicted a fight in America between labor and capital. “Property is not equally divided,” the reporter claimed Wade said, “and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” Congress, which Wade now led, had done much for ex-slaves and must now address “the terrible distinction between the man that labors and him that does not.”

Republican newspapers were apoplectic. The New York Times claimed that Wade was a demagogue. Every hard worker could succeed in America, it wrote. “Laborers here can make themselves sharers in the property of the country,—can become capitalists themselves,—just

as nine in ten of all the capitalists in the country have done so before them,—by industry, frugality, and intelligent enterprise.” Trying to get rich by force of law would undermine society.

Congress established an eight-hour day for federal employees in June 1868, but in that year’s election, voters turned Wade, and others like him, out of office. In 1869, Republican president Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation saying that the eight-hour workday of "laborers, workmen, and mechanics" would not mean cuts in wages.

Then, in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. The transatlantic cable had gone into operation in 1866, and American newspapers had featured stories of the European war. Now, hungry for dramatic stories, they plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by crazed women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows. 

The Communards were a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who planned to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to associations of workmen, American newspapers wrote. In their telling, the Paris Commune brought to life the chaotic world the elite enslavers foresaw when they said it was imperative to keep workers from politics. 

Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.” Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace looked at the rising numbers of industrial workers and the conditions of city life, and warned Americans, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”

At the same time, it was also clear that wealthy industrialists were gaining more and more control over both state and local governments. In 1872 the Credit Mobilier scandal broke. This was a complicated affair, and what had actually happened was almost certainly misrepresented, but it seemed to show congressmen taking bribes from railroad barons, and Americans were ready to believe that they were doing so. Then, in July 1877, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages 20 percent and strikers shut down most of the nation’s railroads, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent U.S. soldiers to the cities immobilized by the strikes. It seemed industrialists had the Army at their beck and call.

By 1882, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government so far toward men of capital that it seemed there was more room for workingmen to demand their rights. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.” 

The workers marching in New York City in the first Labor Day celebration in 1882 carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.” 

Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.” 

In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….” 

Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”

As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).

They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.  

In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”

Happy Labor Day.

—

Notes:

https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history-daze

New York Times, July 1, 1867, p. 4. 

New York Times, July 9, 1867, p. 4.

New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 8.

New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 4.

New York Daily Tribune, September 7, 1882, p. 4.

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/files/2011/09/S-730.pdf

https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-first-Labor-Day/

Grace Palladino, Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840–1868 (Fordham University Press, 2006).

Mark Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Johns Hopkins, 2006). 

Brace quotation is from Robert M. Fogelson, America’s Armories: Architecture, Society and Public Order (Harvard University Press, 1989).

Frank Norton, “Our Labor System and the Chinese,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (May 1871).

Chicago Tribune quoted in Harper’s Weekly, February 9, 1884, p, 86.

New York Times, November 10, 1892, p. 8. Statement from the Commercial Travelers’ Republican Club, quoted in Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1892, p. 2. Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1892, p. 2. Senator Teller, quoted in New York Times, November 15, 1892, p. 1. Washington Post, February 16, 1893, p. 7. Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1892, p. 4. Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1892, p. 4. Chicago Tribune, November 13, 1892, p. 4.

Grover Cleveland, Fourth Annual Message, December 3, 1888, at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fourth-annual-message-first-term'

Generals, Republicans Support Harris/Walz

 

GOP Alums and some retired Generals come out against the current GOP candidate.

Click below for a link to the letter and signatory list.

Bush, McCain, and Romney Alumni for Harris Statement

GOP Playbook for November

 As discussed below, our Constitution establishes clearly the succession procedures in the event the election remains undecided past the specified times.

Since we have clarity about the succession process, then it appears likely that the GOP will use the indecision of an uncertified election to foment violence similar to the violence they created on January 6, 2021. Their goal will be to overthrow the government so they can seize control.

We cannot allow that. 

We should very sure to count every vote before inaugurating a new President.

The law states this:

'If Congress does not certify the vote for President of the United States, the situation is handled according to the 12th Amendment and the procedures outlined in the Electoral Count Act of 1887. If Congress fails to certify the electoral vote, the process to resolve the issue is as follows:

    Role of the President Pro Tempore of the Senate: If no President has been elected by the time the new Congress convenes on January 3rd, the President pro tempore of the Senate, who is third in the line of presidential succession, would be next in line to assume the role of acting President. This position is typically held by the longest-serving member of the majority party in the Senate.

    If a President is not elected by January 20: According to the 20th Amendment, if there is no President elected and inaugurated by January 20th, the Vice President-elect would assume the role of Acting President until a President is officially elected.

    Contingency Procedure: In the absence of a certification of electoral votes and no President or Vice President in place, the Speaker of the House of Representatives would become the Acting President. This would be a temporary solution until the issue of the certification of the electoral vote is resolved.

