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FOCUS: We Must Demand Congress Impeach Trump |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35918"><span class="small">Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Friday, 29 December 2017 12:32 |
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Moore writes: "Wow! We've got 3,916,221 signatures to impeach Trump! This is historic."
Filmmaker Michael Moore. (photo: New York Times)
We Must Demand Congress Impeach Trump
By Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page
29 December 17
 ow! We’ve got 3,916,221 signatures to impeach Trump! C’mon everyone! This is historic. Let’s get to 4 million signatures to Impeach Trump before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve! We’re only a few thousand away! No petition to remove a president has ever had this many people sign it. Be one of them! Tell your grandchildren in 2052 that you were one of the first to stand up against the madness, the utter madness. It’s such a simple, easy thing to do — right now. Just add your name beside mine and 3.92 million others. Share this with your Facebook friends. Tweet it to your twitter followers. Send it to five people right now. And please sign it yourself NOW. Please do this one favor for me. I’m personally having this petition hand-delivered to Mar-a-Lago and to Congress on New Year’s Eve. Help Trump and our elected servants ring in the new year the right way — with our demand that he be removed in 2018. (And don’t worry about us being stuck with Pence or Paul Ryan — I’ll take care of them in a creative, peaceful way that I promise doesn’t involve gay/hetero conversion therapy or a P90X workout involved. Just leave them to me. Sign the petition!) NeedToImpeach.com
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Trump Endorses Criminal Conspiracy to Crush Honduras Vote |
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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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Friday, 29 December 2017 09:35 |
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Boardman writes: "Honduras is bleeding now, and Honduran blood runs from the hands of President Trump and Gen. John Kelly, long a vicar of American violence enforcing the imperial will."
Thousands march in a demonstration against Honduran president Juan Orlando. (photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP)
Trump Endorses Criminal Conspiracy to Crush Honduras Vote
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
29 December 17
Once again, the US saves a puppet dictator from his own people
 onduras is bleeding now, and Honduran blood runs from the hands of President Trump and Gen. John Kelly, long a vicar of American violence enforcing the imperial will. In their vicariously murderous way, Trump and Kelly are carrying on with a century-old, bipartisan American tradition of oppression and human disregard in the classic “banana republic” that the US Marines once kept safe for United Fruit. Trump and Kelly now are merely defending the corrupt military coup of 2009, sanctioned by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who was OK with death squads). Obama and Clinton are the godparents of the present Honduran thugocracy and its unchecked death squads that together provoked the massive emigration of Hondurans seeking safety here, thereby helping to elect Trump in 2016.
Reliable reporting on the current outpouring of protest in Honduras is hard to come by, but it’s rooted in the Honduran presidential election in November. The incumbent Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, 49, of the National Party, is a direct beneficiary of the 2009 coup, which elevated him to the leadership of the National Congress. He is a businessman (coffee, hotels, media) with a master’s degree in public administration from the State University of New York. He was first elected president in 2013 (with 34% of the vote) in a corrupt process during which at least 18 opposition-party candidates and supporters were murdered. Additionally, charges of fraudulent voting and corrupt campaign contributions were ignored by authorities, to the benefit of Hernandez. Once he was president, he was barred by the Honduran constitution from running for a second term. This obstacle was removed by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which is controlled by the president. Hernandez has a long personal relationship with Gen. John Kelly. Going into the election, Hernandez was considered the favorite.
Opposing Hernandez was democratic socialist Salvador Nasralla, 64, of the Libre-PINU Party (the Opposition Alliance against Dictatorship), the party of the coup-deposed President Manuel Zelaya. Nasralla graduated with honors from the Catholic University of Chile as a civil engineer and later earned an NBA. He was CEO of Pepsi Honduras before starting a television career in 1981. Since then, he has been harshly critical of chronic corruption in Honduras, founding the Anti-Corruption Party in 2013, when he won 13% of the vote for president. He was not expected to win the 2017 election.
As it stands now, the winner may never be known, but more than likely Nasralla won the popular vote. Among election monitors, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union (EU) have rejected the results, while the US Embassy has said everything is hunky-dory. Meanwhile, the US and other anti-democratic forces are on the verge of installing their puppet Hernandez as the re-elected president of Honduras. The timeline of this stolen election illustrates just how secure the dictatorship and its allies in the US feel in their brazen criminality:
November 26. Apparently, something like 57% of Hondurans vote for a field of nine candidates. The Supreme Electoral Council, controlled by Hernandez, closes the polls an hour earlier than in the past, likely suppressing the vote. At first the Electoral Council releases vote totals as they come in, as is customary. Then, with Nasralla surprisingly leading, the Electoral Council suspends the count for seven hours.
