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In political science, a constitutional crisis is a conflict and split in the ruling elite that the constitution of the country or other fundamental governing law is unable to resolve. Color Revolution against Trump is the most recent example of constitution crisis in the USA. In this case a part of the elite represented in major government branches such as intelligence and judiciary work against the President and his Cabinet trying to impeach him on false premises. US Civil war was preceded by Constitutional crisis over the procedure of leaving the union: can a state or a group of states leave the union at their own will or not.
So the key here is the split of the elite in such a way that neither part can achieve a quick and decisive victory over the other. Ambiguities in constitution also can play some role. For example, the constitution may fail to provide a clear answer for a specific situation; the constitution may be clear but it may be politically infeasible to follow it; the government institutions themselves may falter or fail to live up to what the law prescribes them to be; or officials in the government may justify avoiding dealing with a serious problem based on narrow interpretations of the law.[1][2]
Specific examples include 1993 Russian constitutional crisis (attempt to impeach Yeltsin and Yeltsin shelling of Russian parliament in a apparent, Western supported coup d'état against Parlametary democracy), the 2007 Ukrainian crisis (Maydanin which defeated party with Western support managed to annul the result of the Presidential election and stage another elections in which they won power), 2014 EuroMaydan crisis in Ukraine that led to secession of Crimea and civil war in Donbass, UK post-Brexit crisis. But the latest and most interesting example is of couse the USA constitutional crisis of 2016-1018, when large part of government and Democratic Party did no accept the results of the election (defeat of Hillary Clinton) and mobilized themselves for impeachment of Trump or other way of removal of him from the office. Especially interesting is the role of intelligence agencies in this Constitutional Crisis.
While constitutional crises demonstrates itself with the conflicts between different branches of government, conflicts between central and local governments, at the core is the split of the elite and conflict between different faction of the ruling (in case of the USA) neoliberal elite. .
The crisis aggavates when one or more of the parties to a political dispute willfully chooses to violate the constitution; or to flout an unwritten constitutional convention; or to dispute the correct, legal interpretation of the violated constitutional law or of the established olitical custom. Moreover, if the crisis arises because the constitution is legally ambiguous, the ultimate resolution of it establishes the legal precedent to resolve future similar crises. In case of the US civil war the law was really written by bayonets.
In the U.S. system of government, the Constitution does not explicitly address the matter of whether or not a state can legally secede from the Union; however, after the American Civil War (1861–1865) thwarted the secession of the Southern United States, the accepted doctrine of constitutional law is that a state cannot legally leave the Union.
Politically, a constitutional crisis can lead to administrative paralysis, the loss of political legitimacy, or to civil war. A constitutional crisis can lead to rebellition of the part of the population incited by one of the elite factions takes arms against the government, in a coup d'état or a revolution led by the military or by civilians.
This time that originators on constitutional crisis in the USA are lobbyists of MIC known as neocons and neoliberal (Cliton's) part of the Democratic Party.
Here are some consideration of the Saker (who is a former intelligence analyst) on this topic:
I believe that what we are seeing is a massive and deliberate attack by the Neocons and their deep state against the political system and the people of the United States. Congress, especially, is now guilty of engaging on a de-facto coup against the Executive on so many levels that they are hard to count (and many of them are probably hidden from the public eye) including repeated attempts to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional powers such as, for example, deciding on foreign policy issues.
... ... ...
By now there is overwhelming evidence that a creeping Neocon coup has been in progress from the very first day of Trump's presidency and that the Neocons are far from being satisfied with having broken Trump and taken over the de-facto power in the White House: they now apparently also want it de-jure too. The real question is this: are there any forces inside the US capable of stopping the Neocons from completely taking all the reins of power and, if yes, how could a patriotic reaction to this Neocon coup manifest itself? I honestly don't know, but my feeling is that we might soon have a "President Pence" in the Oval Office. One way or another, a constitutional crisis is brewing.
... ... ...
The US "elites" and the various interest groups they represent have now clearly turned on each other which is a clear sign that the entire system is in a state of deep crisis: when things were going well, everybody could get what they wanted and no visible infighting was taking place. The Israel Lobby has now fully subordinated Congress, the White House, and the media to its narrow Likudnik agenda and, as a direct result of this, the US has lost all their positions in the Middle-East
... ... ...
As a direct consequence of the Helsinki summit, the infighting of the US ruling classes has dramatically intensified. Furthermore, faced with a barrage of hateful attacks Trump did what he always does: he tried to simultaneously appease his critics by caving in to their rhetoric while at the same time trying to appear "tough" – hence his latest "I am a tough guy with a big red button" antics against Iran (he did exactly the same thing towards the DPRK)
... ... ...
For all his very real failings, Trump cannot be blamed for the current situation. The real culprits are the Clinton gang and the Democratic Party which, by their completely irresponsible behavior, are creating a very dangerous crisis for the United States: the Neocons and the Clinton gang are willing to say anything, no matter how destabilizing, to hurt Trump even if the US political system by itself is also put at risk. Furthermore, the Neocons have now completely flipped around the presumption of innocence – both externally (Russian "attack" on the US elections) and internally (Trump's "collusion" with Putin). As for Trump, whatever his good intentions might have been, he is weak and cannot fight the entire US deep state by himself. The Neocons and the US deep state are now on a collision course with Russia and the people of the United States and while Russia does have the means to protect herself from the Empire, it is unclear to me who, or what could stop the Neocons from further damaging the US. Deep and systemic crises often result in new personalities entering the stage, but in the case of the US, it is now undeniable that the system cannot reform
Anonymous [333] Disclaimer , July 26, 2018 at 10:55 am GMT@exiled off mainstreetJohnny Rottenborough , Website July 26, 2018 at 11:20 am GMTTrump was a complete outsider to politics when he decided to run for the presidency in 2015. He had no team or political allies. He really didn't have much of a philosophy of governance, a solid foundation of history and facts, a first rate vocabulary or the debating skills of an 8th grader. He has consistently failed to win over any Democratic and probably not even a majority of Republican politicians.
The Deep State has opposed him at every turn, choosing to favor the policies of the Neocons and their enablers in the Democratic Party. Hence, having no team of his own, he has been saddled with personnel from the ranks of his most virulent enemies at every level.
His lack of knowledge and primitive persuasive skills, which might work in big business but not under the microscope of politics, have not won him any converts but only encouraged a vicious escalation of antipathy from his opponents, who, controlling the media from top to bottom, are openly calling him a traitor on no objective grounds, unless trying to do the job of the office, maintain the peace, and explore possible avenues for reducing international tensions is now considered treasonous. The charge of treason is clearly bombastic but with virtually everyone of influence nodding in agreement, it's difficult for the man to retain his credibility before the public.
Actually, a smidgen south of half the public are the only base of his support. And a very eclectic base they are, including numerous liberals, progressives, intellectuals and peaceniks, in addition to conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians, who prefer to deal with the real world rather than Hillary's deliberate misrepresentation of it.
Will that be enough for him to survive? The way the maniacs are raving in the media, expect the country to throw a big celebration if he gets "taken out" one way or another tomorrow. The situation is really dangerous and utterly shameful. Most of the blame goes to Hillary Clinton and her insurrectionists for not accepting the outcome of our system of ersatz "democracy." Her husband won with something like 43% of the popular vote in 1992. I'm pretty sure Trump had a higher number. Cry me a river, Hillary, but stop trying to destroy what you can't have like a petulant child.
(I'm a liberal Democrat.)
the logical corollary of this state of affairs is that the people of the US and the people of Russia have the same enemy – the Neocons – and that makes them de-facto alliesAnonymous [346] Disclaimer , July 26, 2018 at 1:37 pm GMTI think it would be more accurate to say that the people of Russia had the same enemy.
Franz , July 27, 2018 at 6:13 am GMTBy the way, these are typical Neocon-style tactics: double-down, then double-down again, then issue statements which make it impossible for you to back down, then repeat it all as many times as needed.
It's like trial lawyers say: if the facts are on your side and the law is not, then argue the facts; if the law is on your side and the facts are not, then argue the law; and if neither the facts nor the law are on your side, then bang your fists on the table and shout as loud as you can! That's exactly what the neo-clowns are doing here.
the Neocons and the Clinton gang are willing to say anything, no matter how destabilizing, to hurt Trump even if the US political system by itself is also put at risk.
All of which just helps to further discredit the empire. Even with all the insanity in the media, I still thank God every day that Hellary did not become president.
now undeniable that the system cannot reform itselfYes, Saker and that puts US politics behind European fascism of 70+ years ago. Mussolini was booted out by a fascist committee, Franco paved the way for a constitutional monarchy, but all Americans get is Bozo the Clown/President.
The destruction of the US working class amazes me in its absence from all serious debate. First subverted by the CIA then rendered null by outsourcing (which is still undercounted) the "deplorables" have no mechanism for resistence except the unthinkable one: Hope for total breakup of the United States. Or hope for a foreign invasion.
Makes one wonder. When Egyptians greeted Alexander the Great as a liberator as he conquered them, it was a fairly pungent comment on the ruling Persians. Will blue-collar former-Yanks be cheering for liberating Chinese or Russian troops anytime soon? Henry Kissinger once predicted something of the sort.
We do live in interesting times.
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Jan 01, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Update (1250ET): Two more lawmakers have joined Hawley with planned objections to the count during the January 6 vote. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-TN) and Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) are also planning to object, according to Bloomberg , along with Rep. Marjorie Greene (R-GA).
That said, it may be all for nothing if rumors are true Pelosi and McConnell are working together to change the rules and block objections.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1344325697473544194&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fhawley-becomes-first-senator-committed-challenging-electoral-college-results&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px
* * *
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he will object during the counting of the Electoral College vote process on Jan. 6, becoming the first senator to confirm they are joining an effort launched by more than a dozen House Republicans.
Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) attends the confirmation hearing of Attorney General nominee William Barr at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 15, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)" I cannot vote to certify the electoral college results on Jan. 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws ," Hawley wrote in a statement on Monday.
"And I cannot vote to certify without pointing out the unprecedented effort of mega-corporations, including Facebook and Twitter, to interfere in this election, in support of Joe Biden," he added.
Hawley said that Congress should investigate voter fraud allegations and make sure that future elections are secure. According to the Missouri Republican, both chambers have failed to act in an appropriate manner.
Hawley noted that Democrats objected during the 2004 and 2016 elections "in order to raise concerns" about election integrity. "They were praised by Democratic leadership and the media when they" objected, Hawley added, saying that they "were entitled to do so" and Republicans concerned about election integrity in the Nov. 3 election "are entitled to do the same.""For these reasons," Hawley continued, "I will follow the same practice Democrat members of Congress have in years past and object during the certification process on Jan. 6 to raise these critical issues ."
For the past several weeks, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and other House GOP lawmakers have pledged to object to the counting of the Electoral College votes during the Joint Session of Congress . Their effort requires a senator and a House member that would trigger a series of debates before a vote on whether to certify a state's Electoral College votes is held.
Some members of the GOP leadership, including Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), have said their efforts are doomed to fail. And over the past weekend, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), in comments widely publicized by news outlets, referred to Brooks's effort as "a scam."
And, according to anonymously sourced reports, Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told GOP senators that they should not take part in the House GOP-led effort on Jan. 6. Another Republican, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), said the attempt to challenge the votes is an improbable one.
" It's basically going through the motions ," Cornyn said, reported The Hill.
"It's a futile exercise."
But Brooks, for his part, indicated that "dozens" of House members back the effort . "We're going to sponsor and co-sponsor objections to the Electoral College vote returns," Brooks told Fox News on Dec. 28.
In a previous interview with The Epoch Times' American Thought Leaders program, Brooks said he believes the Electoral College vote can be rejected, and the election can ultimately be decided in the House of Representatives.
Former California Sen. Barbara Boxer "tried to strike Ohio for George Bush back in 2005, so this is not unusual," Brooks said in an interview with Fox Business on Dec. 15. "The law is very clear, the House of Representatives in combination with the United States Senate has the lawful authority to accept or reject Electoral College vote submissions from states that have such flawed election systems that they're not worthy of our trust."
The new Congress is slated to be sworn in on Jan. 3.
2 hours ago (Edited) remove linkA clear case of fraud is in front of you, Senators.
What message are you going to send the American people?
WE ARE WATCHING.
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Dec 05, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
79 play_arrow 4
Deck 20 hours ago
Life of Illusion 20 hours ago (Edited)I hired trump in 2016 to deal with this. To fire the bad people and hire good people and drain the swamp. He did nothing about it.
There is no excuse why Bill Barr is running the justice department, no excuse why Pompeo is running plush, private deals for global business though the state dept and the Goldman Sachs guys are stripping the wealth of this country and handing it to wall st.
You are making excuses. Trump hired these people. There is no swamp being drained.
pissonmefico 17 hours ago (Edited) remove linkshe will tell you what needs to be done
GO.. DR LINDA TARVER
start 16min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCWE9Qi84I8&ab_channel=PTNewsNetwork
Dr. Linda Lee Tarver Testifies to What is Really Happening in Michigan!!!
BigCumulusClouds 20 hours agoThe money changers, Wall Street, and Corporate America are and will always be in control of the Federal Government, so why do 99.9% of you here keep calling this communism? Because you've been deceived to think it even though you know who runs the show - which is an unbelievable feat. It's FASCISM! - go get an effing dictionary and quit being duped making YOU their main asset.
Dying-Of-The-Light 18 hours agoTrump did not mention Haspel's arrest or her being at gitmo.
Nona Yobiznes 18 hours ago remove linkBeen saying the same since this sick joke of an election came to pass. If the forces of all things Demontard and Deep State, along with the MSM and social media sites, are allowed to so easily steal this election and get away with it then USA citizens will soon enjoy as much liberty as Chinese citizens.
I have stated again and again that if the lying, senile, China bribed Biden has the nerve to hold the bible in one hand on inauguration day, then all hard working USA citizens should refuse to pay any income tax. If that inauguration goes ahead then I hope millions of American citizens will turn up in Washington to protest its legality.
Carlin was RIGHT 19 hours agoThey don't want their viewers to learn about it. This is a DNC directive. Check out the Veritas 9am call CNN leaks. One of the "journalists" said as much.
Chupacabra 20 hours agoBarr is Swamp personified. If his lips are moving, he's lying.
brer_vole 20 hours agoBarr is deep state, always has been. He is there solely to obstruct, much like Wray and Haspell. He is far worse than just useless. I'm glad more people are waking up to that fact.
By the way, his Dad gave Jeffrey Epstein his first job. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.
told_ya_so 20 hours ago (Edited) remove linkSo the AP story headline is inconsistent with what they claim as his statement " Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they've received, but "to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election." "
As the story probagated - the headline was further changed and then even the quote was changed.
Welfarebum 19 hours agoToo many posters here just dismiss the concept that there was any election malfeasance. The problem with this is that its pure conscious dissonance - just choosing to see your point of view despite real evidence to the contrary. Regardless of who you actually vote for why wouldn't you have a smidgen of curiousity about the things that have gone on. The most blatant has been votes disappearing from Trump in realtime on the news feeds.
There are too many testimonies; too many high profile people staking their careers on saying the election looks suspect to just dismiss the notion outright. And even if they are wrong (and that's a big f*cking if), wouldn't you want to know that your guy got in legitimately? Because from now on the other side are going to have to play just as dirty as the Dems did to have a hope in hell of staying in existance.
Dickweed Wang 20 hours agoI'm watching and reading from Canada. I've gone through all the evidence. It's death by a thousand cuts... Distributed corruption designed to collectively achieve a coup against a standing president. The mainstream media and Big Tech have subverted the truth. Average people around me are completely unaware of the corruption. All they think is "orange man bad" because they are subject to anti-Trump propaganda nightly on the TV news. It makes me sick to my stomach.
The US is not a democracy. Not a republic. It's run by crony-capitalist totalitarianism and the various US intelligence agencies are all on-board. What's transpiring is a massive battle of good versus evil. My entire world-view has changed. With the US falling, all the other democracies will also fail. My children will live under a CCP-like government.
My dad fought in WW2 as a fighter pilot for freedom - not for these crooks and their master plan to enslave us all under an authoritarian world government.
Republicans can't let this stand. It they submit, it will be the end of freedom. Trump has the police on his side. And much of the military. The country needs to be saved by the patriots.
chiquita 19 hours agoCourt have laughed at him 39 times already. It's over.
If you're referring to court rulings regarding the election you obviously don't know what you're talking about. Trump's legal team has only filed three lawsuits so far regarding the election and all of them are currently active. It's not "over" until CONgress meets and approves the results of the election on January 6th and at this point it may go on beyond that due to the preponderance of evidence showing widespread and systemic fraud during the election.
BTW . . . It's 'Courts' not 'Court'
Justus_Americans 13 hours agoI've been saying this for a while. The cheating is going to come home to roost regardless of how this ends up. NOBODY is going to be happy about it when the whole country finally sees and accepts the truth of it. It won't be shrugged off as business as usual or "there's always cheating in elections". Not after this.