For a detailed understanding, you can refer to the following sources:

    12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

    Electoral Count Act of 1887'

Courtesy ChatGTP August 11, 2024

Bring Back The Equal Time Rule

The Equal Time Rule, part of the U.S. Communications Act of 1934, was designed to ensure that broadcasters provide equal opportunities for political candidates to reach the public. However, this rule was repealed in 2014 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As a result, the Equal Time Rule no longer applies, and there are no penalties for violations related to it under current regulations.

Historically, the penalties for violating the Equal Time Rule included:

    Fines: Broadcasters could face monetary fines imposed by the FCC.

    License Sanctions: The FCC could impose sanctions on a broadcaster's license, which might include suspension or revocation.

    Compliance Orders: The FCC could issue orders requiring broadcasters to comply with the rule and take corrective actions.

For information on the history and specifics of the Equal Time Rule, you can refer to:

    Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Official Website: FCC Equal Time Rule

    Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute: Communications Act of 1934

Since the rule was repealed, broadcasters now have more flexibility regarding political programming but should be aware of other regulations and guidelines governing political advertising and programming.

Source:  Chat GPT question: what are the penalties for media which violates the equal time regulation and provide sources

Harris Meets Realpolitik

REALPOLITIK

'Realpolitik is the approach of conducting diplomatic or political policies based primarily on considerations of given circumstances and factors, rather than strictly following ideological, moral, or ethical premises. In this respect, it shares aspects of its philosophical approach with those of realism and pragmatism. Wikipedia.'

REALITY #1 - DO NOT ALLOW TRUMP TO STEAL OFFICE OF POTUS

It is time to step back and simulate the Presidential election of 2024 transfer of power. 

trump and MAGA forces may try to delay the Constitutional election certification so that the newly elected President cannot take office,  either permanently or until all the votes are certified. Several States already have installed MAGA supporters in the election certificating process. They may succeed in preventing a certification as required by the Constitution in a timely manner; it is likely that any votes so challenged will be for Harris.  If that happens, trump may claim the he is the rightful winner and demand that his forces seize the White House. MAGA has shown they do not abide by the rules of law. 

If Biden/Harris choose to follow a strict interpretation of the laws, they may hand the office to trump. This is a terrible idea; it will end permanently our elected Republic.

Biden and Harris should not concede the election under any circumstances, if that concession may install trump as POTUS. At the very least, they should not leave the office until ALL votes are counted and certified and trump is the Electoral College winner. Harris most likely will have a significant majority of the popular votes, but there may be some questions about the Electoral College votes.

REALITY # 2 - MURDER ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE

Tyrannical forces test every President to see what she/he is made of: 

Harris WILL face a challenge to the United States that shows whether she values life more than our National Interests.

If she chooses to spare a life instead of taking a life, then tyrants will understand that she is vulnerable. If she chooses to take a life, then she will be recognized as a leader. 

REALITY POLAND # 3 - 

Here is a story about Poland in WW II that we forget at our peril. NSFW, courtesy of historian James Fell.

'James Fell. Poster based in Canada

The European theatre of World War II began in September of 1939 with the fucking Nazi invasion of Poland. On a per-capita basis, Poland lost more people in the war than any other independent nation, a whopping 17% of the population killed. Five years after the invasion, a heroic but ultimately doomed uprising in Warsaw against Nazi occupation began. 

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: August 1, 1944--

In the summer of 1944 things were not going well for the fucking Nazis. The Western Allies had established a solid beachhead in France and were moving inland, and on the Eastern front those Nazi assbuckets were dropping like cicadas after a mating frenzy. With the Nazi dick towels in retreat out of Poland and the Soviet Red Army camped just outside the city, the Polish Resistance decided it was time for some motherfucking payback. 

But it was also political. The Polish resistance were fans of the democratic Polish government, which was in exile in London. With the Soviets ready to “liberate” Warsaw, Poles didn’t want to trade one oppressive external ruler for another. So on August 1, 1944, they said fuck it we’re taking this city back ourselves. Despite being poorly supplied, the Poles had early victories against those Nazi fucks. But that murderous mass of manatee mucus Adolf Hitler said oh hell nein and sent in reinforcements to fight the uprising. 

What followed was brutal street-to-street fighting. With superior weaponry, the fucking Nazis crushed the rebellion. Meanwhile, the Soviets sat just outside the city and watched it happen, doing nothing to help the Poles. The battle lasted two months, and despite pleas from Churchill to Stalin to get off his ass and do something, it’s near certain Stalin ordered his Red Army to allow the Polish resistance to be crushed so that when they moved in and kicked out the fucking Nazis there would be little resistance to the USSR setting up a communist puppet state in Poland. Because that’s exactly what they did. 

The British and U.S. tried to help the beleaguered rebels with air drops of supplies, but it wasn’t enough. Approximately 16,000 members of the Polish resistance were killed and around 200,000 Polish citizens lost their lives in the uprising. Most of the civilian deaths were due to mass executions carried out by fucking Nazis. Warsaw was almost completely destroyed, and another 700,000 fled the city. 