November 27. With 57% of the votes counted, the Election Council reports that Nasralla is leading Hernandez by 5 points, roughly 45-40. These totals apparently represent mostly voting machine votes and not paper ballots. The Election Council then suspends the count again, for another 36 hours, telling the public there might be no final results until November 30.
November 28. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signs off on State Dept. certification that Honduras has been improving on fighting corruption and supporting human rights, clearing the way for $644 million in US aid.
November 28-29. The Election Council issues sporadic new totals that claim Nasralla’s percentage is shrinking and that Hernandez is pulling ahead.
November 29. Nasralla and Hernandez sign “a document vowing to respect the final result after every disputed vote had been scrutinized,” a circumstance unlikely ever to be realized. When the Election Council again halts the count, claiming a computer glitch, Nasralla repudiates the agreement and urges his supporters to protest: “They take us for idiots and want to steal our victory.” Nasralla supporters in the thousands take to the streets across the country.
November 30. Nasralla accuses the Election Council of election fraud. The Election Council reports 94% of votes are counted, with Hernandez ahead by less than 2 points (42.92 to 41.42%). Nasralla supporters are in the streets. Riot police fire tear gas, pepper spray, and live ammunition at protestors.
December 1. The Election Council announces there will be no further results till all votes are counted. Hernandez declares state of emergency and announces a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew.
December 2. The Honduran National Roundtable for Human Rights denounces government action as state terrorism against civilians. The group also accuses the government of imposing the curfew as an act of repression to protect the electoral fraud it was perpetrating. By now government forces have killed at least 7 people and injured a score. The second night of curfew sees thousands of people banging pots and pans in protest (cacerolazos).
Substantial numbers of National Police defy the Hernandez government and refuse to enforce the curfew. A member of the elite Cobra riot police reads from a statement: “Our people are sovereign. We cannot confront and repress their rights.”
December 5. US State Dept. announces certification of Honduran improvement on human rights so that Honduras can continue to get US military assistance.
December 6. OAS observers cast doubt on the election results so far.
December 9. Hernandez government lifts state of emergency and curfew. Radio Progreso, an independent community station defending democracy, is attacked and taken off the air. Journalists are arrested.
December 10. Thousands of Hondurans march on US Embassy in Tegucigalpa protesting US interference in election.
December 14. The Honduran Election Council, as required by law, begins reviewing some 125 official objections to the November 26 election, including four motions challenging the presidential election.
December 15. The Election Council has finished a recount of ballot boxes with irregularities, but has not declared a winner. Protests continue throughout the country. The death toll reaches 16, with 1,675 arrests.
December 17. The Organization of American States (OAS) denounces the Honduran election and calls for a new election in a statement saying: “Facing the impossibility of determining a winner, the only way possible so that the people of Honduras are the victors is a new call for general elections.”
Supporting the OAS conclusions is a detailed technical report on the election by Georgetown University professor Dr. Irfan Nooruddin who writes in conclusion: “On the basis of this analysis, I would reject the proposition that the National Party [Hernandez] won the election legitimately.”
At the same time, Nasralla has left Honduras to go to Washington to plead his case at the State Dept.
Taking advantage of that opportunity, the Election Council announces that Hernandez has beaten Nasralla by less than two points (42.95 to 41.42%) out of almost 3.5 million votes cast (3,476,419). There are about 6 million voters in the country of 9 million people.
Mexico recognizes Hernandez as winner, an announcement coordinated with the US. Nasralla and his supporters call for the population to keep mobilizing and keep protesting.
December 18. Honduran vice president Ricardo Alvarez rejects OAS (but not US) interference in Honduran affairs:
This is an autonomous and sovereign country. This is a country that is not going to do what anybody from an international organization tells it to do. I will say it again: The only other election this country will have, the next one, is on the last Sunday of November 2021. There’s not another election.