IF Biden somehow gets installed as president, his presidency will always be tainted--it will be just like when you see those baseball players with an asterisk next to their stats. You know the ones who did the steroids in order to get higher homerun hits or some other advantage. It won't be a matter of having won fair and square and everybody is going to know about it. No amount of calling Trump a sore loser is going to whitewash what the DNC did or make Biden a good president. When the real stories about just how corrupt Biden and his family are that will make people even angrier if he's sitting in the Oval Office.
Better hope for many reasons that Trump wins his challenges because it will be bumpy, but a much easier ride in the long run.
Thutmoses 13 hours ago (Edited)Trump's most important speech was properly named it showed our broken election system and fake news
https://youtu.be/Vxa4EUpF4wUTrump is giving the courts and Legislatures space to do their job.
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Dec 05, 2020 | off-guardian.org
WATCH: Trump's Censored Speech The media refusing to air the President's allegations of vote rigging is an open display of who REALLY runs the country
https://www.youtube.com/embed/RFzTuaVS8Kk
On Wednesday, December 2nd Donald Trump – the sitting President of the United State of America – released a 46 minute recorded speech. In an alarming display of co-ordinated censorship, much of the media simply refused to air it.
In the speech (embedded above) he details all the suspicious behaviour surrounding the November 3rd election, as well as showing charts of evidence of peculiar activity in the vote counts of key swing states.
None of the major networks aired it in full. CNN simply refused to broadcast even clips, instead letting the millionaire son of a political dynasty lecture the viewing public in a bizarre ten-minute long abuse-laden rant .
Twitter and Facebook stuck "fact-check" warnings under anyone attempting to share it while papers like the Guardian or Independent post mocking summaries without ever showing – or even linking to – the original.
If you want to actually see the speech in full you have search out smaller youtube channels, or go to C-SPAN . (We would suggest downloading a copy while you can, it is likely to become hard to find. There's also a transcript here .)
Their defense of this overt censorship is that Trump is "endangering lives" and/or "encouraging violence" by calling the legitimacy of the vote into question. Such claims were never made about claims Putin's Russia had rigged the vote for Trump. In fact, Russiagate nonsense was spouted nightly by every major news outlet in the country, if not the world.
However they justify to themselves there's no denying the hard truth of it: The mainstream media are actively and openly engaged in the wholesale censorship of an elected head of state. Deliberately crippling the ability of an elected leader to communicate with the public.
Whether or not the vote was rigged – and there is more than enough reason to think that it was – the behaviour of the media is verging on the kind of co-ordinated gagging you would expect to happen during a palace coup.
Even if you hate Trump and love Biden, even if you don't care about the vote and count all modern democracy a sham, there's a coup going on here that's bigger than just who gets to sit in the Oval office:
The billionaire owners of the media are deciding what you can and cannot see. Granting themselves a monopoly on "truth" and usurping the power of the ordinary citizen to inform themselves and make a reasoned decision
Rigged vote or not, what's left of our crumbling democratic freedoms has never been in more danger.
John Goss , Dec 5, 2020 12:08 AM
I know Savorywill below would like to see this. The fight is not over yet. This is election fraud of the worst kind. The problem is those who did not get caught in this corruption but were still a part of it. The actual alleged turnout at the polls is highly questionable – the biggest ever. Now some might think that Joe Biden has that kind of charisma. Others have actually seen him perform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ9YGSMY2xg
It's no wonder the US is always questioning other countries' elections. It thinks its system is the model for the world.
Tom , Dec 5, 2020 12:00 AMThey didn't really censor it. They just show his face, and tell you what they think of it before you even hear him. Pretty usual SOP for them I guess. Dec 4, 2020 11:44 PM
Thank you for publishing this article, and enabling people to watch the speech. At least 70 million Americans did vote for Trump (probably many more than that, if their votes had been counted). They are decidedly not happy to see what is taking place, to say the least. I went to Paddy's gambling side to see the odds of Trump winning late Tuesday, when normally the election is called, and Trump was indisputably odds on favorite (you would have made a fortune betting on Biden at that time!). Then the polls close, the election monitors are told to go home and the mail-in ballots are rolled in and counted in secret, with Republican monitors either not present or, if they were, not allowed to see what was going on.
If Biden does prevail, which seems highly likely, sadly, at this stage, his pick to be the Secretary of Defense, is Michèle Flournoy , a woman (of course!), but a woman who thinks that US troops should remain in Afghanistan to protect Afghani women from the Taliban !
You can't make this up! Trump stated in every rally, to tremendous applause, 'end the endless wars'. The Democrats are the war party now and they are filling government positions with sociopaths such as Madeleine Albright, famous for saying the death of 500,000 children in Iraq was 'worth it'. Worth it for what, I wonder. One thing is sure, though, those millions who did vote for Trump are not going to be pleased by what is going on. How they will express their displeasure is the big question, I guess. However, if it actually happens that the Supreme Court did rule in favor of Trump and invalidated enough mail-in votes to swing the election back to Trump, there would a shit storm of dissent from MSM and the deranged mobs of Trump haters that would likely wreak havoc on the whole country, nightly rampages of BLM and Antifa types terrorizing cities, others bringing out guns to defend themselves, possibly devolving into almost civil war conditions. Perhaps it is better to let Biden's minders have their way, make half hearted efforts to actually reduce CO2 emissions to 0% by 2025 (as Biden solemnly proclaimed in the final debate), give free health to all, allow people from south of border easy or unfettered access to come to the USA (of course, tear down that hateful wall), renew the practice of exporting jobs to other countries where the wages are lower so products can be made more cheaply, resulting in lower employment options for American workers. Then, obviously, the economy will tank and Trump, or someone on the same page, can run again in 2024 and save the day
George Mc , Dec 4, 2020 11:14 PM
I think you have to see the bigger picture. All politicians ultimately serve the most powerful forces i.e. the monied class. It's not a unified group but there is at any time a general direction which this class will take.
The Western world has lived in a comfortable boom bubble after WW2. Our society embodied an unprecedented affluence. And it could afford to project an image of "capitalism for all" or "capitalism with a friendly face".
It was a time of seeming celebration where the Western populace were in the happy position of being like eternal children – mesmerised by an increasingly glamourous entertainment field. And we got to act out a pretence at political participation every few years. The spectrum of potential political leaders effectively boiled down to two – which were merely two faces of the same force.
This comfortable theatre has lasted all our lives. But the underlying situation has changed through a downward economic spiral through which, up till now, we have "weathered the storm". The ruling class has gradually siphoned off more and more wealth to feed its insatiable hunger. And it has managed to do this while still maintaining that basic paradigm of "smiley face capitalism".
But we have reached a moment of crisis. The ruling class is now facing up to the fact that it can no longer maintain its power and luxuriance within the paradigm of a universal security. Thus we have the most transformative point since WW2. That vast majority of happy eternal children will find their hitherto comfortable lifestyles slipping away so that they will become a new peasant class.
And so the glamorous vision of capitalism for all must now give way. The image that is now in the ascendant is that of a war economy i.e. the old war economy. This is very different from the grand bellicosity which can be projected for a protected populace who, as it were, get to watch a televised image of war which is happening comfortably elsewhere. This time, the population itself is on the receiving end.
It is in this sense that the word "socialism" or even "Marxism" may be applied – not because the society we are headed towards is actual socialism. But because the old cold war image of communism with its seedy deprivation will indeed became reality for the vast majority.
So where does Trump fit in all this? Well – that aforementioned communist image is obviously more connected to the Left than the Right. In American terms, that means the Democrats are the ones "for the job".
And what is "the job"? Well it is the most efficacious path towards the slump i.e. the path that will generate the least resistance and the most docility. Hence: the pandemic. Trump's "Make America Great Again" rhetoric was not only obsolete but a positive obstacle to this great deprivation.
No longer the carrot but the stick. No longer prophets of hope but doom merchants. That is what the rulers need now if they want to preserve their position. And preserving their position is all they care abo
Lost in a dark wood , Dec 4, 2020 10:36 PM Reply to Brianborou
Trump is the counter coup against the central banking system, and it's why he has a portrait of Andrew Jackson overlooking his desk (see below). The war against the "invisible enemy" started in 2016 and what we are witnessing now is perhaps the beginning of the end. Probably the best rolling updates come from the X22 Report:
https://rumble.com/c/X22Report
--https://www.salon.com/2019/10/02/donald-trumps-favorite-president-andrew-jackson-as-father-of-the-white-republic/
I don't know much about the detailed history, but I assume the above is at least a partial attempt to trash Jackson. However, it makes the point (perhaps inadvertently) that the British were always a serious threat, and the actions by Jackson should be viewed in the context of addressing that threat.Brianborou. , Dec 4, 2020 11:47 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood
Really, so how do you explain the most powerful bankers in the world bail him out of most of his business failed ventures ?
JuraCalling , Dec 5, 2020 12:00 AM Reply to Lost in a dark wood
Andrew Jackson was an intelligent and politically astute man.
Donald Trump is a billionaire property developer and celebrity.
Do you think Jackson would have had a picture of Trump anywhere( that doesn't include a dartboard )
George Mc , Dec 4, 2020 8:29 PM
One thing that this video gives the lie to is that Trump is a present day version of Hitler. Whatever you think of him, he puts his point forward with poise and dignity. Dec 4, 2020 8:25 PM
Trump's speech should've been broadcasted on MSM. That being said, anyone who foolishly supported sellout Bernie is well aware of how the Dems rig elections. It's done all a time by both parties. All elections are rigged.
In any event, this election was critical. The establishment Republicans, Democrats, and the security state wanted Trump out. They were all in on it.
The person involved (Trump) as usual is always the last to know. Trump, was purposely not given good advice–it was a set-up. Trump's team should've only consented to the "COVID mail-in election," if the mail-in ballots were "solicited" and signatures were matched to existing documentation. These solicited ballots needed to be counted as they came in. They all should've been required to be mailed out early way before election day. After those mail-in ballots were tabulated, then they would only have to count the ballots which were cast on election day.However, this is what probably happened–the security state was stunned by Trump's popularity. They had no idea he was going to secure so many votes. That's why the counting was stopped and they needed to regroup. They had to keep the results solid for Biden so Trump would have no recourse. It was planned for a very long time.
Biden-Harris evolved into the ticket when Harris "their favorite" turned out to be a loser during the Dem primaries. That's why they pulled sleazy Joe out of the coffin to run with the Indian/Zionist Hillary puppet.Geoff , Dec 4, 2020 7:42 PM
Apart from the fact it's outrageous that they rig elections, but the outcome is still the same, in the UK if the great socialist QC leader of the ludwick parry should win the next election what happens nothing never has never will, we must be the only country where you have to work a two year probationary period before you have any employment protection, give seven days notice for any industrial action , why not make it three months? As someone put it on here last week , putting a piece of paper into a ballot box is a grown up version of sending Santa a letter, after the last election, I'm finished never vote again it's a fuckin charade and I'm not joining in.
Joerg , Dec 4, 2020 7:42 PM
WATCH: Video footage from Georgia shows suitcases filled with ballots pulled from under a table AFTER supervisors told poll workers to leave room and 4 people stayed behind to keep counting votes
Joerg , Dec 4, 2020 7:43 PM Reply to Joerg
The video itself has the direct:link:
https://twitter.com/TeamTrump/status/1334569329334083586crank , Dec 4, 2020 7:40 PM Reply to JuraCalling
If this speech we can see hear was banned from reaching the public because of it's truth- why are we able to watch and listen ?
Of course none of us know. My 'take' is that it is part of a fairly elaborate bifurcation strategy. We are 'able to watch and listen' because of the pluralility and cross referencing of the internet. There is only one meaningful divide in Western politics now : those who hang on to the corporate media as a thread back to a believeable account of the world around them, and those who are thinking and do not. The PTB saw this divide coming. The corporate/state media ran Operation Trump as a bout featuring a bad wrestler character, knowing full well that a lot of what he says is, in fact, true. That he is the one saying it though, tar babies the truth with because it is his weird mouth uttering it. Lies then continue to prevail amongst the managerial classes.
None of this is about Donald Trump ulitmately, but electoral politics confuses several things in people's minds : the honesty of character of the individual standing as representative, the stated political objectives/ philosophies of the representative, the unstated objectives/ philosophy of the representative, the values and interests of those who get them into power, the capacity for that representative to work the system to get their objectives enacted etc.
The issue here is about the 70+ million voters who voted for what they think Donald Trump offers them. That they have not got what they seemed to want back in 2016, and that Trump had ample chance to push that along, reminds me that his "America First" declaration is the key (and perhaps only) lie in this speech.
The swing toward a renewed national conservatism in America is a problem for the global elites. So they set up a fake nationalism, sometimes referred to as 'Finkelthink', after its mastermind Arthur Finkelstein. There is a lot on this for anyone open minded enough to look into it.
The stage is being set by the Democrats and Trump together, to maximise chaos layered upon chaos. We all know why, because America (the dollar) is going down:
https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1604-john-titus-on-central-bank-digital-currencies/S Cooper , Dec 4, 2020 8:08 PM Reply to JuraCalling
"Not the most gracious loser is Donald."
"That is precious. Liars, cheats and charlatans lecturing anyone about "sportsmanship." They should first get some integrity. Oh wait, they can't. Because they have none. They have not only cheated Orange Hair Bozo, they have cheated the general public as well."
JuraCalling , Dec 4, 2020 8:24 PM Reply to S Cooper
I think a big part of this is a bit like the Roadrunner carton. No matter how 'wily' Wile E Coyote was, he always ended up with his own bomb exploding in his hand or getting stuck in his own trap.
Four years ago Trump tried to tap into the niche we know and love as 'alt'. He tempted with 'I'll drain the swamp' and 'I'll show you aliens' or 'I'll release the JFK truth' nuggets. Once he was in he developed a 'bromance' that looked like a terrible, terrible acid trip with Alex Jones.
Then there was a mass sweep of 'conspiracy theories' that had been prompted by Obama's blood lust. Suddenly we had Trumps attempt at Orwellian doublespeak as he called whatever he didn't agree with 'fake nooz'. Anyone asking the president a question- as has been protocol for 100 years- was ok if they asked ones he wanted to be asked; any others were branded as ' fake nooz '.
We were still hearing about 'Pizzagate' and the Clinton cartel of psychopaths 2 years into his reign. And even now Russiagate or Hackgate won't go away. So here we are. Trump has found another mixture of conspiracy to call 'fake nooz' .
But this one( according to him) has been to oust him from power.
We've never seen a public figure scrutinised so closely 24/7 in our time. Nobody has. I thought that kind of thing with Lady Diana was the peakt. But the Trump obsession has been off the scale from day one. I think it's down to his numerous cameo appearances on tacky sitcoms or public appearances at the square garden for the big fights. We all knew him in the UK. We never thought of him as a politician, just a slightly wacky billionaire with interesting hair and funny suits.
That the race was between him and Hilary was bad enough. In the UK, we had a complete dickhead who looks like he'd struggle in a job interviewer as the car park attendant end up the PM.
As Dystopia sets in, as the decks are cleared for a NWO and as politicians ready themselves to step aside and let the future structure's rulers- Scientists – take over, Democracy has to be seen as untrustworthy, along with the democratic process.
We can hope the vote -rigging talk goes away ( it's dull already, and less and less people buy the system anyway) but it's serving it's purpose. That being to demonstrate the lack of credibility of any system has that allows us plebs to have a say.
They won't blame us; they'll blame 'data rigging that wasn't policed ' . But we'll be told we'll have to vote by digital means after this. And that's not voting at all. It's pressing keys and a mouse. The results are already decided ahead of the game. Like now.
Captain Birdheart , Dec 4, 2020 6:16 PM
Here is a video version (12 minutes) of the Martin Geddes article 'The digital coup & the great exposure.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/LEFTSJkitYM?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
Tom Larsen , Dec 4, 2020 7:15 PM Reply to Captain Birdheart
I doubt anybody living in the Biden media bubble would ever hear this.
TheCrow , Dec 4, 2020 6:22 PM Reply to Lisa
Trump is the political wing of the military industrial complex, and it looks like they are going to go for it.
Sandy Sanders , Dec 4, 2020 6:08 PM
But let's be honest about the US electoral system. Just concerning post WW2, It's a two-team battle much like a professional football league with just two franchises: playing, making the rules, running the game, refereeing, promoting, providing media and "journalistic" coverage, administering funding, policies, budgets and arenas, controlling ancillary business franchises; and literally charging, controlling behavior of and dictating every aspect of the event an attendance. The public's only power is to buy (being taxed) a ticket or watch the commercialed event on TV. Same two teams, same basic play, same outcome for everyone. The owners & 1% players and support franchises make out fabulously and the public sit in the serf's seats powerless and obedient. As ratified in 1789 and functioning in 2020, it's a rigged game from the start.