The Soviets had encouraged the uprising just two days before it began, sending out a radio broadcast, saying “Fight the Germans!” and that they were “all together” to “pursue the enemy westwards.” Some historians are Stalin apologists, saying there was intense fighting elsewhere on the Eastern Front and so the Red Army was too busy to stop a mass murder of Warsaw citizens. Knowing Stalin’s reputation, however, I can totally see that maniacal dickcheese purposely withholding support so he could control the city more easily after the war. 

Get the book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN at JamesFell.com/books.

The United States of America Does Not Negotiate With Terrorists

Terrorist trump and his GOP have announced they will try, through election officials they have placed in state and local governments already, to prevent the certification of the election in November.

This is an existential challenge to the United States of America. 

While we want to uphold the law to the letter, we cannot allow Terrorist trump and the terrorist GOP to occupy any consequential office of the United States. 

In the event that the election cannot be certified according to the Constitution, then Biden and Harris should refuse to hand over the Presidency until and unless the election is certified according to the law. 

There will be numerous matters of fact and law available to provide the justification for the refusal. 

The moral imperative is simply this: Terrorist trump refuses to acknowledge the law and have and will ignore the law in the future.

Therefore, we are justified to refuse to bend to his will.

Joe from Scranton

You are a good man and a man of honour.

You have allowed billions of people to feel hope. 

I am proud to be American because of you.

Americans are grateful.

Thank you.

National Self-Defense

There can be little doubt by any serious observer that trump and the GOP have become terrorist organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the United States of America by whatever means they choose.

They use the rights we reserve for citizens and lawful residents as tools to further their campaign of destruction. You can read a comprehensive discussion of those rights here: [https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao-mn/legacy/2011/09/16/MN%20Civil%20Rights%20FINAL.pdf]

Because they refuse to accept the rule of law when it goes against their plans and instead conduct actions to destroy that system, they are an existential threat to our country. 

They forfeit their protections from harm granted by the Constitution to citizens.

Under International law, we have the right and the duty to end their threat by any means necessary, whether those means are legal or not.

They have become Enemies of the State: 'An enemy of the state is a person accused of certain crimes against the state, such as treason. Describing individuals in this way is sometimes a manifestation of political repression. For example, an authoritarian regime may purport to maintain national security by describing social or political dissidents as "enemies of the state". In other cases, the individual in question may have legitimately endangered the country and/or its population. For example, a double agent selling military or intelligence secrets could undermine a nation's security, and could therefore be considered an enemy not of just a person or entity within a state, but the state itself and all entities therein.' [https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Enemy_of_the_state]

'The Insurrection Act of 1807, codified in Title 10 of U.S. Code, §§ 251-254, authorizes the President, with certain checks, to use force in the event “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any States by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” Again, this precedes the “domestic enemies” concept by decades.'

'Article 51 has been interpreted to incorporate the inherent rules of self-defense under customary international law, which provide that self-defense must be necessary and proportionate to the aggression. When a state faces an imminent attack, it may have a right to act in anticipatory self-defense.'

“Even in the context of an armed conflict against an armed group, the government may use lethal force only against individuals who are directly participating in hostilities against the United States,” the group says on its website. “Regardless of the context, whenever the government uses lethal force, it must take all possible steps to avoid harming civilian bystanders.” American Civil Liberties Union, 

[https://www.cnn.com/2014/02/10/politics/us-killing-americans/index.html]

'A state can use force to defend against an internal enemy under certain circumstances, typically involving threats to its sovereignty, security, or stability. Here are some general principles and situations when this might apply:

    Internal Armed Insurrection or Rebellion: If there is an armed uprising or rebellion within the state that threatens the authority of the government and the rule of law, the state may use force to restore order and protect its institutions.

    Terrorism: States may use force to combat terrorist activities that pose a significant threat to public safety, infrastructure, or national security.

    Civil War: In cases where there is a widespread breakdown of law and order leading to civil war or large-scale violence, the state may use force to maintain or restore control over its territory and population.

    Protection of Citizens: When the state is unable to ensure the safety and security of its citizens from internal threats, it may use force to protect them.

    Defending Constitutional Order: If an internal enemy seeks to overthrow the constitutional order or democratic processes of the state, the government may use force to defend these principles.' Search results by ChatGTP.

TEAM JOE/KAMALA

Hey Joe:

Here's an idea: Take Kamala everywhere and introduce her as a critical part of your decision making team. Let her answer half the questions you get. 

'Hello everybody. I want you to know that as President I have your back!

And, Kamala has mine !

You know, the Presidency is not a one man show ! My team, and especially my Vice President, are all among the best America has. 

I am honored and privileged to work with them all.

So, if you see me stutter on occasion, remember that we are a team. !

Even if God calls me home, Kamala and our team will carry out the policies we have established to restore America 'with justice and Liberty for ALL'

Project 2025 Brings Death to Americans

 

Some supporters of Project 2025 may think they will be safe from the trumptyrant because they think he will be loyal to them.

He will not; they are deluded.

The future is already here in Russia - read whom Tyrant Putin has already murdered:

Project 2025 will bring darkness and death to America.....

