PERFORMANCE

 

Donald Trump’s hand-picked U.S. Supreme Court continued its destructive path to protect the rich and powerful while grinding the most vulnerable in society into the ground or criminalizing them. The SEC no longer has the authority to impose punishment on financial fraudsters on its own, but the court’s decision on that case has far wider implications, potentially gutting other agencies enforcement power, which is “ironic” given that its ruling on the presidential immunity case went in the opposite direction. The court also in its voiding of an opioid settlement, made it more difficult for victims of abuses of pharmaceutical companies and/or their billionaire owners to receive compensation without years of court struggle, if at all. 

Yet on the other hand, it ruled that communities can criminalize the act of sleeping by any human being who has the misfortune of being homeless; Grants Pass in Oregon has no public homeless shelters, so it is into the surrounding woods so as to be "out of sight, out of mind" for those "good" people.  On the other hand, jail might be the best “option” to stay out of the rain, if the town has so much space for "criminals."

But to top it all off, the Court—after a shockingly misbegotten ruling on the January 6 rioters that dissenters rightly pointed out that there was nothing “confusing” about the meaning of “obstruction of a government proceeding”--simply gave away its oversight authority of the office of the presidency in its misbegotten attempt to protect Trump from any accountability for any actions that outside of that office would be regarded as felony crimes. No governor of a state is given such immunity, and no other democratic country allows its heads-of-state such blanket immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed her outrage at the grasping-at-straws “justification” for the majority’s inexcusable ruling:

The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military dissenting coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

"Founding Father" Alexander Hamilton was one who would have agreed with this sentiment; to him, the whole reason for the revolution was to prohibit a government with a head-of-state who was given limitless power without accountability—i.e. a king. But perhaps “king” is too kind an appellation for a psychopath like Trump:  fascism and dictatorship is much more suitable to his and his minions’ personalities. I don’t see any “exaggeration” in this assertion; migrants are the stand-ins for what Jews represented in Third Reich; where do you think the idea of calling migrants “vermin” came from?

 

 

That from the Nazi film The Eternal Jew. Those like Trump who claim to be such "friends" of Israel sure know their Nazi imagery. Meanwhile, Trump claims he will only be a “dictator” for one day, but the damage he could do to democracy and civil society on "one day" might never be undone. Do we really want to take that chance?

The Supreme Court majority cowardly punted the ball back to the lower courts to determine the meaning of what an “unofficial” act is, before it "revisits" the immunity case again, thus doing its duty for Trump by insuring he will never be prosecuted for his attempt to undermine the "legitimacy" of democracy in this country, perhaps for all time. 

But we can have no doubt that what this ruling means to Trump if he is elected; he won’t be aware of any “ambiguity” in the majority’s decision—he can declare anything an “official” act. Maybe he cuts himself shaving, and in a fit of anger he shouts out some devilment against a perceived enemy, and his minions take him at his word. Perhaps it is to assassinate the president of a Western ally who has criticized him, and perhaps someone will enlist his friend Vladimir Putin to assist him in exchange for the identities of one or two undercover agents, or end all assistance to Ukraine.   

You think I'm nuts? Don't you remember the Iran-Contra Scandal? Ronald Reagan allegedly just gave his minions an order to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and low-class functionaries like Oliver North just ran with it. There is certainly historical precedent to point to, like Henry II’s fit of anger at Thomas Beckett which was “interpreted”  by those who heard him as a “command” and a way to get on his good side, by assassinating Beckett in his cathedral.

Of interest in Trump’s classified documents case is his possession of a news story detailing the death of Valentin Broeksmit. Who was he? A whistleblower who could have tied Trump with Deutsche Bank and its illicit activities in Russia? Broeksmit apparently had hacked into his deceased father’s computer and found incriminating information. He was then reported as missing for a year and then suddenly turned-up dead on the grounds of a Los Angeles high school. 

The autopsy report claimed he suffered from blunt-force injuries after falling from a tree. How ridiculous does that sound?  It sounds like any other “explanation” for a Putin critic falling out of a window; it is within the realm of possibility that Broeksmit was beaten to death, and then his body “fell” from a tree. But then again he was just a drug addict whose stepfather, a Deutsche Bank executive, hanged himself in 2014, perhaps to forestall revelations of his knowledge that the bank was involved in money laundering in Russia.