In the last 100 years we've had the incredibly popular socialist Henry Wallace, VP to FDR, sabotaged by internal Dem politics giving us the most incompetent Truman; JFK thru Chicago ballot rigging; internal sabotage of McGovern and Carter; the Anderson split sabotage of 1980; Gore in Florida 2000 w/SCOTUS & Dem sellout; Kerry Sellout in Ohio 2004; and the 3 million plus majority popular loss to the archaic Electoral College in 2016. For me the only solution for a survivable future was Wallace in 1948. But as 2020 was rigged, it has always been rigged by the system which is the Deep State to get what it wants: 1) a plutocracy that provides for the Commerce operations of the 1%; and 2) thwart, block & erase any functional democracy or potentiality of democratic socialism that allows the 99% to self-govern-provide for the social needs of humanity.
Gwyn , Dec 4, 2020 6:07 PM
And they'll still have the brass neck to bang on about "exporting democracy" to other countries. The USA is a bad joke of a country. A rogue state.
Which makes it the ideal henchman for the transnational financiers who run the world. A big, stupid bully with unlimited military spending at its disposal that can bomb countries that can't defend themselves into submission. Very courageous, those servants of illegitimate power from the Home of the Brave.
It's also called the Land of the Free, of course – which is slightly at odds with the fact that it's the proud possessor of the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world. And they say the Yanks don't do irony!
Ross Hendry , Dec 4, 2020 6:41 PM Reply to Gwyn
"USA is a bad joke of a country."
Make that a sick joke. Americans on the other hand are mostly fine people (albeit amazingly oblivious/uncaring about the outrages that are done in their name).
Gwyn , Dec 4, 2020 8:04 PM Reply to Ross Hendry
The greatest outrage started on the day settlers landed there. A bit of humility, a bit of contrition, about the fate of the American Indians wouldn't go amiss (instead of all the idiotic, infantile bombast about the USA being the greatest country in the world).
Watt , Dec 4, 2020 8:44 PM Reply to Gwyn
Maybe some 'reparations' wouldn't go amiss! Major precedent is already in play, so to speak.
JuraCalling , Dec 5, 2020 12:10 AM Reply to Gwyn
It's Orwellian doublespeak Democracy.
Le Chat Noir , Dec 4, 2020 6:03 PM
We have all globally lost democracy and freedom in a very sinister and well co-ordinated revolution without a shot being fired, apart from the one they'll give you in the arm. I feel very sad for the young people, they'll never grow up in the wonderful world I knew.
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Dec 05, 2020 | thenationonlineng.net
President Donald Trump & Vice President Mike Pence gave speeches on the night of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump talked about his leads in key states and called the continuation of mail-in ballot counting a "fraud on the American public."
He said, "frankly, we did win this election," appearing to claim victory before many states finished counting votes.
He also mentioned "going to the U.S. Supreme Court" over the election.
Read the full transcript of the speeches:
Donald Trump: (00:07)
Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Please sit. Thank you. This is without question the latest news conference I've ever had. Thank you. I appreciate it very much. And I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support, millions and millions of people voted for us tonight. And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won't stand for it. We will not stand for it.
Donald Trump: (00:54)
I want to thank the first lady, my entire family, and Vice President Pence, Mrs. Pence for being with us all through this. And we were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything and all of a sudden it was just called off. The results tonight have been phenomenal and we are getting ready I mean, literally we were just all set to get outside and just celebrate something that was so beautiful, so good. Such a vote, such a success to citizens of this country have come out in record numbers. This is a record. There's never been anything like it to support our incredible movement. We won States that we weren't expected to win. Florida, we didn't win it. We won it by a lot.
Donald Trump: (01:54)
We won the great State of Ohio. We won Texas, we won Texas. We won Texas. We won Texas by 700,000 votes and they don't even include it in the tabulations. It's also clear that we have won Georgia. We're up by 2.5% or 117,000 votes with only 7% left. They're never going to catch us. They can't catch us. Likewise we've clearly won North Carolina. Where we're up 1.4%. We're 77,000 votes with only approximately 5% left. They can't catch us. We also, if you look and you see Arizona, we have a lot of life in that. And somebody declared that it was a victory for us. And maybe it will be. I mean, that's possible. But certainly there were a lot of votes out there that we could get because we're now just coming into what they call Trump territory. I don't know what you call it. But these were friendly Trump voters. And that could be overturned.
Donald Trump: (03:14)
The gentleman that called it, I watched tonight. He said, "Well, we think it's fairly unlikely that he could catch." Well, fairly unlikely and we don't even need it. We don't need that. That was just a state that if we would have gotten it, it would have been nice. Arizona. But there's a possibility, maybe even a good possibility. In fact, since I saw that originally it's been changed and the numbers have substantially come down just in a small amount of votes. So we want that obviously to stay in play. But most importantly, we're winning Pennsylvania by a tremendous amount of votes.
Donald Trump: (04:14)
We're up 600 Think of this. Think of this. Think of this. We're up 690,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 690,000. These aren't even close. This is not like, "Oh, it's less " With 64% of the vote in, it's going to be almost impossible to catch. And we're coming into good Pennsylvania areas where they happen to like your president. I mean, it's very good. So we'll probably expand that. We're winning Michigan, but I'll tell you, I looked at the numbers. I said, "Wow." I looked, I said, "Wow, that's a lot." By almost 300,000 votes and 65% of the voters in and we're winning Wisconsin. And I said, "Well, we don't need all of them. We need " Because when you add Texas in, which wasn't added, I spoke with the really wonderful governor of Texas just a little while ago, Greg Abbott, he said, "Congratulations." He called me to congratulate me on winning Texas.
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Donald Trump: (05:26)
I mean, we won Texas. I don't think they finished quite the tabulation, but there's no way. And it was almost complete, but he congratulated me. Then he said, "By the way, what's going on? I've never seen anything like this." Can I tell you what nobody has? So we won by 107,000 votes with 81% of the vote. That's Michigan. So when you take those three States in particular and you take all of the others, I mean, we have so many We had such a big night. You just take a look at all of these States that we've won tonight, and then you take a look at the kind of margins that we've won it by, and all of a sudden, it's not like we're up 12 votes and we have 60% left. We won States. And all of a sudden I said, "What happened to the election? It's off?" And we have all these announces saying what happened? And then they said, "Oh."
Donald Trump: (06:24)
Because you know what happened? They knew they couldn't win so they said, "Let's go to court." And did I predict this, Newt? Did I say this? I've been saying this from the day I heard they were going to send out tens of millions of ballots. They said exactly, because either they were going to win or if they didn't win, they'll take us to court. So Florida was a tremendous victory. 377,000 votes. Texas, as we said. Ohio, think of this. Ohio a tremendous state, a big state. I love Ohio. We won by 8.1%, 460,00 think of this. Almost 500,000 votes. North Carolina, a big victory with North Carolina. So we won there. We lead by 76,000 votes with almost nothing left. And all of a sudden everything just stopped.
Donald Trump: (07:28)
This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we'll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don't want them to find any ballots at four o'clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It's a very sad moment. To me this is a very sad moment and we will win this. And as far as I'm concerned, we already have won it.
Donald Trump: (08:30)
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So I just want to thank you. I want to thank all of our support. I want to thank all of the people that worked with us. And Mr. Vice President, say a few words, please. Please.
Mike Pence: (08:46)
Thank you, Mr. President. I want to join you in thanking more than 60 million Americans who have already cast their vote for four more years for president Donald Trump in the White House. While the votes continue to be counted, we're going to remain vigilant, as the president said. The right to vote has been at the center of our democracy since the founding of this nation and we're going to protect the integrity of the vote. But I really believe with all of my heart, with the extraordinary margins, Mr. President, that you've inspired in the States that you just described, and the way that you launched this movement across the country to make America great again, I truly do believe as you do that we are on the road to victory and we will make America great again, again. Thank you, Mr. President.
Donald Trump: (09:51)
Thank you very much [inaudible 00:09:56]. Thank you very much.
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Nov 11, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
The purpose of all elections is to allow a band of people called the state to legitimize their claim of control over everyone and everything within a given jurisdiction. In his book The Rise and Fall of Society , the Old Right libertarian Frank Chodorov defines the state as "a number of people who, having somehow got hold of it," use "the machinery of coercion to the end that they might pursue their version of happiness without respect to the discipline of the market place" (italics added).
The two somehows of getting and holding political power are to use institutionalized violence or to convince people to respect state authority. Statists usually pursue some combination of both. Violence is rarely preferred, however, because it can backlash into a resistance that threatens state power. It is far better for the state if people oppress themselves through willing obedience. It is even better if they express enthusiasm for their own oppression. Thus politicians and the media applaud the rah-rah attitude of cheering crowds who characterize elections. Thus voting is deified as the voice of "the people," a fundamental right, and the best way to change society.
The situation is the opposite of what the state claims. The anarchist author Albert Jay Nock divided power into two categories: social and state. Social power is the freedom individuals exercise over their lives; when people gather for mutual benefit and when a society forms, this is also social power. State power is the control government exercises over individuals and society; it preys upon them -- through taxation, for example -- to enrich itself. An inverse and antagonistic relationship exists between the two types of power, with the state expanding only at the expense of society and vice versa. Freedom does not and cannot come from elections that strengthen the state's perceived legitimacy; freedom depends on weakening this authority, preferably down to zero.
The popular celebration of the "right" to vote puzzled Nock and Chodorov. In his book Out of Step, Chodorov writes,
Why should a self-respecting citizen endorse an institution grounded in thievery? For that is what one does when one votes .Perhaps the silliest argument, and yet the one invariably advanced is that "we must choose the lesser of two evils". Under what compulsion are we to make such a choice? Why not pass up both of them?
The answer: people do so because they believe elections and the state are necessary evils. Despite the presence of far more effective strategies -- education and agorism are only two -- people see no other effective alternatives for social change or stability.
https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890
So far in the analysis, election 2020 is the same as every other election; only circumstances like voter turnout are unusual.
What is different?The state's mask of legitimacy is slipping. Election 2020 is rife with Republican cries of "Fraud!" As early as April, Trump was ringing alarm bells about the mail-in ballots demanded by Democrats, calling them "horrible" and "corrupt," with "tremendous potential for voter fraud." Democrats counterattacked by accusing Republicans of destroying democracy by delegitimizing the election.
The Democrats are correct about Republicans damaging democracy but wrong about their glorification of mob rule and blind to their own role in the political carnage. Like the state, democracy is accepted only in the minds of people who believe in the system. A flood of news stories about electoral abuse have shaken this faith, whether or not the stories are true; discarded ballots, dishonest counts, lack of oversight, slack verification, ballot harvesting, and voter suppression have caused lawsuits and protests to erupt across America.
But is election 2020 any more rigged than some past ones? A 2016 article in the Daily Signal, "Rigged Election? Past Presidential Contests Sowed Doubt and Nearly Led to Violence ," lists five presidential races that are viewed as having been won through fraud. And the problem is not confined to the Oval Office. A recent article, "Don't Forget LBJ's Election Theft ," by Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation, recounted the incredible corruption of Lyndon B. Johnson's senatorial race. Nevertheless, the iniquities of this election seem to be unusually widespread and transparent.
Several factors undoubtedly contribute to the more conspicuous abuse.
Many on the left and in the media passionately hate Trump, whom they view as a woman-bashing, homophobic racist. Racism is the worst sin in our culture, which leaves Trump haters free to shed all pretense of fairness toward him. For his part, Trump stokes the fire through caustic tweets and comments.
Some campaign veterans on the left may have sensed the Democrats' weakness: Biden is a terrible candidate who is mentally deteriorating, hides in his basement, and cannot draw a crowd. To these Democrats, cheating may seem necessary.
Others on the left probably believed the polls, which made them cocky and careless. They shouldn't have been. Journalist Glenn Greenwald states concisely in two tweet s, "You have an incumbent President with a massive recession, an unemployment, rent and foreclosure crisis, and an out-of-control pandemic, and this is what the Democrats are able to do with it... Assuming that Biden ekes out a victory, that the Democrats managed to *lose* seats in the House with everything going on might be the most shocking and pathetic part of what happened."
Trump vows to dismantle the deep state. Whether he is sincere or capable of doing so is debatable. There is no question, however, that he has exposed some formidable deep state enemies and wants them punished. The accused, like former director of national intelligence James Clapper, want blood, and they do not play by the rules.
A Trump administration would pursue the Hunter Biden–Burisma scandal, which is making other prominent figures very nervous. A Biden administration would make it go away.
The political storm reflects what is happening on the streets and in the culture. Constant protests and riots seem to fill the streets with tension and crime. In the last two decades, a take-no-prisoners culture of moral outrage has spilled from campuses into the mainstream, using tactics of intimidation, rage, and violent confrontation.
Identity politics is a surging political approach. It defines human beings by secondary characteristics like race and pits different groups into nonnegotiable conflict that blocks the possibility of civil discussion or action.
Election 2020 did not provide a clear winner. The contest de facto continues through lawsuits and court decisions. Here this election could be different from most others, although, again, not unprecedented. If a tie or disputed ballots prevent both candidates from reaching 270 electoral votes, then the House will decide who will be president.
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Chad Pergram, the congressional correspondent for Fox News, explains, "Congress must approve certificates of election from all 50 states." The "crucial date is December 14, dictated by an obscure, 1887 law The Electoral Count Act dictates that states choose electors no more than 41 days after the election. This is partly why the Supreme Court rushed to complete Bush v. Gore on December 12, 2000. The decision halted the count of ballots in Florida, handing the presidency to George W. Bush." Legal challenges to state elections may result in the same for Trump.
If Congress cannot certify the electoral college votes, Pergram describes the next steps. "If Congress determines there's a stalemate, the 12th Amendment directs the House to elect the President. This is called a 'contingent election.'" A delegate from each state casts one ballot. The process would probably advantage Trump, as Republicans have fewer representatives but they cover more states.
"At this point," Pergram writes, "we expect House Speaker Nancy Pelosi presuming she is re-elected, and Vice President Pence, in his capacity as President of the Senate, to co-preside over the Joint Session. Pence's term doesn't expire until January 20. And, the 12th Amendment mandates that 'the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall be counted'." Unfortunately, this wording raises another difficulty over which constitutional scholars have debated for years; it does not specify how the votes are to be counted. Pergram points to yet another possible obstacle. "The 12th Amendment also says 'the person having the greatest number of votes for President shall be President'. But Congress must agree to all of this. And remember, Pence is the one running the show at this stage."
In short, an incredible mess might well be followed by another incredible mess -- one that could set a constitutional precedent. Nonvoters should feel pleased and proud to have played no part in the ugly fiasco of presidential election 2020. "A curse on both your houses" is the sound libertarian position.
Ben A Drill , 17 minutes ago
Bannedeverywhere , just nowNext election the media should have a three day and night blackout of any coverage about the election. Call it a quiet time so voters can do their job and vote without any media intervention.
Joe Biden was 29 when elected US senator. He was the 6th youngest ever to become senator, at the time... By all accounts, Joe was not very bright. So, how did low IQ Joe go from admission to the BAR in '69' to county council to winning a 1972 election to U.S. Senator and holding that for '47' years? Seems like a rather steep progression into the political world.
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Nov 09, 2020 | www.breitbart.com
Allen M. Ease DeplorableChump/sarc... • 6 hours ago
Not only that, but all the dead voters need to be expunged, and all the crooked voter fraud schemers like those recorded in the following video should be questioned and/or charged with a felony.
3 • Reply • Share › −
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[Recorded] Voter Fraud -- Michigan -- Detroit [11:38]
https://www.youtube.com/wat...
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There has never been a more urgent constitutional crisis in our country except maybe during the civil war (the 1st one).Deplorable Texan Allen M. Ease • 6 hours ago
I can't watch that. My blood pressure, oi vey!
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Nov 09, 2020 | www.breitbart.com
tilda • 7 hours agoThis article means there's no paper ballot for recounts and the voter can't verify his ballot. This is not good, and NO ONE should be using a system where the voter cannot verify his own choices and that his vote was counted. These issues must be figured out for now and future elections, even if some states have to throw out the results and vote all over again.
9 • Reply • Share ›Unless you are too dumb to realize it the American public has witnessed the most rigged election in American history....If Biden would have drawn anywhere nearly the crowds that Trump did at his rallies I would say maybe it's legit but Biden couldn't draw more than a dozen people....What's wrong with this picture?
9 • Reply • Share ›ShawnNJ ✓Swamp Drainer Desert cowboy • 7 hours ago
Absolutely!
8 • Reply • Share › −We have no election integrity at this point. None. It's gone.
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Oct 01, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by James Howard Kunstler via The Daily Reckoning,
America has a new manufactured crisis, ElectionGate, as if all the other troubles piling up like tropical depressions marching across the September seas were not enough.
America needs a constitutional crisis like a hole in the head, and that's exactly what's being engineered for the holiday season by the clever folks in the Democratic Party's Lawfare auxiliary.
Here's how it works:
The complicit newspapers and cable news channels publish polls showing Joe Biden leading in several swing states, even if it's not true.
Facebook and Twitter amplify expectations of a Biden victory.
This sets the stage for a furor when it turns out that he loses on election night.