Project 2025 installs a tyrant as President; he will be able to STEAL YOUR WEALTH.

Hey Joe: We trust your judgment.

 Hey Joe:

We love you and we have your back. 

We trust your judgment.

I make a request: When you consider staying in the race or leaving it, please ask a gerontologist about your prospects for the next term. 

It's your decision but our lives ride on it. 

Choose wisely with the next four years in mind.

Your geezer pal....

Western Democracies Under Constant Attack

Moscow Center takes a long view and the election upsets in England, France and elsewhere confirm their political interference strategy, as explained brilliantly by Heather Cox Richardson below.

The Center will continue to foment political instability in their hope that Western Democracies eventually will fall and be replaced by tyrannies. They will spend vast amounts of money in those attempts.

The Congress of the United States of America will be wise to create a law or laws which require criminal prosecution of any citizen or foreign agent who funds politically disruptive actions or groups seeking the demise of our Rule of Law. 

I think it unwise to provide Moscow Center with the means to pursue their strategy. It is a matter of National Security and national survival that we prosecute them vigorously. Groups which use the Rule of Law to overthrow that same rule do not deserve the benefits of that rule. 

Heather Cox Richardson, Jul 8 2024

 

I have spent the weekend struggling mightily with a new manuscript and have had little time to study the news.

The most notable event from the day is that in a stunning upset, French voters have rejected members of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in legislative elections. After the first round of votes, National Rally candidates appeared to be comfortably ahead, but left-wing and centrist candidates combined forces to prevent splitting the vote, and voters then flooded the polls to elect the candidates that coalition fielded. 

Le Pen has said her policies are the same ones advanced by Russian president Vladimir Putin and former president Trump. 

On Thursday, elections in the United Kingdom saw a landslide victory for the center-left Labour Party for the first time in 14 years. Lauren Frayer and Fatima Al-Kassab of NPR noted that it was the worst defeat for the Conservatives in their almost 200-year history. 

There are always many factors that go into any election, but these results at least raise the question of whether western politicians are finding effective ways to counter the techniques of Russian disinformation. France has been flooded with Russian disinformation trying to create divisions in society as Putin seeks to break European support for Ukraine. Russia openly supports Le Pen.    

The U.K. also has been similarly flooded with Russian disinformation for years now. Russian trolls lie on social media websites and populate the comments sections of popular websites both to end support for Ukraine and to exploit wedge issues to split people apart.

These efforts were part of what Russian political theorists called “political technology”: the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media. Political theorists developed several techniques in this approach to politics: blackmailing opponents, abusing state power to help favored candidates, sponsoring “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to confuse voters on the other side and thus open the way for their own candidates, creating false parties to split the opposition, and, finally, creating a false narrative around an election or other event in order to control public debate.

These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. But those techniques dovetailed with the rhetoric of homegrown far-right figures as well.

It has always been a question what people who have embraced a virtual world will do when they figure out that the narrative on which they have based their government is fake. It seems possible that they create centrist coalitions and turn out to vote in huge numbers to reassert control over their politics and their country. 

The United States has had a similarly contentious relationship with political technology, Russian disinformation, and far-right leaders echoing that disinformation as they seek to take power by dividing the American people.

And long before anyone had begun to call disinformation political technology, the United States had a small group of elite enslavers seeking to take control of the nation by hammering on their narrative that the only true basis for society was racial slavery and using racism to divide their opponents. 

When they managed to get Congress and the Supreme Court to give them the right to move slavery into the American West, where new slave states could work with southern slave states to make slavery national, voters woke up. Disagreeing about immigration, internal improvements, public education, tariffs, and finance—all hot-button issues in the 1850s—they nonetheless built a centrist coalition to stop elite enslavers from replacing democracy with an oligarchy. 

Indeed, their coalition was so effective that Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had sponsored the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that permitted enslavement to move west, objected that it was unseemly for abolitionists who opposed human enslavement in principle to work with those like Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who focused on the Constitution and argued that it protected enslavement in the slave states. 

In 1854, Lincoln answered Douglas: “Our Senator…objects that those who oppose him in this measure do not entirely agree with one another…. [H]e…says it is not quite fair to oppose him in this variety of ways. He should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.” 

Six years later, that coalition of voters elected Lincoln to the White House.

The French elections left no party in an absolute majority, so governance will be messy. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez nonetheless cheered tonight’s results: “This week, two of the largest countries in Europe have chosen the same path that Spain chose a year ago: rejection of the extreme right and a decisive commitment to a social left that addresses people’s problems with serious and brave policies,” Sánchez posted on social media.

“The United Kingdom and France have said YES to progress and social advancement and NO to the regression in rights and freedoms. There is no agreement or government with the extreme right.” 