All of that is to set-up our next word of the week:

 

After last week’s presidential debate, everyone on the left of center politically was wringing their hands over the "performance" of Joe Biden and his beady little eyes. I have to admit that Biden tried to sound calm and cool, just not very “collected.” On the other hand, Trump merely spouted the same outrageous lies and misrepresentations that he has repeated thousands of times at countless campaign events or on his “Truth” Social website. He has them implanted into his hate-filled brain, as natural to him as breathing, so why would he have “difficulty” in remembering them? How many times have we seen Trump slur or mispronounce words, or forget his train of thought or even what city he is in, when he is forced to go off the reservation?

CNN’s “moderators” once again punted the ball…

 

…in Trump’s favor, allowing him to call all migrants escapees from jails and mental hospitals, even families with children escaping violence that the U.S. has its filthy paws all over; do people actually believe that, or does it matter? People just don’t “like” them and don’t want them around, even if they do help the economy; if one or two commit crimes worth reporting outrage over, they are “all” guilty, even the children.   

But the media—including MSNBC—is too busy wringing its hands over Biden’s “performance,” and not pointing out what the 70s funk group War once reminded us of in “Why Can’t We Be Friends”:

Sometimes I don't speak right
But yet I know what I'm talking about

As I was telling a Latina who seemed to be “not sure” if it was “OK” to vote for Biden, he has administrators working for him who have the interests of the people in mind, while Trump has a cadre of loyal Nazis ready to do his evil bidding. It’s still no contest for me. Sure, I wish Biden had just called it a day after one term and let someone in who could make mincemeat out of Trump’s various evil absurdities, but whether that can be enunciated “properly” or not is beside the point. The “mainstream” media must remind people that with the new powers the far-right of the Supreme Court has given him, Trump is even more dangerous than he could ever have been before. Why be “afraid” of being called names by fascists? In “The Logical Song” Supertramp pointed out this pointless either/or “dilemma”:

I said, now, watch what you say, they'll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh, fanatical, criminal
Oh, won't you sign up your name? We'd like to feel you're acceptable
Respectable, oh, presentable, a vegetable

Of course we are told that minority and young voters are “abandoning” Biden, but that is hardly surprising given that what they listen to these days reinforces their self-obsessed, narcissistic selves; they don’t believe in anything else, the world is going to pot anyways, just in a different way than the “Armageddon” predicted by extremist Christian sects. Wouldn't it just be "better" to make this world last just a little bit longer, to give us a little more time to figure out what is needed to be done--as if we haven't already figured that out and need to "relearn" the playbook?

Remember the “outrage” when Barack Obama had the audacity to join the debate stage with Democratic candidates that including Hillary Clinton, who the media was already crowning as the party nominee for president in 2008? The mainstream media was astonished that even white people expressed support for Obama over Clinton in the polls, and even voted for him in the primaries. After Obama won more delegates than Clinton and would be the apparent nominee for president, people like former TV news anchor and feminist commentator Bonnie Erbe asserted that Obama had a “white women problem," and in an op-ed “urged” Obama to “step aside” because white people wouldn’t vote for him. I wonder why we didn't hear from her again after the election.

Of course Clinton joined in the misery circus; in an infamous interview, she made the strange allusion to Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination the night he won the California primary 40 years earlier. Was she talking about her own “assassination” after she had been expected to win the nomination—or was she alluding to the possibility that Obama would for some reason be “eliminated”? But then again, there is no point in being “shocked” by such thought crimes,  as when the former president of NOW (are they still around?) “Ellie” Smeal claiming in USA Today that the media reporting homicide cases involving white female perpetrators like Pamela Smart and Susan Smith were examples of “racism against white women.”

But let’s go further back. I remember in 1984 there was “concern” about Reagan’s age and mental capacity. He had this weird habit of bobbing his head, talking slow and saying strange things on a juvenile level, occasionally inserting a joke to solicit the good will of journalists reporting his latest follies. And yet he won the 1984 election in a landslide over Walter Mondale, who probably wasn’t helped by the fact he was Jimmy Carter’s vice president.

But let’s go back even further. In 1975, Sen. Frank Church, whose Church Committee hearings uncovered “shocking” abuses by the CIA, FBI and the NSA ostensibly under the “management” of the president, that included assassination attempts on world leaders. He had this to say about his concerns about what this country could become:

If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. 

I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

Now the circumstances may be different (there was no social media "technology" as we see today), but the results would be the same if this country was allowed to be controlled by a president with dictatorial instincts and had a “supreme court” that simply gave away its oversight authority to control such abuses of power against democratic institutions.

Yes, you “bedwetters,” the potential for that is what you should be wetting your beds over. It is imperative to vote for anyone not named Trump, a psychopath whose worldview is not about making America “great,” but making it a nightmare world that it may never recover from if he is elected again. If Biden is still the Democratic nominee, he may not “speak right,” but he knows what he is “talking about.”