On cue, Antifa commences to riot all around the country. Meanwhile, a mighty harvest of mail-in votes pours into election districts utterly unequipped to validate them.
Lawfare cadres agitate in the contested states' legislatures to send rogue elector slates to the electoral college. The dispute ends up in congress, which awaits a seating of newly-elected representatives on January 4, hopefully for Lawfare, mostly Democrats. Whoops !
Turns out, the Dems lost their majority there too. Fighting in the streets ramps up and overwhelms hamstrung police forces in Democratic-run cities.
January 20 -- Inauguration Day -- rolls around, and the Dems ask the military to drag Trump out of the White House "with great dispatch!" as Mr. Biden himself put it so nicely back in the summer.
The U.S. military breaks into two factions. Voilà: Civil War Two.
You didn't read that here first, of course. It's been all over the web for weeks, since the Democratic Party-sponsored Transition Integrity Project (cough cough) ran their summer "war game," intending to demonstrate that any Trump election victory would be evidence of treason and require correction by any means necessary , including sedition, which they'd already tried a few times in an organized way since 2016 (and botched).
The Democrats are crazy enough now to want this. They have driven themselves crazy for years with the death-wish of eradicating western civ (and themselves with it). There are many reasons for this phenomenon, mostly derived from Marxist theories of revolution, but my own explanation departs from that.
The matter was neatly laid out a year ago during the impeachment ploy: After the color revolution in Ukraine, 2014, Mr. Biden was designated not just as "point man" overseeing American interests in that sad-sack country, but specifically as a watchdog against the notorious deep corruption of Ukraine's entire political ecosystem -- as if, you understand, the internal workings of Ukraine's politics was any of our business in the first place.
https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890
The evidence aired publicly last year suggests that Mr. Biden jumped head-first and whole-heartedly into the hog-trough of loose money there, netting his son Hunter and cohorts millions of dollars for no-show jobs on the board of natural gas company, Burisma.
And then, of course, Mr. Biden stupidly bragged on a recorded panel session at the Council on Foreign Relations about threatening to withhold U.S. aid money as a lever to induce Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor looking into Burisma's sketchy affairs.
Naturally, the Democratic Party impeachment crew accused Mr. Trump of doing exactly what Mr. Biden accomplished a few years earlier.
The impeachment fizzled, but the charges and the odor of the Biden-Burisma scandal lingered without resolution -- all the while that Mr. Biden posed as a presidential candidate in the primaries.
This week, the Senate released a report detailing findings of their investigation into the Biden family's exploits abroad. It didn't look good.
Also implicated are the State Department officers in the Kiev embassy who pretended not to notice any of this, pointing also to their engagement in further shenanigans around the Trump-Clinton election of 2016 -- a lot of that entwined in the Clinton-sponsored RussiaGate scheme.
Of course, the Senate was not so bold as to issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
If Mr. Biden actually shows up at this week's debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject?
Does this finally force Mr. Biden's withdrawal from what has been the most hollow, illusory, and dispirited campaign ever seen at this level in U.S. political history?
All of which is to say that the Democratic Party has other things to worry about, besides who will replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.
That may be hard to believe, but it's how things are now after four years of implacable, seditious perfidy from the party.
A week ago, all the talk centered around the Democrats' election coup plan, as publicized stupidly by the so-called Transition Integrity Project. Nice try. What if all those mail-in ballots sent out recently have Joe Biden's name on them and it turns out that he is no longer a candidate?
Hmmmm . No doubt the recipients were so eager to fill them in and send them out that there's no going back on that scam. Apparently, a Biden withdrawal was not one of the scenarios scrimmaged out in the Transition Integrity Project's "war game."
What then? A do-over?
Hence, panic in the swamp. Joe Biden's misadventures, and his pitiful fate, are but the outer rainbands of the brewing storm.
There's the threat of further and widespread riots, of course, but since when has insurrection proved to be a winning campaign strategy in a country not entirely gone to the dogs?
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People who are not insane usually object to their businesses being torched and their homes invaded. At this point, after months of violent antics by criminal nihilists, one can even imagine Multnomah County, Oregon, turning Trumpwise.
The orgy of political hysteria, insane thinking and violence is a psychotic reaction to the collapsing techno-industrial economy -- a feature of it, actually.
When all familiar social and economic arrangements are threatened, people go nuts. Interestingly, the craziness actually started in the colleges and universities where ideas (the products of thinking) are supposed to be the stock-in-trade.
The more pressing the practical matters of daily life became, the less intellectuals wanted to face them. So, they desperately generated a force-field of crazy counter-ideas to repel the threat, a curriculum of wishful thinking, childish utopian nostrums and exercises in boundary-smashing.
As all this moved out of the campuses (the graduation function), it infected every other corner of American endeavor, institutions, business, news media, sports, Hollywood, etc.
The country is now out of its mind echoes of France, 1793 a rhyme, not a reprise.
Wild Bill Steamcock , 47 minutes ago
Wild Bill Steamcock , 46 minutes agoPeople just have to accept the fact- yes I said fact- that the Republic is dead and there's no saving it. When a guy like Comey, a seditionist, perhaps even treasonous criminal can testify before Congress and not have the cuffs slapped on him on the way out says it all.
The Government is rotten through to the core with corruption and cancer. There's nothing left to work with.
Fizzy Head , 6 minutes agoThis election won't change anything. Not one thing.
And I'll gladly come back here and eat those words if I'm wrong
NoDebt , 2 minutes agoGood point, some swamp creatures that were drained are still out there minus the swamp.
CRM114 , 16 minutes agoCorrect, elections mean nothing when politicians aren't afraid of the population they rule over. And by now I do mean literally RULE OVER. Consent of the governed has been completely tossed aside in abject ridicule. They see us as their intellectual and moral inferiors and hold us all in contempt.
Unless the politicians are afraid of us, this will continue. Right now they have no reason to fear us. Everyone who they wanted locked down and shut up has been- including even ZH getting the Google muzzle thrown on it. Meanwhile, everyone they wanted out in the streets fomenting chaos and revolution is out in the streets doing exactly as they are bidden (and paid) to do.
I imagine them chuckling to themselves and thinking how easy it was. It wasn't easy, of course, they spent 40 years doing their "slow march through the institutions" but that phase is over now. They're into the active (violent revolution) part.
And in case nobody has noticed, they're winning.
play_arrowtyberious , 57 minutes agoInteresting point about corruption in Ukraine. Worth noting that the soccer Champion's League final in 2018 was in Kiev, Ukraine. Very inconvenient for both fans and teams, airlines couldn't cope, and the hotel ripoffs started immediately. Very stupid place to hold it. The location is decided by an "independent" FIFA committee, one of whom has a brother who is the mayor of Kiev. Coincidence, obviously ;)
The idea that Hunter Biden could operate in Ukraine without bribing anyone is ridiculous. The key question is whether he ripped off the American people as well as the Ukrainians ;)
LetThemEatRand , 1 hour ago"The Democrats are crazy enough now to want this"
They hang otherwise!
J S Bach , 25 minutes agoA bloody crisis over whether douchebag or turd sandwich won the election is just about par for the course these days.
flyonmywall , 48 minutes agoAnother great article posted in the past 3 days on ZH. (Maybe there's hope for this site after all.)
However, as usual... the (((cancerous core))) of all of our malaise, from unconstitutional currency, to media, to academia, to corrupt courts, to twisted sexual ideologies... is NOT mentioned.
Hopefully, those who garnered at least an 8th grade education level and a modicum of ability to think, will be able to read between the lines of articles like these to glean to underlying truth as to the guilty party.
********. This isn't France in 1793.
The current President is way more popular than the media is willing to admit.
The media and the Democrats will lose, count on it. They are gambling with the life of the USA, but more importantly, they are gambling with their own lives.
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Jan 01, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org
© Photo: Wikipedia In order to understand the great impeachment charade, it's important to keep three facts about the strange bird known as the United States uppermost in mind.The first is that the U.S. is the ultimate law-based society, one whose structure derives entirely from a single four-thousand-word document created in 1787. The second is that while Americans think of the Constitution as the greatest plan of government known to man, it's actually the opposite: a grotesque pre-modern relic that grows more unrepresentative and unresponsive with each passing year. A pro-rural Electoral College that has overridden the popular vote in two of the last five presidential elections; a lopsided Senate that allows the majority in ten urban states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty; lifetime Supreme Court justices who can veto any law at variance with an ancient constitution that only they understand – it's a broken-down old rattletrap in need of a top-to-bottom overhaul. Yet it's so thoroughly frozen that structural reform is all but unthinkable.
The third thing to keep in mind is that as the constitutional system grows more and more undemocratic, the two-party system that grew out of it in the nineteenth century grows more undemocratic as well. The result is a bipartisan race to the right. Sometimes, the Republicans seem to be in the lead as Trump imprisons thousands of immigrants fleeing murderous conditions in Central America that the U.S. war on drugs helped create. Other times it's the Democrats as they beat the drums for imperialist war against Russia.
Take all these factors – xenophobia, mindless obeisance to ancient law, a president imposed against the popular will, etc. – mix thoroughly, place in a super-hot oven due to a growing imperial crisis, and impeachment is what pops out. The process itself is very old, a by-product of fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman law. (Impeachment derives from the Old French empeechier, meaning to ensnare or entrap.) The British abandoned it in the late eighteenth century when Edmund Burke wasted seven years impeaching an Indian colonial governor named Warren Hastings on grounds of corruption. (The House of Lords finally acquitted him in 1795). But then the Americans took it up and now, two centuries later, are immersed in the same brainless exercise.
The results were all too evident in mid-December when one Democrat after another took to the House floor to denounced Donald Trump for violating the ancient constitution by withholding lethal military aid from the neo-Nazis of the Ukraine's Azov Battalion.
"We used to stand up to Putin and Russia – I know the party of Ronald Reagan used to," declared Adam Schiff, the Democratic point man on impeachment, his voice quivering with emotion. The fight to defend the Ukraine is "about more than Ukraine. It's about us. It's about our national security. Their fight is our fight. Their defense is our defense . And when the President sacrifices our interests, our national security for his election, he is sacrificing our country for his personal gain."
This was the Democratic line in a nutshell. In order to safeguard the ancient republic at home, the U.S. must pay foreign satraps to defend its imperial interests abroad. Since no patriotic American could possibly disagree, any and all problems must stem from meddling by the evil dictator Vladimir Putin and his traitorous puppet in the Oval Office. Americans must therefore fulfill the ancient law by impeaching him just as the "founding fathers" would have wanted. Only then will peace and freedom return to the land of the free and the home of the brave.
It's all quite ridiculous, but what's even more bonkers is that millions of Americans think it's true. Trump is meanwhile in his element. Now that Democrats have voted to impeach him in the House, he'd like nothing more than a lengthy trial in the Senate because (a) acquittal in the upper house is a certainty and (b) it will allow the Republican majority to put the torturers to the rack by subpoenaing everyone from Joe and Hunter Biden to Adam Schiff himself and declaring them in contempt of Congress if they refuse to testify. Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has described an all-out Senate war as "mutual assured destruction," and he's right since, once unleashed, the ancient constitutional machinery will grind everything to dust in its path.
American politics will grow only more farcical. If Putin looms larger and larger on the world stage; if "the moment has come," as the Times Literary Supplement recently announced , "for even the most hardened skeptics to admit that he is one of the most successful world leaders of our era"; if the U.S. at the same time staggers from one imperial disaster to another even while descending into civil war – then it's not because the Russian leader is particularly clever, but because the U.S. is locked in an ancient mindset that is increasingly divorced from reality. It's lost in a constitutional labyrinth of its own making, and impeachment is leading it deeper and deeper into the maze.
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Nov 05, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
[ The American Conservative ]. "Civil war is, at root, a contest over legitimacy. Legitimacy -- literally the right to make law -- is shorthand for the consent of the citizens and political parties to abide by the authority of a constitutional order.
Civil war begins when this larger political compact breaks down .
Hence civil war becomes a struggle in which one party must successfully assert a successor legitimate order, and to which the opposing party must eventually submit. This is above all a contest over constitutional authority.
Inasmuch as civil war happens after constitutional breakdown, it means that resolution must be reached not only outside of a now-former legal framework, but also unrestrained even by longstanding political customs and norms.
Extra-constitutional force is now the deciding factor, which is why these struggles are called civil wars ." • This is a must-read.
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Jul 31, 2018 | russia-insider.com
"a key feature of the Roman Empire in its final slide to collapse ... shared values and consensus which had held the Empire's core together dissolved, leaving petty fiefdoms to war among themselves for what power and swag remained."
If we understand the profound political disunity fracturing the nation and its Imperial Project, we understand the Deep State must also fracture along the same fault lines.
If we consider the state of the nation from 40,000 feet, several key indicators of profound political disunity within the elites pop out:
- The overt politicization of the central state's law enforcement and intelligence agencies: it is now commonplace to find former top officials of the CIA et al. accusing a sitting president of treason in the mainstream media. What was supposed to be above politics is now nothing but politics.
- The overt politicization of the centralized (corporate) media: evidence that would stand up in a court of law is essentially non-existent but the interpretations and exaggerations that fit the chosen narrative are ceaselessly promoted--the classic definition of desperate propaganda by those who have lost the consent of the governed.
Psychopaths with no moral principles. The nation's elites are not just divided--they're exhibiting signs of schizophrenic breakdown : disassociation and a loss of the ability to discern the difference between reality and their internal fantasies.I've been writing about the divided Deep State for a number of years, for example, The Conflict within the Deep State Just Broke into Open Warfare . The topic appears to be one of widespread interest, as this essay drew over 300,000 views.
It's impossible to understand the divided Deep State unless we situate it in the larger context of profound political disunity , a concept I learned from historian Michael Grant, whose slim but insightful volume The Fall of the Roman Empire I have been recommending since 2009.
As I noted in my 2009 book Survival+ , this was a key feature of the Roman Empire in its final slide to collapse. The shared values and consensus which had held the Empire's core together dissolved, leaving petty fiefdoms to war among themselves for what power and swag remained.
A funny thing happens when a nation allows itself to be ruled by Imperial kleptocrats: such rule is intrinsically destabilizing, as there is no longer any moral or political center to bind the nation together. The public sees the value system at the top is maximize my personal profit by whatever means are available , i.e. complicity, corruption, monopoly and rentier rackets , and they follow suit by pursuing whatever petty frauds and rackets are within reach: tax avoidance, cheating on entrance exams, gaming the disability system, lying on mortgage and job applications, and so on.
But the scope of the rentier rackets is so large, the bottom 95% cannot possibly keep up with the expanding wealth and income of the top .1% and their army of technocrats and enablers, so a rising sense of injustice widens the already yawning fissures in the body politic.
Meanwhile, diverting the national income into a few power centers is also destabilizing , as Central Planning and Market Manipulation (a.k.a. the Federal Reserve) are intrinsically unstable as price can no longer be discovered by unfettered markets. As a result, imbalances grow until some seemingly tiny incident or disruption triggers a cascading collapse, a.k.a. a phase shift or system re-set.
As the Power Elites squabble over the dwindling crumbs left by the various rentier rackets, there's no one left to fight for the national interest because the entire Status Quo of self-interested fiefdoms and cartels has been co-opted and is now wedded to the Imperial Oligarchy as their guarantor of financial security.
The divided Deep State is a symptom of this larger systemic political disunity. I have characterized the divide as between the Wall Street-Neocon-Globalist Neoliberal camp--currently the dominant public face of the Deep State, the one desperately attempting to exploit the "Russia hacked our elections and is trying to destroy us" narrative--and a much less public, less organized "rogue Progressive" camp, largely based in the military services and fringes of the Deep State, that sees the dangers of a runaway expansionist Empire and the resulting decay of the nation's moral/political center.
What few observers seem to understand is that concentrating power in centralized nodes is intrinsically unstable. Contrast a system in which power, control and wealth is extremely concentrated in a few nodes (the current U.S. Imperial Project) and a decentralized network of numerous dynamic nodes.
The disruption of any of the few centralized nodes quickly destabilizes the entire system because each centralized node is highly dependent on the others. This is in effect what happened in the 2008-09 Financial Meltdown: the Wall Street node failed and that quickly imperiled the entire economy and thus the entire political order, up to and including the Global Imperial Project.
Historian Peter Turchin has proposed that the dynamics of profound political disunity (i.e. social, financial and political disintegration) can be quantified in a Political Stress Index, a concept he describes in his new book Ages of Discord .
If we understand the profound political disunity fracturing the nation and its Imperial Project, we understand the Deep State must also fracture along the same fault lines. There is no other possible output of a system of highly concentrated nodes of power, wealth and control and the competing rentier rackets of these dependent, increasingly fragile centralized nodes.
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Aug 08, 2018 | www.unz.com
In El-Akkad's dystopian vision, the War on Muslims mutates into the War on Southerners -- but has nothing to do with race. Instead, the Yankee Terror State turns its savagery against the New Rebels of the Free Southern States because those good ole boys and girls (of all shades of skin pigmentation and sexual preference) refuse to give up fossil fuels, choosing instead to secede from the Union.