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/07/france-election-result-2024-left-far-right/

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/05/g-s1-8456/uk-labour-party-win-keir-starmer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/30/france-russia-interference-far-right/

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-exposes-sick-russian-troll-factory-plaguing-social-media-with-kremlin-propaganda

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/virtual-politics-and-the-corruption-post-soviet-democracy

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/gleb-pavlovsky/

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/france-election-runoff-results-07-07-24-intl/index.html

X:

NoLieWithBTC/status/1810085577397608770

anneapplebaum/status/1810013990447092150

Gratuitous Campaign Advice

Joey, Hey Joe:

Here are a couple of things about winning: 

In public, always lower your voice to more bass and raise the volume. That gives you more cred..........

Do NOT challenge him on facts or statements; instead, do the Reagan: 'There he goes again...'

In public, drop the 'contemplative' mindset. Show energy behind every remark.

Say to yourself all the time every day: "Yes I own this whole place. Don't even think about pissing me off". 

Let it show but do not say it out loud. Duh.......

Trot out your brain trust. We know you have good staff, show them to us.

We have your back.

GOP Project 2025 Takes Money from Hungary's Orban

July 4, 2024, Heather Cox Richardson

Monday, July 1, was a busy day. That morning the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that gives the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts. On the same day, Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon began a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress at a low-security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Before he began serving his sentence, he swore he would “be more powerful in prison than I am now.”

 

“On July 2, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, went onto Bannon’s webcast War Room to hearten Bannon’s right-wing followers after Bannon’s incarceration. Former representative Dave Brat (R-VA) was sitting in for Bannon and conducted the interview. 

 

“[W]e are going to win,” Roberts told them. “We're in the process of taking this country back…. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail.”

 

“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the radical left…has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

 

Roberts took over the presidency of the Heritage Foundation in 2021, and he shifted it from a conservative think tank to an organization devoted to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Central to that project for Roberts has been working to bring the policies of Hungary’s president Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, to the United States.

 

In 2023, Roberts brought the Heritage Foundation into a formal partnership with Hungary’s Danube Institute, a think tank overseen by a foundation that is directly funded by the Hungarian government; as journalist Casey Michel reported, it is, “for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.” The Danube Institute has given grants to far-right figures in the U.S., and, Michel noted in March, “we have no idea how much funding may be flowing directly from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation.” Roberts has called modern Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

 

Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy and replace it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.” He is moving Hungary away from the stabilizing international systems supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

 

No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his far-right political party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists, who attacked immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. While Hungary still holds elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for the people of Hungary to remove him from power.

 

Trump supporters have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.

 

The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by Trump or a Trump-like figure. In January 2024, Roberts told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times that Project 2025 was designed to jump-start a right-wing takeover of the government. “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Roberts said. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”

 

Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace: the U.S. must “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “[d]efend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and “[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”

 

In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is “pornography” and must be banned.

 

The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, the document says, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end “is just the beginning.”

 

Dismantling the administrative state starts from the premise that “people are policy.” Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce—about 2 million people work for the U.S. government—and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.

 

The plan asserts “the existential need” for an authoritarian leader to dismantle the current government that regulates business, provides a social safety net, and protects civil rights. Instead of the government Americans have built since 1933, the plan says the national government must “decentralize and privatize as much as possible” and leave “the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.”

 

It attacks “America’s largest corporations, its public institutions, and its popular culture,” for their embrace of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and for their willingness to work with other countries. It calls for abandoning all of those partnerships and alliances.

 

Also on July 1, Orbán took over the rotating presidency of the European Union. He will be operating for six months in that position under a slogan taken from Trump and adapted to Europe: “Make Europe Great Again.” The day before taking that office, Orbán announced that his political party was forming a new alliance with far-right parties in Austria and the Czech Republic in order to launch a “new era of European politics.”

 

Tomorrow, Orbán will travel to Moscow to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin. On July 2, Orbán met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, where he urged Zelensky to accept a “ceasefire.” In the U.S., Trump’s team has suggested that, if reelected, Trump will call for an immediate ceasefire and will negotiate with Putin over how much of Ukraine Putin can keep while also rejecting Ukraine for NATO membership and scaling back U.S. commitment to NATO.

 

“I would expect a very quick end to the conflict,” Kevin Roberts said. Putin says he supports Trump’s plan.

 

Roberts’s “second American revolution,” which would destroy American democracy in an echo of a small-time dictator like Orbán and align our country with authoritarian leaders, seems a lot less patriotic than the first American Revolution.

 

For my part, I will stand with the words written 248 years ago today, saying that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

 

—

 

Notes:

 

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/01/politics/steve-bannon-report-to-prison/index.html

 

https://www.mediamatters.org/project-2025/heritage-foundation-president-celebrates-supreme-court-immunity-decision-we-are

 

https://newrepublic.com/article/179776/heritage-foundation-viktor-orban-trump

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html

 

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/what-is-project-2025-and-why-is-it-alarming/

 

https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/30/make-europe-great-again-hungary-sets-scene-eu-presidency

 

https://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-fidesz-form-new-far-right-alliance-austria-czech-republic/

 

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-orban-visit-kyiv-ukraine-peace-putin-zelenskiy/33022024.html

 

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/02/europe/viktor-orban-visits-kyiv-intl/index.html

 

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/02/nato-second-trump-term-00164517

Don't Get Your Panties In A Bunch

Holy cow. 

