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FOCUS | Trump's Script: The Seven Power-Amassing Techniques of Fascist Dictators |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Tuesday, 08 March 2016 11:14 |
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Reich writes: "Since the 1930s, fascist dictators have used 7 techniques to amass power. I'm not suggesting Donald Trump is a fascist or wanna-be dictator, but he does seem to be following the script."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Trump's Script: The Seven Power-Amassing Techniques of Fascist Dictators
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
08 March 16
 ince the 1930s, fascist dictators have used 7 techniques to amass power. I'm not suggesting Donald Trump is a fascist or wanna-be dictator, but he does seem to be following the script.
- Create a cult of personality. (Donald Trump doesn’t offer policy prescriptions. He offers himself as a strongman who is powerful enough do whatever it takes.)
- Jail the media. (Trump hasn’t gone this far, but reporters covering his rallies are kept in a cage, quite literally. And he describes the media as his enemy.)
- Intimidate opponents. (This is Trump's stock in trade. For example, he tweeted recently that the Ricketts family, who are spending money against his candidacy, “better be careful, they have a lot to hide.”)
- Incite violence. (People describing themselves as Trump supporters have attacked Muslims and the homeless. At his rallies, his supporters have beaten and spit on black protesters.)
- Scapegoat racial and ethnic minorities. (Trump blames America’s problems on Mexican immigrants, Muslims, Muslim-Americans, and African-Americans.)
- Glorify national power. (Trump’s entire foreign policy consists of asserting American power and fueling xenophobia against other nations.)
- Disregard international law. (Trump wants to use torture, punish the families of terrorists, for example.)
- Create a mass following directly, without party or other intermediaries. (Trump’s tweets circumvent all filters. It’s just him and his followers.)
What do you think?
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Romney Throws Hat Toward Ring, Warns of Abyss |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 08 March 2016 09:15 |
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Boardman writes: "Mitt Romney, former Republican candidate for president, showed up in public again on March 3 to make a non-announcement announcement of his candidacy before rambling into a semi-coherent, 18-minute speech, the main purpose of which seemed to be to attack Donald Trump."
Mitt Romney. (photo: Mallory Benedict/PBS NewsHour)
Romney Throws Hat Toward Ring, Warns of Abyss
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
08 March 16
“I’m not here to announce my candidacy for office…. America will remain, as it is today, the envy of the world….
If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished….
A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president….
I understand the anger Americans feel today…. Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less than noble purposes…. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”
 itt Romney, former Republican candidate for president, showed up in public again on March 3 to make a non-announcement announcement of his candidacy before rambling into a semi-coherent, 18-minute speech, the main purpose of which seemed to be to attack Donald Trump – or so it was widely reported: “a detailed, thorough and lacerating assault on Mr. Trump,… a diatribe,” according to the New York Times. Nonsense – Romney’s disjointed comments wandered all over the place, as the brief, condensed version above indicates. Romney had no message, he had several, overt and covert, that all boiled down to a final, political prayer: “God bless us to choose a nominee who will make that vision [of greatness] a reality.” Will we never outgrow American infantile exceptionalism?
In other words, Romney wasn’t engaged in leadership, he wasn’t taking any kind of a stand on any sort of principle, he was just indulging himself in mealy-mouthed pandering rooted in mostly cheap-shot attacks on the scapegoat du jour for his political class. Even granting the accuracy of his Trump trash-talk, it was still just trash-talk. Trumpery remains ascendant and Romney proferred no alternative. As Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept has excellently documented,
… flamboyant denunciations of Trump by establishment figures make no sense except as self-aggrandizing pretense, because those condemning him have long tolerated if not outright advocated very similar ideas…. Trump is self-evidently a toxic authoritarian demagogue advocating morally monstrous positions, but in most cases where elite outrage is being vented, he is merely a natural extension of the mainstream rhetorical and policy framework that has been laid, not some radical departure from it. He’s their id…. [They resent] what he reflects: the unmistakable, undeniable signs of late-stage imperial collapse, along with the resentments and hatreds they have long deliberately and self-servingly stoked but which are now raging out of their control.