Al-Akkad's vision of blue vs. red global-warming-driven war run amok in a near-future America that has completely forgotten about the whole concept of race is surprisingly plausible, at least while you are reading it. (Civil War I, after all, was really about economics not race , so why shouldn't Civil War II also be over an economic issue?) The plot turns on the adventures of Sarat, a young Red State woman of mixed and meaningless (near-black Chicano and po' white trash) ancestry who awakens politically and goes after the Blue State occupiers in pretty much the same way the Iraqi resistance went after George W. Bush's storm troopers.
... ... ...
C.J. Hopkins offers a deeper, more accurate, vastly funnier, more genuinely subversive vision. His far-future America, which bears an uncanny resemblance to our nightmarish present, features drone-patrolled hyper-surveiled cities, each of which is divided by an Israeli-style Wall complete with Israeli-style checkpoints and incursions featuring Israeli-style killings of hapless untermenschen. But instead of Israelis vs. Palestinians, the divide here is between the Normals on one side of the wall and the Anti-Socials on the other. The Normals -- good corporate citizens who are submitting to pharmaceutical and genetic correction so they can work and consume and conform and live meaningless lives like everybody else without batting an eyelash -- are conditioned to fear and loathe the Antisocials, who retain enough humanity to rebel, in whatever pathetically insignificant way, against corporatist dystopia.
Zone 23 , like American War , imagines the future as post-racial: Hopkins' Normal vs. Antisocial divide isn't about race. But it is, nonetheless, very much about behavioral genetics. In this (not so) far future, the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin has developed a variant-corrected version of the MAO-A gene. Inserted into embryos via germline genetic engineering, this patented DNA produces "clears": people who are intelligent but incurious, incapable of emotionally-driven fight-or-flight aggression (including the most common defensive variety), "easily trained, highly responsive to visual and verbal commands," and so on. In other words, perfect corporate citizens!
The corporatist state naturally strives to perfect itself, imposing a "final solution" to the ASP (anti-social person) problem by mandating that henceforth no non-genetically-engineered babies may be born. The result is a very one-sided "race war" in which a few antisocial malcontents try to hold out against what amounts to a genocide against "uncorrected" humanity. The plot follows two of those ASP antiheroes as they throw rocks at the Israeli bulldozer of corporatist genocide.
Hopkins' ferociously funny yarn is not just a satire on our ever-worsening techno-dystopia. In imagining a genetic basis to the difficulties many of us experience adjusting to hyperconformist "technologically-enhanced" lifestyles, and in portraying individuals struggling and flailing against the uber-civilization around them like flies caught a spider web, Zone 23 resonates with the great critiques of technological civilization .
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Aug 09, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." ― Benjamin Franklin
What a mess.
As America has become ever more polarized, and those polarized factions have become more militant and less inclined to listen to - or even allow for the existence of - other viewpoints, we are fast becoming a nation of people who just can't get along.
Here's the thing: if Americans don't learn how to get along - at the very least, agreeing to disagree and respecting each other's right to subscribe to beliefs and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different - then we're going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).
In such an environment, when we can't agree to disagree, the bullies (on both sides) win and freedom suffers.
Intolerance, once the domain of the politically correct and self-righteous, has been institutionalized, normalized and politicized. Even those who dare to defend speech that may be unpopular or hateful as a constitutional right are now accused of " weaponizing the First Amendment ."
On college campuses across the country, speakers whose views are deemed "offensive" to some of the student body are having their invitations recalled or cancelled, being shouted down by hecklers, or forced to hire costly security details. As The Washington Post concludes, " College students support free speech -- unless it offends them ."
At Hofstra University, half the students in a freshman class boycotted when the professor assigned them to read Flannery O'Connor's short story "Artificial Nigger." As Professor Arthur Dobrin recounts, "The boycotters refused to engage a writer who would use such an offensive word. They hadn't read the story; they wouldn't lower themselves to that level. Here is what they missed: The story's title refers to a lawn jockey, a once common ornament of a black man holding a lantern. The statue symbolizes the suffering of an entire group of people and looking at it bring a moment of insight to a racist old man."
... ... ...
What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that's a whole other ballgame.Just as surveillance has been shown to " stifle and smother dissent, keeping a populace cowed by fear ," government censorship gives rise to self-censorship, breeds compliance, makes independent thought all but impossible, and ultimately foments a seething discontent that has no outlet but violence.
The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world.
When there is no steam valve - when there is no one to hear what the people have to say - frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation. By bottling up dissent, we have created a pressure cooker of stifled misery and discontent that is now bubbling over and fomenting even more hate, distrust and paranoia among portions of the populace.
Silencing unpopular viewpoints with which the majority might disagree -- whether it's by shouting them down, censoring them, muzzling them, or criminalizing them -- only empowers the controllers of the Deep State.
Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned -- discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred -- inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.
It's political correctness disguised as tolerance, civility and love, but what it really amounts to is the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.
We've allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we've allowed ourselves to become so timid in the face of offensive words and ideas that we've bought into the idea that we need the government to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean.
The result is a society in which we've stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.
In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems with each other and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears of each other.
... ... ...
Instead of intelligent discourse, we've been saddled with identity politics, "a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought."
Safe spaces.
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Aug 08, 2018 | www.unz.com
Sic Semper , Next New Comment August 8, 2018 at 1:37 pm GMT
I vividly recall the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. I was nine-years-old and we were not wired for cable then. There also was no remote control for the 27″ Zenith color console. I was forced to watch some of the coverage for those reasons. Sarajevo was held up as a utopian city where Serbs, Croats and Muslims all lived in a beautiful city peacefully.El Dato , Next New Comment August 8, 2018 at 2:04 pm GMTIt was so beautiful said the announcers. And in less than a decade that Olympic stadium was turned into a cemetery as those peaceful Croats, Serbs and Muslims slaughtered each other. Once the Soviet Army withdrew from Yugoslavia and the nation disintegrated back into its ethnic lines, the killings started.
Imagine what is coming in the United States where the simmering hatreds are invited and exploited by not three distinct groups, but hundreds. Image what is to come when "historically aggrieved" peoples who have been weaponized for generations to despise their non-homogenous neighbors.
The erasure of common nationhood and the instilling of grievance as a caste system will see the US descend into chaotic slaughter the likes of which have never been seen before.
When Pakistan separated from India after the British pulled out, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus slaughtered each other, stopping trains filled with refugees being repatriated into their new nations and slaughtering every one of them. Americans have been so denuded of historical understanding that these histories are unknown.
The malevolence of humanity seething just under the surface until the opportunity arises for it to burst forth is forgotten by placated propagandized people. What people in world history have been more propagandized and placated than Americans who have been viewing carefully crafted scripts since their eyes were first able to focus on a tv screen and whose desperately poor are morbidly obese?
Stocking a warehouse to the rafters with volatile materials, packing them in so tightly until they near critical mass, now add in some agitation – and light a match. The most devastating weapon ever devised in not the hydrogen bomb, it is a population bomb. A 100 megaton nuclear weapon destroys cleanly – one flash and a wind storm – it's all over aside from lingering sunshine units. In a thousand years the land will forget what had happened.
A population bomb where the very people have been weaponized will prove far more devastating and remain scarring the land for eons and that common memory lives on in the survivors igniting anew every few decades.
@Sic SemperChris Mallory , Next New Comment August 8, 2018 at 2:31 pm GMTOnce the Soviet Army withdrew from Yugoslavia and the nation disintegrated back into its ethnic lines, the killings started.
That never happened though because the Soviet Army was never in Yugoslavia in the first place. It was Tito who maintained order with an iron fist.
At some point the Western Powers decided the that old Communist Apparachik Milosevic would be the Bad Guy and the Croatian freedom-loving "our bastards" the good guys to be internationally recognized and thus enflamed the passion of secession. The thing just flew apart. And afterwards we had to bomb the country in order to save it.
I vaguely remember a pretty explanation in First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia by David N. Gibbs
@John Burns, Gettysburg Partisanjacques sheete , Next New Comment August 8, 2018 at 2:35 pm GMTSecession was about slavery. The war was started by Lincoln for economic reasons.
@HeisendudeHow can there be a second civil war when the US never had one civil war?!
The so called Am Rev could, in many ways, be considered a "civil" war, and you are correct that the War of Northern Bankers Against Southern Planters was not a "civil war" but essentially another war of conquest and centralization and concentration of wealth in the hands of ever fewer.
In my opinion, as such concentration proceeds, it inevitably corrupts the morals and values (if any), of a polity and to me, it's pretty obvious that it's proceeding as expected and at an ever increasing rate.
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Aug 08, 2018 | www.unz.com
Anon [370] Disclaimer , Next New Comment August 8, 2018 at 6:35 am GMT
The three most likely ways the United States will descend into tyranny, from most likely to least likely are the following:CCZ , Next New Comment August 8, 2018 at 7:04 am GMT1. Continuous immigration makes the country a de facto one party state; the democrats win congress and the presidency and retain it through successive election cycles, all legitimized through the fig leaf of democratic voting.
With electoral checks removed, radical leftists will rescind most American rights such as free speech and association – tacitly, they won't directly say that's what they are doing, rather they will present it with terms like "hate crime" and the like. Say the wrong thing, and you will get fired, your bank will deny you service, and you will be subject to international media scorn. They'll start with traditionally "right wing" freedoms like gun rights, speech, and religious affiliation. But they'll move on to internet anonymity and the secret ballot.
Expect endless media-generated witch trials of dissenters and two minute orgies of hate for white Caucasians, and to a lesser extent, East Asians.
Expect a security state that monitors and records EVERYTHING you do for future use against you should it be necessary – phone calls, internet usage, public travel via CCTV and automobile/cell phone tracking (they already do that) perhaps even what you do in your own home via technologies that can see through walls, record through television and computer cameras and mics, and inquiries to personal AI assistants like Siri. Quantum computer-based AI will additionally be able to track down internet posters through sophisticated mathematical analysis, encryption breaking, and grammar/syntax analysis.
Future development of AI makes brainwashing and propaganda easier than anyone could have previously imagined. This works miracles at controlling the population for a while, but even AI can't erase day-to-day multicultural tensions through personal interactions. People begin disbelieving everything they see and hear from the media. Ironically, this presents propaganda opportunities for foreign governments against the US population.
The country will become increasingly ungovernable. The corrupt oligarchical media, owned and controlled by individuals loyal to the democrat party, lie endlessly on their behalf. The internet is eventually censored using "harassment" and "hate speech" as a pretext. Those who oppose this are labeled supporters of hate – a derivation of the "think of the children" fallacy.
The US tries to counter a rising China militarily but fails. America's military isn't committed; it's just a job in a country no one has any true loyalty to anymore (like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century). There may be a battle over Taiwan that the US navy loses. A multicultural US population has no desire to fight a protracted war with a determined, nationalist and nearly homogeneous China, so the US backs off after a single humiliating sea battle. The event presages a new Chinese century much like US entry into WWI marked a new era or the Russo-Japanese war marked the end of Western military hegemony for the first time since the end of the Middle Ages.
Sensing a sea change, Asian governments like Japan begin rapprochement with China. US alliances falter in Asia.
As SJWs take over Hollywood and churn out leftist agitprop, new centers of culture and entertainment pop up in China. Just as the Russians hoarded Western pop music during the Cold War, many white Americans do the same with Chinese movies and books – their own movies and books being uninteresting propaganda (see the downfall of the US comic book industry for an example of what is to come) – and sometimes even racist anti-white trash.
Diversity (non-white) efforts cripple US industry. Meritorious China becomes even more economically dominant than expected at American expense.
US financial life is punctuated by continual boom/bust cycles as minorities use the government to re-appropriate wealth for themselves at the expense of white Caucasians (see Zimbabwe and South Africa's looming land grab). We saw something like this with the housing crisis of 2008-9: George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy urged banks to lower lending standards for poor minorities; Wall Street got in on the act and, predictably, people with low incomes couldn't pay back what they owed and the system came crashing down as a result. Expect this to be a more frequent staple of future American life.
The US's financial stability is threatened when massively expensive social programs – ineptly thought out and implemented – drive up the federal deficit to record highs; the government raises taxes to cover the losses. This works for a time, but there is only so high taxes can be raised before the economy suffers. A sovereign debt crisis looms. The country becomes ever more socialist.
Racial tensions reach a boiling point as intractable racial disparities in everything remain. Whites begin leaving for Eastern, Western Europe and eventually China and Japan once their populations fall enough for those countries to change their immigration laws. This brain drain crushes the United States.
US standing in the world falls dramatically as Europeans recoil in horror at the prospect of their own people's looming – similar – fate. Democracy is discredited world wide. Elections still happen, but in many places they simply serve as propaganda to legitimize ruling regimes.
The US attempts to solve its problems by picking fights with smaller countries, the logic being that the population will rally around the flag in response, distracting everyone from internal strife. These military adventures will not go well, leading to increasing internal unrest.
The elite will engage in a Cold War with Russia because the Russians are white; the belief among the establishment is that this will distract America's majority minorities from attacking white Americans, the country's single most valuable resource. This leads to a series of dangerous standoffs and, perhaps, even war.
By 2060, the US is much weakened. China has an economy 3-4x larger than the total US economy. China has military bases in most of South America and perhaps even Mexico. China also has a military that dwarfs the US military in technological sophistication, size, and overall determination.
By 2070, the US ends up like the Soviet Union: a powerful external entity (China) foments rebellion among different groups; the country, poor and defeated, splits up. 300 years wasn't a bad run.
2. The democrats take back all branches of government in 2020. By 2028, it is apparent that no Republican can win the White House ever again. One of the Red States secedes. The US military, purged of patriotic white men and filled with immigrant scabs, brutally attacks said Red State; Obama did something very similar when he started filling the military with immigrants. Also, one poll after Charlottesvile indicated that the vast majority of the military would favor using the national guard to shut down those protestors, so they definitely aren't on our side (your feelings about the protestors and their views are irrelevant, but the sentiment expressed by the military in regards to the expression of constitutionally-protected public beliefs is astonishing); don't be surprised when the military does whatever the democrats demand in the future, including shooting protestors or putting down rebellions with force.
This is not a civil war because you don't have a situation where groups fight over control of the government. This is a massacre perpetrated by the left and it's been building for years now – from "punch a Nazi" and encouraging violence against Sarah Huckabee to antifa terrorist attacks on protestors and doxxing dissenters.
Future historians (Chinese and Indian) will wonder why Red States didn't break off sooner when they had the chance. They will point out that a frog put in a pot won't leap out if the temperature is raised slowly. They will use this to remind themselves that democracy is ultimately a fool's errand.
3. Some patriotic element of the Deep State concocts a plan for Trump to remain president permanently. The 2020 election is called off. The democrat party is banned and voting is limited to republicans. The government works to reverse the country's looming demographic disaster.
Peter Turchin, author of "Ages of Discord: A Structural Demographic Analysis of American History" (2016) has examined the "demographic, social, and political trends that changed direction from favorable to unfavorable in America around the 1970s" and has concluded that "in the United States social instability and political violence would peak in the 2020s."jacques sheete , Next New Comment August 8, 2018 at 1:06 pm GMTHe agrees that high levels of immigration and economic inequality breed "popular immiseration (the stagnation and decline of living standards and the declining fiscal health of the state )" and that in periods when economic inequality is high ("disintegrative phases") socio-economic well being and political cooperation plummet. Most importantly, he cites "the key role of "elite overproduction" in "driving waves of political violence, both in historical societies and in our own." [United States]
"Increasing inequality leads not only to the growth of top fortunes; it also results in greater numbers of wealth-holders. Rich Americans tend to be more politically active than the rest of the population. In technical terms, such a situation is known as 'elite overproduction'. Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions."
"The victory of Donald Trump changes nothing in this equation. The 'social pump' creating new aspirants for political offices continues to operate at full strength. In addition to politically ambitious multi-millionaires, the second important source of such aspirants is U.S. law schools, which every year churn twice as many law graduates as there are job openings for them, about 25,000 "surplus" lawyers, many of whom are in debt. It is emblematic that the 2016 election pitted a billionaire against a lawyer."
@AnonThe three most likely ways the United States will descend into tyranny, from most likely to least likely are the following:
Will descend?
Done deal. What do you think the constitution was all about?
The Constitution looked fairly good on paper, but it was not a popular document; people were suspicious of it, and suspicious of the enabling legislation that was being erected upon it. There was some ground for this. The Constitution had been laid down under unacceptable auspices; its history had been that of a coup d'état.
It had been drafted, in the first place, by men representing special economic interests. Four-fifths of them were public creditors, one-third were land speculators, and one-fifth represented interests in shipping, manufacturing, and merchandising. Most of them were lawyers. Not one of them represented the interest of production -- Vilescit origine tali. (the dice were loaded from the start)
Albert Jay Nock, Liberty vs. the Constitution: The Early Struggle
mises.org/daily/4254
Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner.