Biden had a bad day. So what?

He's a genius; it helps that he agrees with me!

Look at all the things he has done and is doing on our behalf.

Sometimes we geezers need a break. Don't put us out there unless we are good. 

It ain't rocket science.............

SCOTUS Commits Treason Most Vile

The Supreme Court of the United States has stolen the rule of law from our country by giving the President immunity from criminal prosecution. We can no longer say that 'no man is above the law.'

Now we live in a tyranny. You should be afraid for your liberty, life and property. I am afraid.

Read Justice Soto Mayor's dissent to its grant of immunity to the Office of President: 

Her dissent, lightly edited by msmagazine.com 

   Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.

    Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by the President … The Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.

    The indictment paints a stark portrait of a President desperate to stay in power. … That is the backdrop against which this case comes to the Court.

    The Court now confronts a question it has never had to answer in the Nation’s history: Whether a former President enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution. The majority thinks he should, and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law. …

    Argument by argument, the majority invents immunity through brute force. Under scrutiny, its arguments crumble. … No matter how you look at it, the majority’s official-acts immunity is utterly indefensible.

    Historical evidence reinforces that, from the very beginning, the presumption in this Nation has always been that no man is free to flout the criminal law. The majority fails to recognize or grapple with the lack of historical evidence for its new immunity. With nothing on its side of the ledger, the most the majority can do is claim that the historical evidence is a wash.

    The majority today endorses an expansive vision of Presidential immunity that was never recognized by the Founders, any sitting President, the Executive Branch, or even President Trump’s lawyers, until now. Settled understandings of the Constitution are of little use to the majority in this case, and so it ignores them.

    Today’s Court … has replaced a presumption of equality before the law with a presumption that the President is above the law for all of his official acts.

    The majority’s dividing line between “official” and “unofficial” conduct narrows the conduct considered “unofficial” almost to a nullity. … Under that rule, any use of official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt purpose indicated by objective evidence of the most corrupt motives and intent, remains official and immune. Under the majority’s test, if it can be called a test, the category of Presidential action that can be deemed “unofficial” is destined to be vanishingly small.

    I am deeply troubled by the idea, inherent in the majority’s opinion, that our Nation loses something valuable when the President is forced to operate within the confines of federal criminal law.

    The public interest in the federal criminal prosecution of a former President alleged to have used the powers of his office to commit crimes may be greater still. “[T]he President … represent[s] all the voters in the Nation,” and his powers are given by the people under our Constitution. …

    When Presidents use the powers of their office for personal gain or as part of a criminal scheme, every person in the country has an interest in that criminal prosecution. The majority overlooks that paramount interest entirely. … Yet the majority believes that a President’s anxiety over prosecution overrides the public’s interest in accountability and negates the interests of the other branches in carrying out their constitutionally assigned functions.

    If the former President cannot be held criminally liable for his official acts, those acts should still be admissible to prove knowledge or intent in criminal prosecutions of unofficial acts. … Imagine a President states in an official speech that he intends to stop a political rival from passing legislation that he opposes, no matter what it takes to do so (official act). He then hires a private hitman to murder that political rival (unofficial act). Under the majority’s rule, the murder indictment could include no allegation of the President’s public admission of premeditated intent to support the mens rea of murder. That is a strange result, to say the least.

    Today’s decision to grant former Presidents immunity for their official acts is

 deeply wrong. … In the hands of the majority, this new official-acts immunity operates as a one-way ratchet.

    The long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding.

    The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.

    Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune.

    Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune.

    Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

    Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

    Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

    Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

https://msmagazine.com/2024/07/01/sonia-sotomayor-dissent-trump-immunity/ 

Debate: Biden Won Decidedly

 

Despite an optics glitch, Biden won decidedly; time will tell if the optics overrules the facts.

Heather Cox Richardson, Jun 28

 

Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness. 

Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand. 

In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list. 

Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt. 

Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.

There is no point in going on, because virtually everything he said was a lie. As Jake Lahut of the Daily Beast recorded, he also was all over the map. “On January 6,” Trump said, “we had a great border.” To explain how he would combat opioid addiction, he veered off into talking points about immigration and said his administration “bought the best dog.” He boasted about acing a cognitive test and that he had just recently won two golf club tournaments without mentioning that they were at his own golf courses. “To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way,” he said. “I can do it.” 

As Lahut recorded, Trump said this: “Clean water and air. We had it. We had the H2O best numbers ever, and we were using all forms of energy during my 4 years. Best environmental numbers ever, they gave me the statistic [sic.] before I walked on stage actually.”

Trump also directly accused Biden of his own failings and claimed Biden’s own strengths, saying, for example, that Biden, who has enacted the most sweeping legislation of any president since at least Lyndon Johnson, couldn’t get anything done while he, who accomplished only tax cuts, was more effective. He responded to the calling out of his own criminal convictions by saying that Biden “could be a convicted felon,” and falsely stating: “This man is a criminal.” And, repeatedly, Trump called America a “failing nation” and described it as a hellscape.