Greenwald goes on to cite specific illustrations of the sham horror of establishment Romnoids over Trump’s embrace of stuff like American torture, American war and American war crimes, American assassinations, or American punishment of civilian populations. There is no need to revisit these issues that Greenwald covers in detail very well. (The faux umbrage of establishment moralists reminds one of the scene in Casablanca, in which the corrupt Captain Renault asserts, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here,” and then accepts his winnings/bribe.) With persuasive precision, Greenwald makes the rational case that we’re swamped with political hypocrisy, but he only hints at another, deeper context for this Romney drive-by shouting.
“the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss”
What did Romney intend to mean by that rather isolated sentence? The apparent antecedent is “the anger Americans feel today.” After several snide asides about Trump, Romney adds: “This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”
What other nations? What abyss? What is Romney actually talking about? Is he hinting at Nazi Germany? He doesn’t say, he only shakes his fearstick in our faces, then leaves us to scare ourselves into submission with our own paranoid projections. Incredibly, without showing the slightest comprehension, Romney claims: “I understand the anger Americans feel today.” If he did understand even some of the widespread, multi-faceted, innumerable sources for American anger, he would have to be hopelessly obtuse not to understand also that he and most of the people he knows are all causes of that anger, and that the anger is wholly justifiable. Romney is a very rich man who pays a lower tax rate than his secretary and, so far as public policy is concerned, sees absolutely nothing wrong with that, or the special tax break that makes it possible. But Romney is not known for public policy coherence, much less coherence about any looming “abyss.”
Romney doesn’t get it, none of them get it. It’s misleading, irrelevant, stupid, even dishonest to say anything as vapidly portentous as: “This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.” That is not reality. That is a prediction of a future abyss. The reality is that we are already in the abyss, and we’ve been sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss for 35 years or more now: no matter how much any of us scream, no matter what we scream about, we are a psychologically frozen nation locked into a metaphorical silent scream as unchanging and so far immutable as the Edvard Munch 1893 painting, “The Scream,” a version of which sold in 2012 for $119 million, enough to make anyone scream unheard in the deepening abyss.
All our individual screams together only begin to describe the abyss
Here’s my scream (no more rational analysis for now):
It’s just a scream, incomplete, random, subject to change tomorrow, different from yesterday, never comprehensive, never finished, seldom answered, endlessly expanded, like the abyss itself, a Mobius strip of rorschach blots and more deliberate insults to mind – the Supreme Court gets to pick your President – and body – if you’re a woman we don’t care who rapes you as long as you carry his baby to term and stop all this nonsense about controlling your own body, why should you have more rights than poor people who get their bodies sent to pointless wars by rich people who just go on getting richer because you’re using up ammunition and equipment that they get to sell to all the sides fighting over nothing, like in Yemen, where the Saudis have run out of hospitals to bomb so they’re using American cluster bombs on schools and churches, leftovers from Iraq or Syria or Yugoslavia or Flint – no, wait, they didn’t cluster bomb Flint, they poisoned the water, they’re still pumping poisoned water, and making damn sure the consumers pay for it, some of the highest rates in the country, for poisoned water – that’s value-added! – that’s the Republican way to which Democrats acquiesce, who cares really about Flint or poor people or black people, black lives don’t really matter or someone would listen to them, but not when the leadership class has become the lootership class and even the “political revolutionaries” are more about money out of politics and not about American troops out of more than a hundred foreign countries helping to prop up dictators who will foment terrorists and others who will never know what it’s like to be American and middle class and to go decades without any improvement in living standard, but at least they took away your jobs and your homes and your pensions, or if they didn’t, they will, or they’ll try to – what, are you one of those people who wants bankers to go to prison for stealing your future? – good luck with that, not to mention your kids over their heads in education debt in a country where education used to try to teach people to think for themselves, not just become dependent profit centers for an ever smaller elite that complains about paying 70% of the country’s taxes when it gets only 95% of the country’s income, how is that fair when we’re the ones maintaining the world’s largest military to preserve the global abyss and here at home cops can’t shoot unarmed black people fast enough to distract them from the celebrity rape-a-thon where Bill Cosby is now the black Bill Clinton on his way back to the White House where opportunity and interns beckon and the abyss abides, and we abide in an abyss so varied and changing we can reassure ourselves it’s really different places and not just one big abyss, but it is.