-Lysander Spooner, No Treason: No. VI, The Constitution of No Authority, p1. (1870)
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Feb 09, 2017 | fivethirtyeight.com
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Political and legal observers generally divide constitutional crises into four categories:
1. The Constitution doesn't say what to do.The U.S. Constitution is brief and vague. (Compare it to a state constitution sometime.) This vagueness has one major advantage: It makes an 18th-century document flexible enough to effectively serve a 21st-century society. But sometimes the Constitution leaves us without sorely needed instructions, such as when William Henry Harrison became the first president to die in office in 1841. At the time, it wasn't clear whether the vice president should fully assume the office or just safeguard the role until a new president could somehow be chosen. (It wasn't until 1967 that the 25th amendment officially settled the question.)
When Vice President John Tyler took over, no one was sure if he was the real president or merely the acting president, nor was anyone certain what should happen next. Tyler asserted that he was, in fact, the new president, and since then, vice presidents who have had to step into service as chief executive have been treated as fully legitimate, but early confusion took its toll on the perceived legitimacy of Tyler's presidency.
In this way, informal precedents and practices have filled in many of the gaps in the Constitution's text over time. Constitutional amendments have also clarified issues such as succession rules and term limits.
So what could cause this kind of constitutional crisis during Trump's presidency? One area where the Constitution has never been clarified -- much to the chagrin of advocates for a limited presidency -- is the question of emergency powers . The Constitution is completely silent on what powers the president has to respond to crises, although some scholars argue that protecting the nation in a state of emergency is an inherent power of the chief executive. Plenty of presidents have interpreted it this way -- Abraham Lincoln did when he suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, for example, as did Harry Truman when he tried to seize the steel mills during the Korean War. 1
It's worth noting that both of these claims were rejected by the Supreme Court, but Lincoln didn't comply , leaving it up to Congress to rein him in. That might have been a constitutional crisis in its own right, but there was already another one going on (the Civil War).
Trump, for his part, has talked a lot about terrorist attacks, even suggesting that the media might be covering them up . Given presidents' history of using crises and threats to shore up their emergency powers, it's easy to imagine that in the wake of a terrorist attack or war, Trump might enact policies that would lead Congress or the courts to challenge whether he had the authority to take those actions. That would be a constitutional crisis.
2. The Constitution's meaning is in question.Sometimes the Constitution's attempt to address an issue is phrased in a way that could allow multiple interpretations, leaving experts disagreeing about what it means and making it difficult or impossible to address a pressing problem. In this way, both the Great Depression and the Civil War created constitutional crises. The problem sparked by the Civil War is obvious: The fight rested on a bunch of unsettled constitutional questions , the biggest of which was about slavery and the federal government's ability to control it, a subject on which the Constitution was silent. And while the Constitution provided information on how a state could join the union, it didn't say whether one could leave it or how it would go about doing so. It obviously took a war to resolve this crisis.
When it comes to the Great Depression, the issue is harder to see. By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, there were calls for the president to declare martial law to more forcefully address the economic situation because, well, people were starving and homeless. Contemporary interpretations of the Constitution offered very limited views about how the federal government could intervene in the economy, limits FDR wasn't inclined to heed. Indeed, the Supreme Court overturned many of the New Deal's main provisions . In 1937, Roosevelt threatened to change the makeup of the court, asking Congress to add seats (which is within their power) so that he could pack the court with new appointees who were more likely to vote his way. (The Constitution is notably silent on the proper number of seats on the court -- a fact Merrick Garland surely knows by now.) Roosevelt argued that the people had elected him twice and had installed a Democratic Congress, thus endorsing his new vision for economic regulation. Even though the court-packing plan did not violate any specific provision of the Constitution, many felt Roosevelt was abusing the Constitution's vagueness to claim near-dictatorial powers, creating a crisis . Ultimately, several sitting justices chose to side with FDR's economic plans, and the president backed off on his court-packing proposal.
Presidential politics frequently spur constitutional conflict when Congress feels the executive branch has claimed too much power. Congress censured Andrew Jackson for taking aggressive steps to destroy the Second Bank of the United States instead of waiting for its charter to expire. Clashes over war powers are common enough that Congress, overriding Richard Nixon's veto, enacted the War Powers Resolution in 1973 in an effort to lay out a procedure for the president to notify Congress when American troops are sent into a conflict. But these clashes rarely rise to the level of a constitutional crisis, even though experts consistently warn about increasing, unchecked executive power.
Trump has only been in office for three weeks, so it's hard to say how this type of constitutional crisis might come up during his presidency. So far, Trump has relied heavily on executive orders and hasn't revealed much in the way of a legislative agenda. The main controversies of his administration thus far have been over the substance of his actions, and the immigration order was blocked mainly on the grounds that it violated the constitutional rights of individuals, not that it represented executive overreach. But if Trump goes too far in issuing executive orders that affect domestic politics, or if he takes heavy-handed action with the states, the overreach question could come up.
Another possible crisis that would fall into this category: impeachment. It doesn't come up all that often, but one source of constitutional confusion is the impeachment clause in Article II, Section 4 , which states, "The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." What are "high crimes and misdemeanors?" The nation debated this during the Clinton impeachment but didn't really get any closer to a definition. Since there's little agreement about the conditions under which a president can be removed from office, we might be in for a constitutional crisis if the House attempts to initiate the impeachment process. Then again, maybe not. The criteria are murky, but the process for removal is clear: If the House drafts articles of impeachment and the Senate votes to convict, the president is out. If he refuses to leave, however, that would certainly spark a constitutional crisis.
3. The Constitution tells us what to do, but it's not politically feasible.This category of constitutional crisis can crop up when presidential elections produce contested and confusing results. In the 2000 presidential election, when George W. Bush and Al Gore were separated by just a few hundred votes in Florida, the tipping-point state whose electoral votes would determine the winner, the state's election results remained contested for weeks due to a number of irregularities and a secretary of state who seemed determined to cut a recount short.
In theory, the Constitution allowed for various solutions to this problem: Congress could have decided which of Florida's electors to recognize, or Congress could have determined that neither candidate had achieved a majority in the Electoral College and let the House of Representatives decide on a president (per the process spelled out in the 12th Amendment ). Such outcomes, while certainly constitutional, would have been politically infeasible, creating a significant legitimacy crisis for the new president.
The last time the House of Representatives chose a president was in 1824 , and this decision was widely decried as corrupt and created a massive backlash against John Quincy Adams' administration. In 2000, the Supreme Court stepped in instead, cutting the recount short . The court's decision ended the dispute in Bush's favor, and Gore gave a televised statement announcing that while he disagreed with the decision, he would accept it.
In this case, the court arguably created a constitutional crisis by stepping in where it wasn't technically needed, but Gore's acceptance of the decision defused the situation. Had Gore refused to abide by the decision, the crisis could have become far more serious.
In a somewhat similar case, the results of the 1876 election were hotly disputed when Democrat Samuel Tilden won a majority of the popular vote but enough state delegations remained in dispute to deny him a majority of the Electoral College. Congress appointed a 15-member special commission to address the growing crisis. Members came up with a compromise under which Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes would become the president, but Union soldiers would be withdrawn from Southern states, effectively ending the post-Civil War Reconstruction period . This election remains possibly the most disputed presidential contest to date.
It's fair to ask whether these sorts of crises are even constitutional in nature -- just because we don't want to follow the Constitution doesn't mean there's a constitutional crisis. But if following the Constitution is impractical, that is itself a form of crisis. Presumably, we won't encounter an election-related constitutional crisis of this type until 2020.
However, other scenarios might create a similar dilemma. There has been a lot of talk about the 25th amendment , which allows other governing officials to remove the president and put the vice president in charge. Like most of the Constitution, there's some room for interpretation, but this kind of removal is definitely established in the text. It's possible to imagine a situation in which the Cabinet decides this is the best course of action but faces hurdles in selling it to the millions of voters who chose Trump in November, sparking a crisis.
Related: Politics Podcast Politics Podcast: Trump vs. The Judge -- Vol. II 4. Institutions themselves fail.The Constitution's system of checks and balances sets the various branches against each other for the laudable purpose of constraining tyranny. However, due to partisan polarization, individual corruption, or any number of other reasons, sometimes the political institutions in these arrangements fail, sending the governmental system into a crisis. This was the type of constitutional crisis commentators were seemingly referring to in describing reports that Customs and Border Protection agents (members of the executive branch) weren't following orders from the judicial branch.
In theory, clashes between different parts of government could regularly produce constitutional crises, but in reality, they often don't. Had Nixon ignored the Supreme Court ruling ordering him to turn over tapes of conversations he had recorded in the Oval Office, that would have been a huge crisis of this genre. But he didn't.
Government shutdowns are a milder example. During the brief shutdowns in the Clinton and Barack Obama years, some government functions remained in place, and in both cases, agreements were eventually reached. But these situations illustrate how the Constitution doesn't always provide safeguards or guidelines for making a decision when governing bodies reach a stalemate. The provisions of the Constitution set up political incentives for elected leaders to ensure that the government runs. When these don't work, there's not much recourse.
True constitutional crises are rare. The Constitution is set up so that power is shared between the president, Congress and the courts, and between the federal government and the states. This cuts down on vacuums where no one has clear authority, instead creating situations where multiple people or institutions are empowered to act. Serious constitutional crises occur when our institutions are rendered ineffective, which is usually about politics more than process, and often has less to do with how institutions were designed than with how legitimate they are perceived to be.
The last type of constitutional crisis -- when different parts or branches of government are at loggerheads -- might be the one we are most likely to see during Trump's administration. If Trump continues to strain democratic norms and push political boundaries, Congress, the courts or even members of his own administration could push back. Those conflicts could be resolved deliberately and thoughtfully, with an eye toward what the founders would do. Or not. Footnotes
Julia Azari is an associate professor of political science at Marquette University. Her research interests include the American presidency, political parties, and political rhetoric. She is the author of "Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate." @julia_azari Seth Masket is a professor of political science and director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, specializing in political parties, state legislatures and campaigns and elections. He is the author of "The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How they Weaken Democracy."
- It's worth noting that both of these claims were rejected by the Supreme Court, but Lincoln didn't comply , leaving it up to Congress to rein him in. That might have been a constitutional crisis in its own right, but there was already another one going on (the Civil War).
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Jul 29, 2018 | www.thegatewaypundit.com
It's Official: The US is in a Constitutional Crisis – Only President Trump Can Save the Nation Now! The US is now in a constitutional crisis. Yesterday Attorney General Sessions announced that he was refusing to set up a special investigation into FBI and DOJ wrongdoing even though the evidence of corruption, illegalities and cover ups of Obama and Clinton scandals is rampant. A year ago Sessions had no problem with the creation of an unconstitutional investigation into President Trump when no crimes were committed.Mueller's illegal Trump-Russia investigation moves on while investigations into obvious corruption and criminal activities in Obama's FBI, DOJ and State Department are ignored. We asked in October what does the deep state have on AG Sessions causing him to ignore the constitution and his duty to serve the American people? It's now clear that Sessions must go and a new team be brought in to clean up the FBI, DOJ and other deep state led government departments.
How did we get here?During the 2016 election one of the biggest chants at Trump rallies was – Drain the swamp!
Americans were tired of the corruption and criminal acts perpetrated by the government under the Obama administration but no one guessed how corrupt it really was. The sinister Obama administration had the audacity to spy on the Trump campaign using the entire apparatus of the US government and then framed the incoming President once he won.
AG Sessions allowed a special investigation into the new President while allowing rogue actors from the Obama Administration to lead the investigation.
Former FBI Director and Dirty Cop Robert Mueller was selected to lead the investigation. Mueller had a history of allowing Clinton and Obama related scandals to dissolve. Emailgate, Fast and Furious, the Clinton Foundation, Clinton emails, Uranium One, and the IRS scandal all fizzled with no wrong doing identified over Mueller's years with the FBI. Mueller also was best friends with disgraced and fired leaker former FBI Director James Comey. Mueller should have never taken the job to lead the investigation due to his numerous conflicts of interest.
We know that the FBI had an investigation into the Clintons and money they received from Russia in return for giving Russia 20% of all US uranium. Prior to the Obama administration approving the very controversial Uranium One deal in 2010, the FBI had evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were involved in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering in order to benefit Vladimir Putin. The FBI approved the deal anyway. We also know that Rosenstein and Mueller were the ones who allowed the Uranium One deal to go forward. This was the real Russia collusion story involving the US government.
Mueller brought in a team of Obama and Clinton lackeys to form his investigative team who had no intention of performing an independent and objective investigation. The entire team is corrupt lefties who have represented the Clinton Foundation or let Hillary go in her obvious crimes related to her email scandal. This included the texting FBI scoundrels Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Some suspect that their efforts are as much to cover past wrong doings as to frame the current President for unethical acts.
We know that Mueller's team illegally obtained emails related to the Trump transition team as reported in December and these emails were protected under attorney-client privilege. Mueller and his entire team should have resigned after this but the investigation moves on.
Unconstitutionality of the Mueller InvestigationNot only is the Mueller investigation corrupt, it is unconstitutional. We learned in January that Paul Manafort was suing Mueller, Rosenstein and Sessions as Head of the DOJ due to the Mueller investigation being unconstitutional.
Gregg Jarrett at FOX News wrote when initially Mueller brought charges against Manafort that Mueller is tasked with finding a crime that does not exist in the law. It is a legal impossibility. He is being asked to do something that is manifestly unattainable. In addition Jarrett stated-
As I pointed out in a column last May, the law (28 CFR 600) grants legal authority to appoint a special counsel to investigate crimes. Only crimes. He has limited jurisdiction. Yet, in his order appointing Mueller as special counsel (Order No. 3915-2017), Rosenstein directed him to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump." It fails to identify any specific crimes, likely because none are applicable.
Manafort sued the DOJ, Mueller and Rosenstein because what they are doing is not supported by US Law as noted previously by Jarrett. Manafort's case argues in paragraph 33 that the special counsel put in place by crooked Rosenstein gave crooked and criminal Mueller powers that are not permitted by law –
But paragraph (b)(ii) of the Appointment Order purports to grant Mr. Mueller further authority to investigate and prosecute " any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation." That grant of authority is not authorized by DOJ's special counsel regulations. It is not a "specific factual statement of the matter to be investigated." Nor is it an ancillary power to address efforts to impede or obstruct investigation under 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).
In addition to Jarrett and Manafort's arguments above, Robert Barnes wrote this past week at Law and Crimes that –
Paul Manafort's legal team brought a motion to dismiss on Tuesday, noting that Rosenstein could not appoint Mueller to any investigation outside the scope of the 2016 campaign since Sessions did not recuse himself for anything outside the campaign. I agree with this take on Mueller's authority. If we follow that argument that would mean Sessions himself has exclusive authority to appoint a special counsel for non-collusion charges, and Sessions has taken no such action. Sessions himself should make that clear to Mueller, rather than await court resolution. Doing so would remove three of the four areas of inquiry from Mueller's requested interview with President Trump.
Sessions formally notifying Mueller that he does not have authority to act outside of campaign-related cases and cases related to obstruction of Mueller's investigation would be doing what the Constitution compels: enforcing the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. Additionally, Sessions notifying Mueller that he does not have authority to act outside of campaign-related cases would be exercising Sessions' court-recognized Constitutional obligation to "direct and supervise litigation" conducted by the Department of Justice. Furthermore, Sessions notifying Mueller that he does not have authority to act outside of campaign-related cases protects against the inappropriate use of the federal grand jury that defendant Manafort now rightly complains about.
Sessions limiting Mueller to the 2016 campaign would also be restoring confidence in democratic institutions, and restore public faith that democratically elected officials.
One thing to remember about Sessions' recusal : Sessions only recused himself from "any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States." This recusal letter limits the scope of Sessions' recusal to the 2016 campaigns; it does not authorize Sessions' recusal for anything beyond that. Constitutionally, Sessions has a " duty to direct and supervise litigation" conducted by the Department of Justice. Ethically, professionally, and legally, Sessions cannot ignore his supervisory obligations for cases that are not related to the "campaigns for President."
Not only is the Mueller investigation run by former FBI and DOJ criminals and bad cops but it is unconstitutional in the way it was created and in the way it is currently being managed outside the scope of Sessions' recusal while incorporating Sessions duties as AG.
The only solutionThere's a lot of speculation from some Americans and Trump supporters who believe that AG Sessions is behind the scenes working on cleaning the swamp, but this is all speculation. Little if any evidence supports these hopes.
We must look at the facts. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. Rosenstein was somehow recommended and hired as Assistant AG. With a background of multiple conflicts of interest related to Uranium One and having signed off on at least one FISA warrant to spy on candidate and future President Trump, Rosenstein never should have been appointed. In spite of his conflicts, Rosenstein hired Mueller to investigate President Trump and continues in his oversight role. Sessions', Rosenstein's and Mueller's actions are unethical, illegal and unconstitutional.
We are currently in a constitutional crisis. AG Sessions will not uphold the law. He must be replaced with an aggressive, competent and fair AG who will uphold the constitution. This is something we haven't had in at least a decade.