It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

There are ways to combat the Gish gallop—by calling it out for what it is, among other ways—but Biden retreated to trying to give the three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand. His command of those points was notable, but the difference between how he sounded at the debate and how he sounded on stage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, just an hour afterward suggested that the technique worked on him. 

That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.” 

A much bigger deal is what it says that the television media and pundits so completely bought into Trump’s performance. They appear to have accepted Trump’s framing of the event—that he is dominant—so fully that the fact Trump unleashed a flood of lies and non-sequiturs simply didn’t register. And, since the format established that the CNN journalists running the debate did not challenge anything either candidate said, and Dale’s fact-checking spot came long after the debate ended, the takeaway of the event was a focus on Biden’s age rather than on Trump’s inability to tell the truth or form a coherent thought. 

At the end of the evening, pundits were calling not for Trump—a man liable for sexual assault and business fraud, convicted of 34 felonies, under three other indictments, who lied pathologically—to step down, but for Biden to step down…because he looked and sounded old. At 81, Biden is indeed old, but that does not distinguish him much from Trump, who is 78 and whose inability to answer a question should raise concerns about his mental acuity. 

About the effect of tonight’s events, former Republican operative Stuart Stevens warned: “Don’t day trade politics. It’s a sucker’s game. A guy from Queens out on bail bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, said in public he didn’t have sex with a porn star, defended tax cuts for billionaires, defended Jan. 6th. and called America the worst country in the world. That guy isn’t going to win this race.”

Trump will clearly have pleased his base tonight, but Stevens is right to urge people to take a longer view. It’s not clear whether Trump or Biden picked up or lost votes; different polls gave the win to each, and it’s far too early to know how that will shake out over time. 

Of far more lasting importance than this one night is the clear evidence that stage performance has trumped substance in political coverage in our era. Nine years after Trump launched his first campaign, the media continues to let him call the shots. 

—

Notes:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/all-the-crazy-things-trump-said-you-might-have-missed-in-biden-debate

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/04/trump-biden-presidential-debate-prep-408651

https://archive.is/JNu8D

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/us/politics/trump-revenge-biden-convicted-felon.html

X:

stuartpstevens/status/1806528635391631485

ddale8/status/1806517477163061469

MoniquePressley/status/1806527221881847898

The Russian Conspiracy to Destroy Democracy and Install Thugs in Power

I will try here to present some scenarios of likely conditions in the United States of America after trump becomes President. I model some of these ideas on Russia under Putin; trump has said he admires Putin and even takes some compensation from Russia. IMHO, trump will change the United States to a Putin model.

 

Citizens of EU countries and the United States have difficulty imagining daily life in a tyranny; those citizens see daily examples of their legal and political systems preventing tyrants and other thugs from committing crimes. Putin has systematically stripped away all those constraints in Russia, which might deter him in order to keep control of state assets within his group of friends.

 

If trump installs the Putin model in the United States, we will have absolutely no recourse for crimes or abuse done to us by Government officials or trump affiliated thugs. Project 2025 is already creating a list of federal civil servants to remove from office and replace them with trump thugs. [https://newrepublic.com/post/183015/team-trump-enemies-list-federal-workers-project-sovereignty-2025]

 

Putin's model includes these:

 

Murder of persons who try to stop crimes committed by the ruling thugs.

 

Example - Putin was part of a criminal gang, which controlled the port of St. Petersburg and made a lot of money from shipping. 'Control of the port became so strategic that when, in 1997 the Property Department chief Mikhail Manevich sought to return the voting rights City Hall had lost to its 29 per cent stake during the privatization, he was shot dead by a sniper as he drove to work." [Source PUTIN'S PEOPLE, Catherine Belton, Farrar, Straus and Geroux, 2020, pg 104.]

 

Execution of political adversaries. [Source: The List Is Long: Russians Who Have Died after Running Afoul Of the Kremlin, Radio Free Europe, URL:  [https://www.rferl.org/a/enemies-kremlin-deaths-prigozhin-list/32562583.html]

 

Theft of companies and properties in Russia. [Source: Browder: 'Putin Has Stolen Hundreds of Billions of Russia's Wealth, Moscow Times, Feb. 16, 2015, URL [https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2015/02/16/browder-putin-has-stolen-hundreds-of-billions-of-russias-wealth-a43920#google_vignette]

 

The foregoing is the tip of the iceberg. Underneath that, Russia has a shadow Russian group that conducts systematic operations to disrupt life in Western Democracies and sow discord. 'The secret organization created by descendants of the Soviet KGB still continues its activities and poses a serious threat to the national security of the United States. Such information appeared in a recently published investigation of intelligence services.' [Source: Economy and life address by American expert. URL: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=122151129350040424&set=a.122095018034040424]

 

This shadow group of Russian citizens which controls Russia and Putin in attacking Democracy, and the United States especially, seems motivated by their greed for more power over more people, without any more noble aim.