No wonder the Mitt Romneys of the world can look into the abyss they’ve made and not see themselves, just like they can look in a mirror and not see Donald Trump. That’s an inner abyss.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Supporting Women Includes Opposing TPP |
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Tuesday, 08 March 2016 09:09 |
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Slaughter writes: "Something that has gone overlooked and under-discussed is the fact that the TPP will tie the United States to countries that do not value the rights of women."
Activists protest the TPP. (photo: The Hill)
Supporting Women Includes Opposing TPP
By Louise Slaughter, The Hill
08 March 16
 illary Clinton stood before the United Nations in 1995 and proclaimed that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” More than 20 years later, our nation is leading the way in helping live up to that ideal by strengthening the rights of women in countries around the world. As we mark International Women’s Day on March 8, we should take this opportunity to reflect on the extraordinary achievements women are making. This year’s theme, Pledge for Parity, is a call that we should all rally around. Our pledge to support women across the world should include the promise to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
There are hundreds of reasons why the TPP is a mistake. As the representative for Rochester, New York, I have never seen a trade agreement that benefited the American manufacturer or American worker. We were decimated by NAFTA and have lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in my area since it went into effect, culminating in one of the highest poverty rates in the country. For that reason alone, we cannot afford another NAFTA-style trade agreement like the TPP. It’s a bad deal for jobs, wages and environmental protections.
But something that has gone overlooked and under-discussed is the fact that the TPP will tie the United States to countries that do not value the rights of women.
One of those countries is Brunei Darussalam. Even while Brunei was participating in the TPP negotiations, that country was passing laws that harm women. Brunei’s new penal laws proscribe imprisonment for women who have an abortion or who have a child out of wedlock. The penalty for being found guilty of adultery or extramarital sex is flogging or death by stoning. Rather than condemn these repressive acts, the TPP would bring the United States in partnership with Brunei, a country that adopted Sharia law in 2014, causing condemnation from human rights groups.
The case of Malaysia is just as distressing. That country has a troubling and well-documented history of slave labor and serious human trafficking abuses. Every year, millions of people are forced into unpaid labor, with teenage girls forced to become domestic workers in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. Sadly, many also suffer sexual abuse or are driven into Malaysia’s sex trade, and mass graves were also recently discovered.
For years, Malaysia was on the list of worst countries for human trafficking but has shown no real progress in changing its ways. According to our own State Department’s 2014 trafficking report, Malaysia “made limited and inadequate efforts to improve its flawed victim protection regime,” and authorities there detained victims for over a year in some cases, all while decreasing trafficking enforcement.
In May 2015, authorities near the border with Thailand discovered 139 bodies in shallow graves, most likely the remains of trafficked migrants trying to escape persecution in Burma and Bangladesh. Yet, just a few short weeks later, the State Department actually upgraded Malaysia’s status. Questions have since been raised about whether this was done because the fast-track bill passed by Congress said the administration couldn’t rubber stamp any trade agreement with countries in the worst trafficking category.
Appallingly, just a month after the administration rewarded Malaysia with this upgraded trafficking status despite its abysmal record, authorities found dozens more bodies in the Malaysian jungle.
Malaysia is also in the midst of a serious corruption scandal. Investigators have found that $700 million from the country’s sovereign wealth fund was transferred into the prime minister’s bank account. The New York Times recently reported that a Swiss government investigation found $4 billion has been misappropriated as well, with much of it transferred into Swiss bank accounts held by former Malaysian public officials.