Only President Trump can save America. Only President Trump can replace AG Sessions and now it's time.
jacobum Lee Lilly • 4 months ago ,
LEEPERMAX Susieq • 4 months ago ,You're right. But the reality is being right doesn't do squat for Sessions very little credibility. For good reason...his actions merit distrusting him. It's the height of arrogance and simply smells to high heaven that a "Man of the highest integrity"...would knowingly allow himself to be confirmed one day and recuse himself the next day......without first telling his boss the POTUS.
That excuse dog is not going to hunt no matter how long or whomever blows that dog whistle. It's an insult to not only the intelligence of folks but their common sense as well.
Bluntly, he is a disaster for the country and POTUS. The problem is NO THINKING ADULT TRUST SESSIONS ANY FARTHER THAN THEY CAN THROW HIM! What he did disqualifies him for the position he took under false pretenses. That is is Deception...not...Integrity. PERIOD!We are in a war. Nice guys don't win wars. They clean up afterwards. He acts like Mr Magoo and not the nations Chief Law Enforcement Officer. We are in a war and the equivalent of the Military Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Law Enforcement has gone missing.
Sessions is the classical..."Fool me once..your fault; Fool me twice, my fault"
My deadline for him is June 20, 2018 at the maximum. Nothing significant by then....it will be a confirmation he is part of the problem....and always has been....a plant of the "Deep State"Alti LEEPERMAX • 4 months ago ,"Bush Family Plant"
#FireSessions now.Lee Lilly jacobum • 4 months ago ,Tom Fitton: "When you read the letter its pretty clear Huber isn't charged with prosecuting anyone. Sessions is not going to appoint a special counsel to investigate anything having to do with the Obama FBI or Hillary Clinton. I don't think [Huber] has empaneled a grand jury or is doing a prosecution, he's just looking at the record and may suggest additional resources. Nothing is going to be done. There is no public indication of any serious investigation by the DOJ."
Sir_Tanly jacobum • 4 months ago ,Had I not come across the following, I would absolutely agree with you. But below is what is really occurring behind the scenes. They ARE fighting the Deep State which has existed for decades, but rest assured POTUS and his team of patriots are on it. If you take the time to really go through it, you can almost predict what POTUS will do next.
It seems unbelievable at first but it checks out as the story unfolds and Q predicts things before they happen... Also, Trump has signalled the truth of it; do you think he said "tip top tippety top" just for the heck of it at Easter speech? (He was asked by an anon to use this in something to verify validity of Q.) It won't make sense unless you start at the beginning in Oct and read posts from there. (And disregard MSM reports that Q is false; if he was, why even bother trying to discredit?)
Think about it - is it like POTUS to keep someone so "obviously inept" around as Sessions? Does that really sound like POTUS? Trump and team have handled this beautifully...they even have conservatives screaming for Sessions' head. He is neither uninvolved nor clueless as is being portrayed. It's the Art of the Deal. Many are going down and POTUS and Q team are bringing us to it live through the posts.
I promise you, this will open your eyes to the long game that POTUS and Sessions are playing out. Check it out - it will be the best read of your life. So many things that never made sense, so many lies, massive corruption...be prepared.
Once you've gone through Q, you will truly know that POTUS meant every single word, literally, in this short link.
Every. Single. Word. ~ Enjoy, my friend
Play HideAlti Guest • 4 months ago ,Don knew of the recusal before the nomination. Betcha.
robert v g Alti • 4 months ago ,After diligent study, I have come to the conclusion that this letter is a deceptively worded masterpiece (if you like being deceived).
John Jensen Lee Lilly • 4 months ago ,I have a hunch you're right. Isn't Sessions just a long- time swamp politician/lawyer?
Molon labe Lotsa Snuggs • 4 months ago ,Biggest problem after watching the video of Lou Dobbs tonight is that Rod Rosenstein is still acting in an oversite position. He will never let anyone be convicted of any crime because he is a sitting member of almost every crime that was committed. I don't think Sessions is that smart in the first place, I believe that Rosenstein is running the show and that is all it is a Dog and Pony show for the masses. All of them should be fired
Au contraire-All you Sessions sycophants are the ones who'll have an uncomfortably full stomach! That man's public actions are NOT those of a sly old law and order prosecutor maintaining "radio silence" while tirelessly working behind the scenes! They're the actions of a compromised Attorney General who is NOT performing his Constitutional duties and is actively covering for known lawbreakers and Obstructing Justice--NOT demanding it!!
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Mar 17, 2018 | www.theatlantic.com
A quick search on Google Trends shows that public interest in constitutional crises has scaled up impressively in the time since Trump's election, with spikes in interest appearing at particularly fraught moments: the first travel ban, James Comey's firing, and several points at which Trump appeared to be on the brink of dismissing Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Now, with the firing of McCabe, the specter of constitutional crisis has reappeared.
The term "constitutional crisis" gets thrown around a lot, but it actually has no fixed meaning. It's not a legal term of art, though lawyers and law professors -- as well as political scientists and journalists -- sometimes use it as though it were. Saying that something is a constitutional crisis is a little like saying that someone is going through a "nervous breakdown" -- a term that does not map neatly onto any specific clinical condition, but is evocative of a certain constellation of mental-health emergencies. It's hard to define a constitutional crisis, but you know one when you see it. Or do you?
There have been various attempts to define the term over the years. Writing in the wake of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and the turmoil of the 2000 election, the political scientist Keith Whittington noted the speed with which commentators had rushed to declare the country on the brink of a constitutional crisis -- even though, as he pointed out, " the republic appears to have survived these events relatively unscathed ."
Whittington instead proposed thinking about constitutional crises as "circumstances in which the constitutional order itself is failing." In his view, such a crisis could take two forms. There are "operational crises," in which constitutional rules don't tell us how to resolve a political dispute; and there are "crises of fidelity," in which the rules do tell us what to do but aren't being followed. The latter is probably closest to the common understanding of constitutional crisis -- something along the lines of President Andrew Jackson's famous (if apocryphal) rejoinder to the Supreme Court, "[Justice] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." Or, to point to an example proposed recently by Whittington himself , such a crisis would result if congressional Republicans failed to hold Trump accountable for firing Mueller.
The constitutional scholars Sanford Levinson and Jack Balkin more or less agree with Whittington's typology, but add a third category of crisis : situations in which the Constitution fails to constrain political disputes within the realm of normalcy. In these cases, each party involved argues that they are acting constitutionally, while their opponent is not. If examples of the crises described by Whittington are relatively far and few between -- if they exist at all -- Levinson and Balkin view crises of interpretation as comparatively common. One notable example: the battle over secession that began the Civil War.
These three categorizations help show what a constitutional crisis could look like, but it's not entirely clear how they apply to the situation at hand. Whittington, Levinson and Balkin all agree that the notion of a constitutional crisis implies some acute episode -- a clear tipping point that tests the legal and constitutional order. But how do we know this presidency isn't just an example of the voters picking a terrible leader who then leads terribly? At what point does a bad president doing bad things become a problem of constitutional magnitude, let alone a crisis of constitutional magnitude? Indeed, it's hard to see a crisis when the sun is still rising every day on schedule, when nobody appears to be defying court orders or challenging the authority of the country's rule-of-law institutions, and when a regularly scheduled midterm election -- in which the president's party is widely expected to perform badly -- is scheduled for a few months from now. What exactly is the crisis here?
Another problem with thinking about America's current woes as a constitutional crisis involves the question of what comes next. That is, assume for a moment we are in some kind of constitutional crisis. So what? What exactly flows from that conclusion? Normally, constitutional conclusions imply certain prescribed outcomes. When a president is impeached, for example, the Senate must hold a trial to determine whether he or she should be removed from office. When serving a second term, a president is not allowed to run for a third term. But if one concludes that we are going through a constitutional crisis, what happens next? The label doesn't carry any obvious implication, let alone an action item. If it has value, its value is descriptive. It carries cultural and emotional weight but not much else.
Still another problem with the term is that the duration of the crisis is not clear. Does a constitutional crisis take place over days, weeks, or longer? Must it threaten in the immediate term to blow things up if it doesn't blow over or get resolved through some other process? (Think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, only in domestic constitutional terms.) Or can a constitutional crisis also take place in slow motion?
There's a better term for what is taking place in America at this moment: "constitutional rot."
Constitutional rot is what happens, the constitutional scholar John Finn argues, when faith in the key commitments of the Constitution gradually erode, even when the legal structures remain in place. Constitutional rot is what happens when decision-makers abide by the empty text of the Constitution without fidelity to its underlying principles. It's also what happens when all this takes place and the public either doesn't realize -- or doesn't care.
Quinta Jurecic is the managing editor of Lawfare.Benjamin Wittes is the editor in chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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Jul 29, 2018 | www.unz.com
Oh sure, there were a number of general statements made about "positive discussions" and the like, and some vague references to various conflicts, but the truth is that nothing real and tangible was agreed upon. Furthermore, and this is, I believe, absolutely crucial, there never was any chance of this summit achieving anything. Why? Because the Russians have concluded a long time ago that the US officials are " non-agreement capable " (недоговороспособны). They are correct – the US has been non-agreement capable at least since Obama and Trump has only made things even worse: not only has the US now reneged on Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (illegally – since this plan was endorsed by the UNSC ), but Trump has even pathetically backtracked on the most important statement he made during the summit when he retroactively changed his " President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be " into " I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia " (so much for 5D chess!).
If Trump can't even stick to his own words, how could anybody expect the Russians to take anything he says seriously?! Besides, ever since the many western verbal promises of not moving NATO east " by one inch eastward " the Russians know that western promises, assurances, and other guarantees are worthless, whether promised in a conversation or inked on paper. In truth, the Russians have been very blunt about their disgust with not only the western dishonesty but even about the basic lack of professionalism of their western counterparts, hence the comment by Putin about " it is difficult to have a dialogue with people who confuse Austria and Australia ".
It is quite obvious that the Russians agreed to the summit while knowing full well that nothing would, or even could, come out of it. This is why they were already dumping US Treasuries even before meeting with Trump (a clear sign of how the Kremlin really feels about Trump and the US).
So why did they agree to the meeting? Because they correctly evaluated the consequences of this meeting. This is the proverbial case where the real " action is in the reaction " and, in this case, the reaction of the Neocon run US deep-state and its propaganda machine (the US corporate media) was nothing short of total and abject hysterics. I could list an immense number of quotes, statements and declarations accusing Trump of being a wimp, a traitor, a sellout, a Putin agent and all the rest. But I found the most powerful illustration of that hate-filled hysteria in a collection of cartoons from the western corporate media posted by Colonel Cassad on this page:
What we see today is a hate campaign against both Trump and Russia the likes of which I think the world has never seen before: even in the early 20th century, including the pre-WWII years when there was plenty of hate thrown around, there never was such a unanimity of hatred as what we see today. Furthermore, what is attacked is not just "Trump the man" or "Trump the politician" but very much so "Trump the President". Please compare the following two examples:
The US wars after 9/11: many people had major reservations about the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq and the entire GWOT thing. But most Americans seemed to agree with the "we support our troops" slogan. The logic was something along the lines of "we don't like these wars, but we do support our fighting men and women and the military institution as such". Thus, while a specific policy was criticized, this criticism was never applied to the institution which implement it: the US armed forces. Trump after Helsinki: keep in mind that Trump made no agreement of any kind with Putin, none. And yet that policy of not making any agreements with Putin was hysterically lambasted as a sellout. This begs the question: what kind of policy would meet with the approval of the US deep state? Trump punching Putin in the nose maybe? This is utterly ridiculous, yet unlike in the case of the GWOT wars, there is no differentiation made whatsoever between Trump's policy towards Putin and Trump as the President of the United States. There is even talk of impeachment, treason and "high crimes & misdemeanors" or of the "KGB" (dissolved 27 years ago but nevermind that) having a hand in the election of the US President.What Trump is facing today is not a barrage of criticism but a very real lynch mob! And what is really frightening is that almost nobody dares to denounce that hysterical lynch mob for what it is. There are a few exceptions, of course, even in the media (I think of Tucker Carlson), but these voices are completely drowned out by the hate-filled shrieks of the vast majority of US politicians and journalists. Even such supposed supporters of President Trump like Trey Gowdy who has fully thrown his weight behind the "Russia tried to attack us" nonsense . With friends like these...
What has been taking place after this the summit is an Orwellian "two minutes of hatred" but now stretched well into a two weeks of hatred. And I see no signs that this lynch mob is calming down. In fact, as of this morning, the levels of hysteria are only increasing .
By the way, these are typical Neocon-style tactics: double-down, then double-down again, then issue statements which make it impossible for you to back down, then repeat it all as many times as needed. This strategy is useless against a powerful and principled enemy, but it works miracles with a weak and spineless foe like Trump. This is particularly true of US politicians and journalists who have long become the accomplices of the deep state (especially after the 9/11 false flag and its cover-up) and who now cannot back down under any circumstances or treat President Trump as a normal, regular, President. The anti-Trump rhetoric has gone way too far and the US has now reached what I believe is a point of no return.
The brewing constitutional crisis: the Neocons vs the "deplorables"
I believe that the US is facing what could be the worst crisis in its history: the lawfully elected President is being openly delegitimized and that, in turn, delegitimizes the electoral process which brought him to power and, of course, it also excoriates the "deplorables" who dared vote for him: the majority of the American people.
The process which is taking place before our eyes splits the people of the US into two main categories: first, the Neocons and those whom the US media has successfully brainwashed and, second, everybody else. That second group, by the way, is very diverse and it includes not only bona fide Trump supporters (many of whom have also been zombified in their own way), but also paleo-conservatives, libertarians, antiwar activists, (real) progressives and many other groups.
I am also guessing that a lot of folks in the military are watching in horror as their armed forces and their country are being wrecked by the Neocons and their supporters. Basically, those who felt "I want my country back" and who hoped that Trump would make that happen are now horrified by what is taking place.
I believe that what we are seeing is a massive and deliberate attack by the Neocons and their deep state against the political system and the people of the United States. Congress, especially, is now guilty of engaging on a de-facto coup against the Executive on so many levels that they are hard to count (and many of them are probably hidden from the public eye) including repeated attempts to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional powers such as, for example, deciding on foreign policy issues. A perfect example of this can be found in Nancy Pelosi's official statement about a possible invitation from Trump to Putin:
"The notion that President Trump would invite a tyrant to Washington is beyond belief. Putin's ongoing attacks on our elections and on Western democracies and his illegal actions in Crimea and the rest of Ukraine deserve the fierce, unanimous condemnation of the international community, not a VIP ticket to our nation's capital. President Trump's frightened fawning over Putin is an embarrassment and a grave threat to our democracy. An invitation to address a Joint Meeting of Congress should be bipartisan and Speaker Ryan must immediately make clear that there is not – and never will be – an invitation for a thug like Putin to address the United States Congress."
Another example of the same can be found in the unanimous 98-0 resolution by the US Senate expressing Congress's opposition to the US government allowing Russia to question US officials. Trump, of course, immediately caved in, even though he had originally declared "fantastic" the idea of actually abiding by the terms of an existing 1999 agreement on mutual assistance on criminal cases between the United States of America and Russia. The White House "spokesperson", Sarah Sanders, did even better and stated : (emphasis added)
"It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it. Hopefully, President Putin will have the 12 identified Russians come to the United States to prove their innocence or guilt "
Talk about imperial megalomania! The US will not allow the Russians to interrogate anybody, but it wants Putin to extradite Russian citizens. Amazing
As for Nancy Pelosi, her latest "tweet" today is anything but subtle. It reads:
Every single day, I find myself asking: what do the Russians have on @realDonaldTrump personally, financially, & politically? The answer to that question is that only thing that explains his behavior & his refusal to stand up to Putin. #ABetterDeal.
Pretty clear, no? "Trump is a traitor and we have to stop him".
By now there is overwhelming evidence that a creeping Neocon coup has been in progress from the very first day of Trump's presidency and that the Neocons are far from being satisfied with having broken Trump and taken over the de-facto power in the White House: they now apparently also want it de-jure too. The real question is this: are there any forces inside the US capable of stopping the Neocons from completely taking all the reins of power and, if yes, how could a patriotic reaction to this Neocon coup manifest itself? I honestly don't know, but my feeling is that we might soon have a "President Pence" in the Oval Office. One way or another, a constitutional crisis is brewing.
What about the Russian interests in all this?
I have said it many times, Russia and the AngloZionist Empire (as opposed to the United States as a country) are at war, a war which is roughly 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% "kinetic". This is a very real war nonetheless and it is a war for survival simply because the Empire cannot allow any major country on the planet to be truly sovereign. Therefore, not only does the AngloZionist Empire represent an existential threat to Russia, Russia also represents an existential threat to the Empire. In this kind of conflict for survival there is no room for anything but a zero-sum game and whatever is good for Russia is bad for the US and vice-versa.
The Russians, including Putin, never wanted this zero-sum game, it was imposed upon them by the AngloZionists, but now that they have been forced into it, they will play it as hard as they can. It is therefore only logical to conclude that the massive systemic crises in which the Neocons and their crazy policies have plunged the US are to the advantage of Russia.