 

The group probably dates to the 1918 Communist revolution. That group, whom I will call the Center, directs action by their agents to defeat Democracy and establish control over a national government. The Center has been doing this since 1918 and they are very good at it.

 

Their simple model enables them to control many countries without any military intervention. First, locate a political person willing to accept help from the Center and then assist that person in eliminating rivals and consolidating power in the country. That person becomes an Asset

 

Then the Center provides their Asset with assistance in eliminating opposition within that country. In exchange, the Center demands obedience to their commands, which can include financial opportunities for Russians, and strict adherence to Center directives to help Russia in its territorial expansion.

 

They allow the Asset to use any method he needs to remove an impediment to the Asset's control over the country or control over a moneymaking opportunity. No method is off the table.

 

We, as Americans and citizens of an EU country have difficulty understanding how that works in reality. That is exactly how citizens in tyrannies live every day. Russians, Chinese and North Koreans live under a tyrant.

 

When a tyrant wants some property or person, he takes it by force.

 

As citizens of democracies, we react and say that cannot happen because the police will interfere. Alternatively, we assume the courts will enforce the law and prevent such violent acts.

 

We do not worry about politicians who want to be tyrants because we assume that laws will survive to prevent criminal acts. In fact, that assumption simply paves the way for the tyrant.

 

It is real and it is happening today in most Democracies. 

ACLU: trump on Immigration

 His message is extreme. 

LINK to ACLU Memo here: ACLU on policy proposal

Excerpt: 'American Civil Liberties Union TRUMP ON IMMIGRATION1

'If given a second term, Donald Trump promises

to decimate American communities by targeting

immigrants who are already contributing members

of society and blocking new immigrants from

coming lawfully to the United States. Trump has

made clear that he will double down on what he did

during his presidency — without regard for the law,

decency, or common sense.'

Debate Prep - Asking the Hard Questions

Abortion

Mr. Trump - I am sure you agree that a decision about when or whether to terminate a pregnancy is a very intimate decision. It is a decision that changes a family's future, forever.

I am very humble about that decision even though I am a Catholic and try to obey the laws of our church; even I think it is a decision best left to the pregnant woman and her medical team without my interference.

Yet, I recognize that some well-meaning political leaders consider than abortion is actually an act of murder and not acceptable under any circumstances. You are proud of your support for the Supreme Court in its decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision recently. That decision made it difficult or impossible for many women to abort a fetus. 

I ask you Mr. Trump, what will you do if your daughter or daughter in law has a pregnancy that will take her life unless she undergoes an abortion.

What will you do? Will you seek an illegal but safe procedure to save her life and thereby acknowledge that the law does not apply to you? 

Alternatively, will you obey the law and refuse to help your family member even if she will die?

American women deserve an answer from you. What will you do?

Inflation

Mr. Trump: You have complained about how my Administration has failed to stop inflation from hurting American families. We agree that many families today have a hard time providing necessities for their families. While sometimes I wish I could act more directly, the fact is that no President can change prices in our market economy. We have to act indirectly to make life better for working Americans.

Perhaps you are not aware that the President has no ability to raise or lower prices in our market economy - that is ZERO ability to set prices. Nixon tried changing prices, and it failed miserably [see ' Confessions of a price controller' Book by C. Jackson Grayson, Louis Neeb, 265 pages, January 1, 1974; ISBN     9780870940750 (ISBN10: 0870940759)]

What my administration does is to work diligently to make life easier for working people by raising wages through labor union actions and to reduce the market power of monopolies to set high prices. We support and encourage labor unions in their efforts to raise family incomes for all Americans. And, we put pressure on regulators to prosecute businesses with monopoly power so that competition can enter the markets and force lower prices on all. We hope those efforts will ease the burden on American families.

Mr. Trump you have said that labor unions should be prevented from succeeding in their efforts to raise wages and that businesses should be able to thwart workers' efforts to form unions. Since you take campaign contribution from corporations who want wages to go lower and for their monopoly power to remain even if working families suffer from your actions, what will you do to help the American family? What is your plan to make life easier for us??

So far, Mr. Trump, it seems that you will do your best to make billionaires and CEO's richer and the rest of us poorer. Is that correct ??

Rule of Law

Mr. Trump, you seem acutely aware that our Democratic Republic is a creature of the laws and the systems we rely on to enforce those laws. You have said repeatedly that you will not obey the laws if you do not like them. In addition, you have gathered a collection of felons and foreign agents in your attempts to take power by force. 

I am convinced that you will lose the popular vote for President this year by several million votes. I am also convinced that you will create or incite a violent attack on our institutions the same way you did in 2021 in order to regain power as President through unlawful means. 

We are prepared Mr. Trump so that your actions will fail and perhaps many of your followers will die. There is no amount of force you can command that will achieve your objectives.  

For the love of God, call off your forces and accept the will of the voters. 

Assault Weapons

Mr. Trump, you support the NRA and the companies that make and sell assault weapons. They make lots of money by encouraging unstable people to kill children. All the deaths at school massacres are on you Mr. Trump. 

They are on you.