For What It's Worth

I wonder.

In Nov. 2007 I was stunned but elated when we elected Barack Obama. I was never more proud of our country. While he made many missteps, he and his family always acted with grace and class. I had high hopes for us. But those hopes have been diminished. I look at our country now and see hatred of non-whites; hatred of non-Christians; hatred of non-heterosexuals; hatred of the elderly; hatred of the poor; hatred of the the sick; hatred of the earth; and hatred of the truth. I wonder on this Memorial Day Weekend if those who made the supreme sacrifice for this country would think it was worth it.

Freedom Lost

 This weekend is supposed to be about remembering and honoring the sacrifices made to make this a free country. Because those of us on the Left are often critical of our country, we're considered unpatriotic. But it is our patriotism that leads us to expect our government to live up to a higher standard. If those on the Right truly believe in a free society, where is their outrage at the constant erosion of our freedoms?

The below article is very long but this is the gist of the story:

From The Intercept: "A SHADOWY INTERNATIONAL mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.

Internal TigerSwan communications describe the movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” and compare the anti-pipeline water protectors to jihadist fighters. One report, dated February 27, 2017, states that since the movement “generally followed the jihadist insurgency model while active, we can expect the individuals who fought for and supported it to follow a post-insurgency model after its collapse.” Drawing comparisons with post-Soviet Afghanistan, the report warns, “While we can expect to see the continued spread of the anti-DAPL diaspora … aggressive intelligence preparation of the battlefield and active coordination between intelligence and security elements are now a proven method of defeating pipeline insurgencies.”

More than 100 internal documents leaked to The Intercept by a TigerSwan contractor, as well as a set of over 1,000 documents obtained via public records requests, reveal that TigerSwan spearheaded a multifaceted private security operation characterized by sweeping and invasive surveillance of protesters.

As policing continues to be militarized and state legislatures around the country pass laws criminalizing protest, the fact that a private security firm retained by a Fortune 500 oil and gas company coordinated its efforts with local, state, and federal law enforcement to undermine the protest movement has profoundly anti-democratic implications. The leaked materials not only highlight TigerSwan’s militaristic approach to protecting its client’s interests but also the company’s profit-driven imperative to portray the nonviolent water protector movement as unpredictable and menacing enough to justify the continued need for extraordinary security measures. Energy Transfer Partners has continued to retain TigerSwan long after most of the anti-pipeline campers left North Dakota, and the most recent TigerSwan reports emphasize the threat of growing activism around other pipeline projects across the country."

#makeadifference

#resist

https://theintercept.com/2017/05/27/leaked-documents-reveal-security-firms-counterterrorism-tactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipeline-insurgencies/

Campaign Promises

Trump has made good on one of his campaign promises: "The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump declared on Dec. 2, 2015. “They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families.”

In January, Trump ordered bombing raid on Yemen that killed 10 women and children. Last week Trump made a $110 billion arms deal with Saudia Arabia, who is currently bombing the shit out of Yemen and is the country thought to be behind 9/11. Yesterday, U.S. bombing raids in Syria killed 100 civilians including 40 children.

#makeadifference
#resist
#grabyourwallet
#nobannowall
#wewillreplaceyou

Indifference

Rome is burning yet people are content to share recipes and pictures of their pets on social media.

Shouldn't there be some type of outrage at the dismantling of our democracy?  What will it take for people to wake up? Or are they already awake but just don't care enough?

I realize people have bills to pay; jobs to suffer through; kids to care for; and lives to live. But the nightmare that is the Trump administration is destroying the middle class and the poor. More activism is needed. And there any many forms of activism that don't require time or money: an email or a phone call to a legislator; a comment on social media directed at someone or something; correcting fake news heard from friends or co-workers. It doesn't take much if everyone does it. Those in power depend on the indifference of the electorate. Make a difference.