To be sure, the ideal scenario would be for Russia and the US (as opposed to the AngloZionst Empire) to work together on the very long list of issues where they share common interests. But since the Neocons have seized power and are sacrificing the US for the sake of their imperial designs, that is simply not going to happen, and the Russians understand that. Furthermore, since the US constitutes the largest power component of the AngloZionist Empire, anything weakening the US also thereby weakens the Empire and anything which weakens the Empire is beneficial for Russia (by the way, the logical corollary of this state of affairs is that the people of the US and the people of Russia have the same enemy – the Neocons – and that makes them de-facto allies).
It is not my purpose here to discuss when and how the Neocons came to power in the US, so I will just say that the delusional policies followed by the various US administrations since at least 1993 (and, even more so, since 2001) have been disastrous for the United States and could be characterized as one long never-ending case of imperial hubris (to use the title of here ). The long string of lost wars and foreign policy disasters are a direct result of this lack of even basic expertise. What passes for "expertise" today is basically hate-filled hyperbole and warmongering hysterics, hence the inflation in the paranoid anti-Russian rhetoric.
The US armed forces are only good at three things: wasting immense sums of money, destroying countries and alienating the rest of the planet. They are still the most expensive and bloated armed forces on the planet, but nobody fears them anymore (not even relatively small states, nevermind Russia or China). In technological terms, the Russians (and to a somewhat lesser degree the Chinese) have found asymmetrical answers to all the key force planning programs of the Pentagon and the former US superiority in the air, on land and on the seas is now a thing of the past. As for the US nuclear triad, it is still capable of accomplishing its mission, but it is useless as an instrument of foreign policy or to fight Russia or China (unless suicide is contemplated).[Sidebar: this inability of the US military to achieve desired political goals might explain why, at least so far, the US has apparently given up on the notion of a Reconquista of Syria or why the Ukronazis have not dared to attack the Donbass. Of course, this is too early to call and these zigs might be followed by many zags, especially in the context of the political crisis in the US, but it appears that in the cases of the DPRK, Iran, Syria and the Ukraine there is much barking, but not much biting coming from the supposed sole "hyperpower" on the planet] The US is now engaged in simultaneous conflicts not only with Iran or Russia but also with the EU and China. In fact, even relationships with vassal states such as Canada or France are now worse than ever before. Only the prostituted leaders of "new Europe", to use Rumsfeld's term , are still paying lip service to the notion of "American leadership", and only if they get paid for it.
The US "elites" and the various interest groups they represent have now clearly turned on each other which is a clear sign that the entire system is in a state of deep crisis: when things were going well, everybody could get what they wanted and no visible infighting was taking place. The Israel Lobby has now fully subordinated Congress, the White House, and the media to its narrow Likudnik agenda and, as a direct result of this, the US has lost all their positions in the Middle-East and the chorus of those with enough courage to denounce this Zionist Occupation Government is slowly but steadily growing (at least on the Internet). Even US Jews are getting fed up with the now openly Israeli apartheid state (see here or here ). By withdrawing from a long list of important international treaties and bodies (TPP, Kyoto Protocol, START, ABM, JCPOA. UNESCO, UN Human Rights Council, etc.) the United States has completely isolated themselves from the rest of the planet. The ironic truth is that Russia has not been isolated in the least, but that the US has isolated itself from the rest of the planet.
In contrast, the Russians are capitalizing on every single US mistake – be it the carrier-centric navy, the unconditional support for Israel or the simultaneous trade wars with China and the EU. Much has been made of the recent revelation of new and revolutionary Russian weapon systems (see here and here ) but there is much more to this than just the deployment of new military systems and technologies: Russia is benefiting from the lack of any real US foreign policies to advance her own interests in the Middle-East, of course, but also elsewhere. Let's just take the very latest example of a US self-inflicted PR disaster – the following "tweet" by Trump: (CAPS in the original)
To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!
This kind of infantile (does he not sound like a 6 year old?) and, frankly, rather demented attempts at scaring Iranians (of all people!) is guaranteed to have the exact opposite effect from the one presumably sought: the Iranian leaders might snicker in disgust, or have a good belly-laugh, but they are not going to be impressed .
The so-called "allies" of the US will be embarrassed in the extreme to be "led" by such a primitive individual, even if they don't say so in public. As for the Russians, they will happily explore all the possibilities offered to them by such illiterate and self-defeating behavior.
Conclusion one: a useful summit for Russia
As a direct consequence of the Helsinki summit, the infighting of the US ruling classes has dramatically intensified. Furthermore, faced with a barrage of hateful attacks Trump did what he always does: he tried to simultaneously appease his critics by caving in to their rhetoric while at the same time trying to appear "tough" – hence his latest "I am a tough guy with a big red button" antics against Iran (he did exactly the same thing towards the DPRK). We will probably never find out what exactly Trump and Putin discussed during their private meeting, but one thing is sure: the fact that Trump sat one-on-one with Putin without any "supervision" from his deep-state mentors was good enough to create a total panic in the US ruling class resulting in even more wailing about collusion, impeachment, high crimes & misdemeanors and even treason. Again, the goal is clear: Trump must be removed.
From the Russian point of view, it matters very little whether Trump is removed from office or not – the problem is not one of personalities, but one of the nature of the AngloZionist Empire. The Russians simply don't have the means to bring down the Empire, but the infighting of the US elites does and, if not, then at the very least the current crisis will further weaken the US, hence the Russian willingness to participate in this summit even if by itself this summit brought absolutely no tangible results: the action was in the reaction.
Conclusion two: the Clinton gang's actions can result in a real catastrophe for the US
Trump's main goal in meeting with Putin was probably to find out whether there was a way to split up the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership and to back the Israeli demands for Syria. On the issue of China, Trump never had a chance since the US has really nothing to offer to Russia (whereas China and Russia are now locked into a vital symbiotic relationship ). On Syria, the Russians and the Israelis are now negotiating the details of a deal which would give the Syrian government the control of the demarcation line with Israel (it is not a border in the legal sense) and Trump's backing for Israel will make no difference. As for Iran, the Russians will not back the US agenda either for many reasons ranging from basic self-interest to respect for international law. So while Trump did the right thing in meeting with Putin, it was predictable at least under the current set of circumstances, that he would not walk away with tangible results.
For all his very real failings, Trump cannot be blamed for the current situation. The real culprits are the Clinton gang and the Democratic Party which, by their completely irresponsible behavior, are creating a very dangerous crisis for the United States: the Neocons and the Clinton gang are willing to say anything, no matter how destabilizing, to hurt Trump even if the US political system by itself is also put at risk. Furthermore, the Neocons have now completely flipped around the presumption of innocence – both externally (Russian "attack" on the US elections) and internally (Trump's "collusion" with Putin). As for Trump, whatever his good intentions might have been, he is weak and cannot fight the entire US deep state by himself. The Neocons and the US deep state are now on a collision course with Russia and the people of the United States and while Russia does have the means to protect herself from the Empire, it is unclear to me who, or what could stop the Neocons from further damaging the US. Deep and systemic crises often result in new personalities entering the stage, but in the case of the US, it is now undeniable that the system cannot reform
exiled off mainstreet , July 26, 2018 at 4:47 am GMT
All of this seems profoundly depressing, but it appears to be how things are. I was disappointed by Trump's efforts to cave into the deep state on his statements. The fact he can't even control his justice ministry reveals his weakness. I'm of the view history shows that once spy agencies reach a critical mass in power they become the absolute rulers of a structure and the rule of law becomes a facade, then is sidelined completely.Anonymous [333] Disclaimer , July 26, 2018 at 10:55 am GMT@exiled off mainstreetJohnny Rottenborough , Website July 26, 2018 at 11:20 am GMTTrump was a complete outsider to politics when he decided to run for the presidency in 2015. He had no team or political allies. He really didn't have much of a philosophy of governance, a solid foundation of history and facts, a first rate vocabulary or the debating skills of an 8th grader. He has consistently failed to win over any Democratic and probably not even a majority of Republican politicians.
The Deep State has opposed him at every turn, choosing to favor the policies of the Neocons and their enablers in the Democratic Party. Hence, having no team of his own, he has been saddled with personnel from the ranks of his most virulent enemies at every level.
His lack of knowledge and primitive persuasive skills, which might work in big business but not under the microscope of politics, have not won him any converts but only encouraged a vicious escalation of antipathy from his opponents, who, controlling the media from top to bottom, are openly calling him a traitor on no objective grounds, unless trying to do the job of the office, maintain the peace, and explore possible avenues for reducing international tensions is now considered treasonous. The charge of treason is clearly bombastic but with virtually everyone of influence nodding in agreement, it's difficult for the man to retain his credibility before the public.
Actually, a smidgen south of half the public are the only base of his support. And a very eclectic base they are, including numerous liberals, progressives, intellectuals and peaceniks, in addition to conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians, who prefer to deal with the real world rather than Hillary's deliberate misrepresentation of it.
Will that be enough for him to survive? The way the maniacs are raving in the media, expect the country to throw a big celebration if he gets "taken out" one way or another tomorrow. The situation is really dangerous and utterly shameful. Most of the blame goes to Hillary Clinton and her insurrectionists for not accepting the outcome of our system of ersatz "democracy." Her husband won with something like 43% of the popular vote in 1992. I'm pretty sure Trump had a higher number. Cry me a river, Hillary, but stop trying to destroy what you can't have like a petulant child.
(I'm a liberal Democrat.)
the logical corollary of this state of affairs is that the people of the US and the people of Russia have the same enemy – the Neocons – and that makes them de-facto alliesAnonymous [346] Disclaimer , July 26, 2018 at 1:37 pm GMTI think it would be more accurate to say that the people of Russia had the same enemy.
War for Blair Mountain , July 26, 2018 at 2:25 pm GMTBy the way, these are typical Neocon-style tactics: double-down, then double-down again, then issue statements which make it impossible for you to back down, then repeat it all as many times as needed.
It's like trial lawyers say: if the facts are on your side and the law is not, then argue the facts; if the law is on your side and the facts are not, then argue the law; and if neither the facts nor the law are on your side, then bang your fists on the table and shout as loud as you can! That's exactly what the neo-clowns are doing here.
the Neocons and the Clinton gang are willing to say anything, no matter how destabilizing, to hurt Trump even if the US political system by itself is also put at risk.
All of which just helps to further discredit the empire. Even with all the insanity in the media, I still thank God every day that Hellary did not become president.
The Paradox:sarz , July 26, 2018 at 3:28 pm GMTThe above h0moerotic caricature of Putin and Trump is quite revealing in what it tells us about what drives the emotional life of White Liberals and White Leftist. They are driven by powerful urges to impose homosexuality-pedophilia-pederasty on both Christian Russia and the Working Class Native Born White American Christians.
Saker, something is not adding up. If Trump is truly as pathetic a pushover, as "weak and spineless," as you say, why all the hysteria? If, on the other hand, he is a rather successful wrecking ball, already having put in jeopardy half the key resources of the empire, that's another story.Carlo , July 27, 2018 at 12:08 am GMT@sarzErebus , July 27, 2018 at 2:12 am GMTI think because Trump postulated himself as a candidate, then got nominated the Republican candidate and worst of all, despite the huge campaign against him, won the elections, without the blessing of the Deep State and the neocons. So now they want to teach him (and anyone else who might think about doing the same) a lesson: "Anyone who tries to become president without our approval will be crushed", so it never happens again.
@sarzFranz , July 27, 2018 at 6:13 am GMTsomething is not adding up. If Trump is truly as pathetic a pushover, as "weak and spineless," as you say, why all the hysteria?
And nobody seems to like him
They can tell what he wants to do
And he never shows his feelingsBut the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning aroundThat Trump is a wrecking ball is a hypothesis I've held since the first GOP debate, when I also realized he would (probably) win not only the election, but may even succeed at the far more difficult challenge of bringing the Empire to a sufficiently soft landing that the nation survives. I'm less convinced of the latter now, largely because I underestimated the centrifugal forces driving the fault lines in the American body politic. The nation, tragically may not survive the Empire's twilight, but I've seen nothing that makes me want to change my hypothesis.
He's laying waste to the Empire in the most peaceful process possible – in large part by so embarrassing the Empire's elites, allies and vassals that they withdraw first their active support, and then finally even their consent. Inducing hysteria, both foreign and domestic, is a non-trivial component of the forces giving the wrecking ball an extra push as it heads for the edifice.
As for the summit, I frankly wouldn't be surprised to learn that much of it was staged for maximum hysteria-inducing effect. Their 2hrs spent alone probably was little more than comparing notes. After all, what can Trump promise that he can also deliver under the circumstances? He can only promise to keep doing what he's doing.
In any case, they both know the Empire has to go, and they both want the American nation to be a player after it goes. A vibrant America is as critical to the multipolar world as it is to Americans. Maybe more so.
Collusion? Maybe, but the Trump phenomena, IMHO, has all the earmarks of regime change done right. With or without collusion, the hystericals can't quite put their finger on what happened, which drives further hysteria, which pushes the wrecking ball even faster, which drives....
Cyrano , July 27, 2018 at 7:10 pm GMTnow undeniable that the system cannot reform itselfYes, Saker and that puts US politics behind European fascism of 70+ years ago. Mussolini was booted out by a fascist committee, Franco paved the way for a constitutional monarchy, but all Americans get is Bozo the Clown/President.
The destruction of the US working class amazes me in its absence from all serious debate. First subverted by the CIA then rendered null by outsourcing (which is still undercounted) the "deplorables" have no mechanism for resistence except the unthinkable one: Hope for total breakup of the United States. Or hope for a foreign invasion.
Makes one wonder. When Egyptians greeted Alexander the Great as a liberator as he conquered them, it was a fairly pungent comment on the ruling Persians. Will blue-collar former-Yanks be cheering for liberating Chinese or Russian troops anytime soon? Henry Kissinger once predicted something of the sort.
We do live in interesting times.
@ErebuspeterAUS , July 28, 2018 at 7:14 am GMTWell on the way, head in a cloud
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody ever hears him
Or the sound he appears to make
And he never seems to noticeHe never listens to them
He knows that they're the fools
They don't like himI don't think that Trump is the fool on the hill. I think that mostly all those around him are. The latest hysteria over Russia is not about any "meddling" in any "democracy". It's about throwing tantrums that Russia won't submit to US hegemony. In my opinion, they don't deserve to be in charge of their own country, let alone to be asking to be in charge of Russia.
All they come up with is terrible ideas which they in their generosity are way too eager to share with the world – against the wishes or the best interests of the world. Like the multiculturalism. It's bad enough that they came up with that awful idea, but then they had to force it down the throats of the stupid Europeans.
Then when Merkel showed enough brains to challenge their idea, they forced her to make 180 turn and to welcome over a 1 million refugees from the imperial misadventures.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/10/18/frum.merkel.multicultural
Well, Saker did put, this time, some good points here. Of course, they were well mixed with the usual Kremlin propaganda, but that's now like "good morning" with his writing. Probably all public members of "Team Russia" have that clause in their contract. The usual spin "Russia is great, winning, and all is not only good but simply getting better for Kremlin and the Great Leader".He does point to this "thing" with MSM and public figures in West re the summit. I agree, it's surreal. If I were watching this in a serious movie I'd change the channel/walk out. If I were reading a serious book with the "thing" as a part of the plot I'd stop reading. I think there IS something there.
It is not just "unanimity of hatred and chaos", "abject hysterics", "hate-filled hysteria", "two minutes of hatred stretched well into a two weeks of hatred" etc. It's something else and, I feel, simply much worse and dangerous.
I guess we have entered a zone beyond geopolitics into mass psychology. Not my area of expertise at all, but simply feel there is something there. It feels as watching, hard to express it, hysterical people? Now, on my level, whenever I dealt with such people I simply walked away, most of the time. A couple of times, when I couldn't walk away I simply floored them (or so I say). Both men and women (talking about being a gentleman , a). With women, it's even easier, just one strike, weak hand even. With men a full combination, even with a takedown and ..anyway. Joking. Sort of. Besides, I was younger then. But how can you take out people who control, in essence, US power, nuclear weapons in particular? You simply can't . That is what makes, IMHO, this so dangerous. I simply can't recollect anything similar in relationship between superpowers. I am not so optimistic re the collapse of The Empire, multipolar world etc.
This "thing" can, I concede, deliver a couple of goods: People, at last, realizing who, or better what, are our "betters". The real power of The Empire diminishing because of the mess and chaos those species ..created. Those two things creating an opportunity to, somehow, do something about this abomination.
But, and a big but, there is the flip there. People simply not paying attention. And, those hysterics really getting the levers of power in their hands. While they are in that state, that is.
As I've said several times here so far (doesn't matter a bit, of course) Trump supporters fucked up. Not him; he didn't expect to win and when he did he found himself in a really bad position. His supporters. As soon as he won they walked home. A mistake. A terrible mistake. I feel we'll all pay, dearly, for it.
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