December 20. Three human rights experts (David Kaye, Michel Frost, Edison Lanza) from the United Nations and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights condemn the Hernandez government for the use of lethal force on protestors, and for violating basic human rights to life, free expression, and free assembly. They write:
“We are alarmed by the illegal and excessive use of force to disperse protests, which have resulted in the deaths of at least 12 protesters and left dozens injured. Hundreds of people have also been detained, many of whom have been transferred to military installations where they have been brutally beaten and subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment.”
December 21. Honduras is one of only eight countries at the UN voting not to denounce the US plan to move its embassy to Jerusalem.
December 22. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has the State Dept. issue a statement recognizing Hernandez as winner, adding the absurdly hypocritical caveat that “a significant long-term effort to heal the political divide in the country and enact much-needed electoral reforms should be undertaken.”
Congressman Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, says the State Dept.’s action left him “angry and disturbed.” One of some 50 lawmakers who signed letters urging the US to support the OAS call for a new election in Honduras, McGovern states the obvious: “Very few Hondurans have confidence in the results, and the country remains deeply polarized.” McGovern then adds fairy dust: “For the U.S. government to pretend otherwise is the height of blind folly and it will surely harm our influence and undermine our priorities throughout the region.” This is real blind folly, unless McGovern or anyone else steps up to do anything about it.
Canada also recognizes Hernandez as the winner.
Nasralla concedes.
Why was the US so concerned about Nasralla? He opposes corruption, violence, law-breaking, dictatorship – are these views now seen as threats to US interests? The US doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t have to, it’s the US. As reporter Allan Nairn said on Democracy NOW recently:
And at one point early in December, [acting US ambassador Heide] Fulton and John Creamer, who’s a senior State Department official and a former aide to General John Kelly of the White House, met with Nasralla. And he said that the U.S. officials were urging him to stop the protests. The protests were the one popular source of leverage against the electoral fraud, and the U.S. was trying to shut them down—without success—even though Nasralla made a point of saying he wanted to be a friend of the U.S., he wanted to be an ally of the U.S. He said he wasn’t going to touch the military base, he wasn’t going to touch the multinationals. He even said he would sign every U.S. extradition order without even reading them….
So, they decided even Nasralla, who was promising all those things to comply with the U.S., was not good enough, was not acceptable to them, because he would represent a voting out of the coup regime. The 2009 coup, which had backing from the Pentagon and from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time, put in a series of presidents, of whom Hernández is the latest, who back the oligarchy, give the U.S. a blank check to do whatever they want militarily, and who have very little popular support.
Remember that Honduran constitutional ban on a Honduran president being able to run for a second term? The military coup in 2009 claimed then-president Zelaya was trying to change the constitution. Eight years later, stealing an election in which the Honduran president succeeds himself is justified by changing the constitution. As long as the US puppet wins, principles don’t matter any more to Trump and Tillerson than they did to Obama and Clinton.
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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My Dad Was Strip-Searched at the Airport Last Weekend - and It's a Wake-Up Call for Us All |
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Friday, 29 December 2017 09:28 |
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Sampathkumar writes: "We need to follow the rules. We need to be polite to TSA and other federal agents. But we can't stop resisting."
TSA agent. (photo: Erik Lesser/Corbis)
My Dad Was Strip-Searched at the Airport Last Weekend - and It's a Wake-Up Call for Us All
By Mythili Sampathkumar, PRI
29 December 17
 n Sunday night, my dad was going through the security line at Washington Dulles International Airport to board a short domestic flight. It was, by his account, an uneventful evening, away from the protestors who were awaiting international arrivals.
According to his boarding pass, he'd been granted TSA Pre-check, the Transportation Security Administration protocol to expedite screening for passengers given an advance background check and deemed low-risk. Passengers can register for the program or, what is likely in this case, it is given to older travelers who don't fit the profile for a threat.
Still, he was directed to the regular security line anyway.
ID and boarding pass: Check. Bag, wallet, phone on the belt: check. Full body scanner: 1...2...3. Problem. He was asked to step aside by a security agent.
Instead of the public pat down or the hand-held metal detecting wand waved around travelers who has some sort of anomaly, he was taken into the separate room and asked to lift up his shirt, remove his shoes, pants and pull down his underwear. A visual check and pat down by a male TSA agent followed. He did as he was told.
They found nothing that would pose a threat and allowed him to board his plane without further inspections.