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” 
― Noam Chomsky

Knowledge is Power

Despite much evidence to the contrary, I'm still operating under the premise that much of the electorate is misinformed rather than uninformed and/or greedy. Because it is simply foolish and dangerous to get your information from just one source i have provided a list of links to some worthy sources, many of them completely non-partisan (they frequently held Obama's feet to the fire):




theintercept.com
propublica.org
theguardian.com
theatlantic.com
thenation.com
nytimes.com
salon.com
robertreich.org
publicintegrity.org
revealnews.org
aclu.org
splcenter.org
moveon.org
truthout.org
politico.com
washingtonpost.com
motherjones.com
rollingstone.com

Please share these links to help spread factual information.

#makeadifference
#resist
#grabyourwallet
#nobannowall
#wewillreplaceyou

Silence is complicity.

The World According to Trump

"The starkest difference between dictatorships and democracies is that democracies are ruled by laws, and dictatorships are ruled by dictators. 

The “rule of law,” as it’s often referred to, stands for laws that emerge from a process responsive to the majority, that are consistently applied, and are applicable to everyone regardless of their position or power.

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand this. Within a matter of days, Trump has bombed Syria and a group of fighters in eastern Afghanistan.

On April 12, Trump authorized the Pentagon to drop a 22,000-pound GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB) on people described as “Islamic State forces” in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. 

It’s the first time this bomb – nicknamed the “mother of all bombs,” and the largest air-dropped munition in the U.S. military’s inventory – has ever been used in a combat.

It’s the largest explosive device America has utilized since dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. (By comparison, U.S. aircraft commonly drop bombs that weigh between 250 to 2,000 pounds.)

Why, exactly? It’s not clear. And what was Trump’s authority to do this? Even less clear. 

We still don’t know exactly why Trump bombed Syria. He said it was because Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons on innocent civilians, including children. 

But it wasn’t the first time Assad had used chemical weapons. When he did in 2013, Trump counseled against bombing Syria in response. 

And where did Trump get the authority to bomb Syria? Assad is a vicious dictator who does terrible things to his people. But U.S. law doesn’t authorize presidents to go to war against vicious dictators who do terrible things to their people.

The Constitution leaves it up to Congress, not the president, to declare war.

In 2014, President Barack Obama began hostilities against the Islamic State, arguing that Congress’s approval of George W. Bush’s wars against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2002 provided him sufficient to authority.

Well, maybe. But there’s no way Trump can rely on Congress’s approval of these wars to bomb Syria. 

And it’s a stretch to argue that a group claiming or alleged to be connected to ISIS, but located in eastern Afghanistan far away from where ISIS is attempting to establish an Islamic State, is the same as the Islamic State. 

In a democracy, the rule of law means that we the people are supposed to be in charge, through our elected representatives in Congress.

It can be a heavy responsibility. It is especially weighty when it comes to warfare, to the destruction and annihilation of human beings. 

As Commander-in-Chief, a president is empowered to manage the military might of the nation. But he is not empowered to initiate warfare on his own. That’s our job.  

The world according to Trump is becoming increasingly dangerous, in part because we are not doing our job." * 

*This is an article by Robert Reich 

The Jobs Myth

Recently Donald Trump met with Robert Murray, founder and chief executive of Murray Energy, the largest privately held coalmine in the US. Murray is confident Trump will follow through with campaign plans to reinvigorate the coal industry and will start by scrapping Barack Obama’s clean power plan (CPP), Obama’s signature climate change plan. Murray also expects Trump to declassify carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

But Murray has asked Trump to tone down his rhetoric about bringing back mining jobs. “I suggested that he temper his expectations. Those are my exact words,” said Murray. “He can’t bring them back.”

This is the heart of trickle down/supply-side economics the Right has been pushing since their god of capitalism, Ronald Reagan, was king: reducing regulations and cutting corporate taxes will create more jobs. The Economics 101 reality is that unless demand increases there is no incentive to increase supply. The coal industry is a perfect example. There is no market for more coal so what is the point of hiring more people? But the industry sees a chance to be more profitable even at the expense of the environment and the health of the citizenry.

Since the Reagan years there has been no evidence that trickle down economics works for anyone other than the wealthy. Yet the working class clings to the elusive hope that their old jobs are coming back.

Greed is an ugly virtue but the deceit cruelly inflicted on the working class by the wealthy and powerful is truly degenerate.

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” 
― Edward Abbey