The TPP presented an opportunity for the United States to encourage our trading partners to bring their standards up to meet the rest of the international community. Instead, we have given countries like Malaysia and Brunei preferential access to the world’s greatest economy with no assurances that they will address these fundamental problems.
International Women’s Day should be marked by celebrations of women’s progress, not by entering into agreements with countries hostile to their basic human rights. The Trans-Pacific Partnership isn’t just a bad deal for our workers and our environment; it’s a threat to women and a compromise of our American values.
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LAPD Shoots Unarmed, Sleeping Couple in 'Self-Defense' |
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Tuesday, 08 March 2016 09:07 |
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Rodriguez writes: "A couple in their early 30s, Kisha Michael and Marquintan Sandlin, went out for a date in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. By the end of the night, both of them were dead - shot by police on the side of the road. Initially, the LAPD claimed that Michael threatened them with a gun, but as the story has developed, it's been revealed that both victims were asleep in their vehicle at the time of the shooting."
A police officer checks in on a fellow officer. (photo: Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News)
LAPD Shoots Unarmed, Sleeping Couple in 'Self-Defense'
By Julie M. Rodriguez, Care2
08 March 16
 n February 21, a couple in their early 30s, Kisha Michael and Marquintan Sandlin, went out for a date in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. By the end of the night, both of them were dead — shot by police on the side of the road. Initially, the LAPD claimed that Michael threatened them with a gun, but as the story has developed, it’s been revealed that both victims were asleep in their vehicle at the time of the shooting.
That’s not the only detail that has the local community suspicious about what really happened that day. The LAPD hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with information on the incident. What we do know is that someone called to report a “suspicious vehicle,” and the police responded around 3 a.m. Apparently, the police arrived and found the couple unconscious in the car. After about 45 minutes spent attempting to “de-escalate” the situation by trying to rouse the occupants of the vehicle, police opened fire in response to an as-of-yet unnamed “threat” from Michael or Sandlin.
Despite the claims that Kisha Michael had a weapon, there have been no reports of a gun recovered at the scene. In an interview with the LA Times, Michael’s twin sister Trisha explained that her sister had never even owned a firearm, and that Sandlin was unarmed. Of course, it’s possible that the responding officers thought they saw something that might have looked like a gun in the dark, but if that’s the case, the department has declined to say. It’s also worth noting that mistaking harmless objects, like a pill bottle, for a gun has become a troublingly widespread defense in police shootings against unarmed suspects.
In the meantime, relatives of the victims are demanding answers. Some of them visited Inglewood Police headquarters this week, demanding to speak with the chief of police. They held signs reading “Murdered by Inglewood Police,” and shouted slogans including, “It could be your child next. You never know.” So far, the department has declined to respond while they collect all the details of the incident. It’s unclear whether there will be any investigation or action taken against the responding officers.
As if the senseless killing weren’t tragic enough on its own, it turns out that both Michael and Sandlin were single parents — she had three sons at home, while he had four daughters. That’s seven children orphaned for seemingly no reason.
This isn’t the first time the LAPD has been accused of abusing its power. In recent years, the department’s officers have come under fire for sexually assaulting a female suspect and then allowing her to fall from a moving vehicle, fatally shooting an autistic man for touching his waistband in a “suspicious” manner, firing more than 100 bullets at two elderly women delivering newspapers, punching a homeless woman on the bus, and racially profiling suspects, among other controversies. Unfortunately, this latest incident shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone given the department’s history, especially given the fact that both victims were black.
While the LAPD has been equipping officers with body cameras since last May, there’s no point in holding your breath for any incriminating footage. The department has already stated it’s not going to release any of the footage to the public, and it’s possible that the footage doesn’t even exist. LAPD officers are allowed to turn their cameras on and off at will, and they’re encouraged to review the recordings before filing reports on any controversial incidents. Unless the department is faced with incredible public pressure, the facts about what really happened that night may never be known.
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