My dad is 68. He is a short, slight, bespectacled man who was born in India and has been an American citizen for 17 years. He had a green card, a visa for a legal permanent resident, for a nearly a decade before then. This was a domestic flight. So when he told me what happened, I had so many questions.
Had they seen his poonal, the sacred thread worn by some Hindu men across their chest? Was it because he had forgotten something in his pockets? Maybe he was just randomly selected for a search. He did not ask and was not told.
There is no evidence this search was related to the executive order that President Donald Trump signed on Friday. The TSA, I believe, has a difficult job in keeping us all safe and most employees are doing the best they can within the guidance they are given. I did not want to accuse anyone of wrongdoing, but I shared my dad’s story on Twitter because the strip search of an American citizen boarding a domestic flight is the type of security measures so many of us could face regularly because of Trump’s policies.
Last Wednesday, after signing his first two executive orders on immigration, Trump told the Department of Homeland Security, "From here on out, I'm asking all of you to enforce the laws of the United States of America. They will be enforced and enforced strongly." While he was directly addressing Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, TSA also falls under the purview of homeland security.
His order calls for hiring 5,000 more border patrol agents and tripling the number of immigration agents.
These words and actions send a signal: Safety takes precedence over anything else.
As of Friday, the my dad’s story has been shared thousands of times on Twitter and I’ve gotten more replies than I can count. Most people, of many ethinicities, offered support — their sincerity made me tear up. Some people said, “I’m sorry this is happening,” while others said, “This is not our country.” I also don’t believe my dad’s experience in “extreme vetting” at Dulles is the same America where my brother and I have grown up since the 80s.
We need to follow the rules. We need to be polite to TSA and other federal agents. But we can’t stop resisting.
The TSA has been sued for conducting strip searches and for racial profiling. In 2015, the agency settled a lawsuit with a woman who says she was pulled off a plane, detained and told to undress. A communications officer at TSA told PRI that asking a passenger to undress is against their policies. “TSA screening policy does not call for, ask or require passengers to undress,” he said, and offered more information about pat downs and the security process on their website.
My parents do not want to pursue a complaint, but they do want people to know what happened. There may be immigrants on visas or legal permanent residents who are scared to come forward about similar incidents, so I felt it was my responsibility to use my privilege as a US citizen to speak out.
In the run-up to the election I saw pictures of Bollywood-esque dancers, aunties and uncles clad in their best silk outfits, putting on as a fundraiser for then-candidate Donald Trump.
To me, it was both confusing and maddening. Through several conversations and Facebook posts of friends, it became clear that those Trump supporters who are immigrants from India, or whose parents are immigrants from India, don’t do so because of a single issue.
Some people liked that he is a businessman and thought he would protect corporate interests. Others were drawn in by his promise to ease visa restrictions on incoming Indians. Others simply did not want Hillary Clinton to win.
Underlying all this, though, was, "Well, we're not them," as one family friend explained it to me in August. He believed that Hindus are exempt from Trump’s ire because we’re mostly not black, Latino or LGBTQ. And certainly not Muslim. We are the “good kind” of American immigrant, your doctors and IT guys.
In turn, I explained that all brown and black and Asian people look the same to the scared and ignorant.
On Tuesday, the Republican Hindu Coalition issued a statement in support of the immigration order that bans refugees and immigrants from certain countries from entering the US. They called for more people from Muslim-majority countries be added to the list of those who will not be allowed visas.
I’m ashamed.
I’m ashamed they would equate terrorism with Muslims, given that acts of domestic terrorism in Newtown, Charleston and Oak Creek were committed by white men. I’m ashamed they came here from India, a diverse place in so many ways, and are now only in favor of a limited definition of diversity that seems to include the majority and other Indian Americans just like themselves. While most Indian Americans lean left, as do most Hindus, it bothers me that this minority group of Trump supporters can influence policies.
My dad’s experience at Dulles is just one of many negative outcomes that this group — even If unwittingly — advocated for. Divya Shridhar, a recently naturalized US citizen and family friend, was in a grocery store with her 6-year-old daughter in their Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood recently when someone yelled at her and praised Trump.
On Twitter, a new hashtag has surfaced in reaction to the Republican Hindu Coalition’s very visible position. It’s #HindusResist, created by Deepa Iyer, an author and senior fellow at the Center for Social Inclusion who has written about civil rights and the effects of profiling.
After what happened to my dad on Sunday night, I can’t help but throw my support behind it too.
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America's Endless, Invisible Wars |
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Friday, 29 December 2017 09:26 |
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Linker writes: "I wonder how many Americans could accurately answer the question of how many wars the United States is currently waging."
U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. (photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
America's Endless, Invisible Wars
By Damon Linker, The Week
29 December 17
 wonder how many Americans could accurately answer the question of how many wars the United States is currently waging.
Leave aside the pesky details — you know, like an accurate list of the countries where American forces are engaged, the strategic case for our military actions in specific theaters of battle, and the overall cost of these wars in terms of blood and treasure. I'd be content to know that a solid majority of Americans were aware that we're currently at war in (at least) seven countries across the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan.
I've added a parenthetical "at least" because our military engagements and commitments are so vast and amorphously defined that any list will almost certainly fall short of comprehensiveness. If we include covert operations, for example, we're almost certainly engaged in acts of war in several additional countries beyond those seven. And then there's the tendency among the members of our political class, including many journalists who cover it, to avoid using the term "war" for military actions that fall short of the deployment of ground troops — even when they include such acts of war as the firing of missiles at sovereign nations and the imposition or enforcement of naval blockades against them.
So it's hard to know precisely how many wars the nation is currently waging. But let's say it's seven. How widely known is this? How many Americans are aware that 71 civilians were killed in Yemen over the weekend by a U.S-backed bombing campaign by Saudi Arabia? Or that our support for Saudi interference in the Yemeni civil war was begun, with barely any public explanation or justification, by the Obama administration? Or that Congress, empowered by the Constitution to declare and fund wars, has proven itself eager to shirk its responsibilities, allowing the White House and the Pentagon to prosecute endless, invisible wars across the globe with barely any democratic oversight?
Critics of President Trump like to point out the significant threat that he and his administration pose to the health of America's liberal democratic norms and institutions. In most cases, these warnings are well-founded. But no account of the decay of American democracy will be complete without an effort to embed Trump and everything he represents within a much broader story of political decline that cuts across both parties. And war-making may be where the decline is most obvious and egregious.
Consider the Pentagon's low-key announcement earlier this month that the U.S. military will continue operations in Syria "as long as we need to." This declaration of an open-ended commitment to the deployment of American forces was barely noted in the news or in the halls of Congress. The latter is especially revealing, since Congress never authorized the deployment of forces to Syria in the first place. Yet our forces are there nonetheless, and we have now been flatly informed that they will remain with no end in sight.
Perhaps we should be grateful that we were informed at all.
It would be shockingly easy for the White House and Department of Defense to do whatever they wanted with no meaningful democratic oversight at all. Our wars are fought thousands of miles from American shores with an all-volunteer force drawn from a tiny percentage of the population. Meanwhile, the country has spent the astonishing sum of $250 million a day on war-making for each of the nearly 6,000 days since the 9/11 attacks 16 years ago. Instead of raising taxes to pay for it, Congress has cut taxes, insulating the American people entirely from the cost and handing the bill to future generations of Americans in the form of debt.
Other people fight, other people suffer, other people pay — it's a recipe for political ignorance and indifference. All the American people know is that there hasn't been another 9/11. And that one must always, no matter what, "support the troops." Together these sentiments translate into: "We dare not say anything critical about whatever the military is doing." That holds for members of Congress no less than for average Americans. Rather than raise questions or concerns, we're expected to defer. And for the most part we're all too happy to comply with this debased and degraded form of civic duty.
That's how the U.S. ended up waging seven interminable wars without so much as a congressional debate.
President Trump is a serious threat to American democracy. But this threat didn't arise out of thin air. It emerged from the exhaustion and corruption of American democracy itself. And nowhere is this exhaustion and corruption more obvious than in the country's unwillingness to exercise responsible self-governance in matters of war and peace.
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he first primary of the 2018 midterm elections, in Texas, is barely eight weeks away. It’s time to ask: Will the Russian government deploy “active measures” of the kind it used in 2016? Is it possible that a wave of disinformation on Facebook and Twitter could nudge the results of a tight congressional race in, say, Virginia or Nevada? Will hackers infiltrate low-budget campaigns in Pennsylvania and Nebraska, and leak their e-mails to the public? Will the news media and voters take the bait?
