Global Research – March 2, 2017
Trump’s Address to the US Congress:
Making America Safe for Wall Street and War Profiteers
By Stephen Lendman
His February 28, 2017 address was long on making America safe for Wall Street, war profiteers and other corporate predators, short on what’s most needed to serve all Americans equitably and promote world peace.
He focused on increased military spending at a time major cuts are needed, combating terrorism without explaining ISIS and likeminded groups are US creations, used as imperial foot soldiers.
He called for repealing and replacing Obamacare, omitting what he and GOP lawmakers want is something worse, maybe devastating for the nation’s most vulnerable.
We will soon begin the construction of a great wall along our southern border,” he said. He lied claiming it’ll deter illicit drugs and crime.
He covered his notion of immigration reform, falsely claiming “it will save countless dollars, raise workers’ wages, and help struggling families, including immigrant families, enter the middle class.
Middle America has been disappearing for years. Neoliberal harshness since the 1990s wrecked it. Nothing in prospect suggests resurrection.
He wants America more militarized than ever, intending greater funding for police – to protect the nation’s privileged class from beneficial social change.
Changes he’ll propose in America’s tax code are unrelated to letting “our companies…compete and thrive anywhere and with anyone.” He lied claiming otherwise.
Corporate tax cuts don’t create jobs. Economic growth does. GW Bush and Obama gave business trillions of dollars in tax breaks. Their balance sheets and bottom line performance benefitted.
Enormous amounts of corporate wealth went to tax havens, were used for stock buybacks, along with higher executive pay and bonuses, nothing helping workers, nothing creating jobs.
Job reductions accompanied foreign investments. Offshoring was rewarded. Rotten part-time jobs replaced good full-time ones.
Corporate America and high-net worth households never had things better. Unprecedented wealth amounts shifted from ordinary people to them.
The great wealth transfer heist continues, America thirdworldized in the process, nothing being done to change things. Trump’s economic plan may make conditions worse with Goldman Sachs in charge of administration policy.
His address said nothing about Russia, little about foreign policy. America remains the world’s leading pariah state on his watch, its leading bully, waging endless wars of aggression.
He lied claiming the “United States respects the right of all nations to chart their own path.” Humanity profoundly disagrees.
Candidate Trump called NATO “obsolete.” Before Congress he expressed strong support for “an alliance forged through the bonds of two World Wars that dethroned fascism, and a Cold War that defeated communism.”
NATO is a killing machine, used for offense, not defense. World peace, stability and security are impossible as long as the alliance exists.
Saying he “want(s) harmony and stability, not war and conflict,” imperial wars rage on his watch in multiple theaters – nothing said about ending US aggression against nations threatening no one, nothing about the grand deception of America’s war on terrorism.
His address was long on hyperbole and bluster, short on a compelling need for a new direction.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/trumps-address-to-the-us-congress-making-america-safe-for-wall-street-and-war-profiteers/5577546
So, What Is To Be Done?
By Paul Craig Roberts
The question in the title is V.I. Lenin's question. His answer was to create a revolutionary "vanguard" to spread revolutionary ideas among the workers, the economic class that Karl Marx had declared to be the class rising to the ascendency of political power. Finally, democracy, frustrated by upper class interests in its earlier manifestations, would become reality. The workers would rule.
Given the presence of evil and human failing, it did not work out in that way. But Lenin's question remains a valid one. Americans whose economic life and prospects for their children have been destroyed by the offshoring of American manufacturing and tradable professional skills jobs, such as software engineering, answered the question by electing Donald Trump.
The Americans, dispossessed by the offshoring corporations, elected Trump, because Trump was the only American running for a political office who called attention to the problem and declared his intention to fix it.
By standing up for Americans, Trump alienated the global corporations, their executives and shareholders, all of whom benefit from stealing the economic life of Americans and producing abroad where labor and regulatory costs are lower. Neoliberal junk economists describe this labor arbitrage, which reduces the real incomes of the American labor force, as the beneficial working of free trade.
These offshoring firms not only have destroyed the economic prospects of millions of Americans, but also have destroyed the payroll tax base of Social Security and Medicare, and the tax base of local and state governments, with the consequence that numerous pension systems are on the verge of failure. The New York Teamsters Road Carriers Local 707 Pension Fund has just failed. This failure, experts predict, is the beginning of a tsunami that will spread into municipal and state pension systems.
When you add up the external costs of jobs offshoring that are imposed on Americans, the costs far exceed the value of the profits that flow to the One Percent. Clearly, this is an intolerable situation.
Dispossessed Americans rose up. They ignored the presstitute media, or perhaps were driven to support Trump by the hostility of the media. Trump was elected by dispossessed America, by the working class.
The working class is out of favor with the elite liberal/progressive/left which abhors the working class as racist, misogynist, homophobic, gun nuts who oppose trans-gendered toilet facilities. Thus, the working class, and their chosen representative, Donald Trump, are under full assault by the presstitutes. "Trump Must Go" is their slogan.
And well he might. Trump, in a fit of stupidity, dismissed his National Security Adviser, Gen. Flynn, because Flynn did what he should have done and spoke with the Russian ambassador in order to avoid a Russian response to Obama's provocation of expelling Russian diplomats at Christmas.
Russians have been demonized and ascribed demonic powers. If you speak to a Russian, you fall under suspicion and become a traitor to your country. This is the story according to the CIA, the Democratic Party, the military/security complex, and the presstitute media.
Once Trump put Flynn's blood in the water, he set the situation for the sacrifice of other of his appointees, ending with himself. At the present time, "the Russian connection" black mark is operating against Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. If Sessions falls, Trump is next.
Let's be clear. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sessions met with the Russian ambassador, just as he met with a number of other countries' ambassadors. There is nothing unusual or surprising about a US senator meeting with foreign diplomatic representatives.
Those who accuse Sessions of lying are misrepresenting the facts. Sessions met with ambassadors in his capacity as a US Senator, not in his capacity as a Trump representative. As a former US Senate staffer, I can attest that it is perfectly normal for US Senators to meet with diplomats. John McCain and Lindsey Graham even fly to the Middle East to meet with terrorists.
Despite the facts, the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and all the rest of the CIA's media whores are consciously and intentionally misrepresenting the facts. Americans do not need any more evidence that the entirety of the American media is totally devoid of integrity and respect for truth. The American media is a collection of whores who lie for a living. The presstitutes are despicable, the scum of the earth.
The real question is how has contact with Russian government officials become criminalized, grounds for removing a National Security Adviser, an Attorney General, and impeaching a President himself. President John F. Kennedy had ongoing contact with Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet government, in order to resolve the Cuban/Turkish missile crisis without nuclear war. President Nixon had ongoing contact with the Russians in order to achieve SALT I and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. President Carter had ongoing contact with Russians in order to achieve SALT II. President Reagan worked with the Russian leader in order to end the Cold War. I know. I was there.
But if President Trump wants to defuse the extremely dangerous tensions that the reckless Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have resurrected with a powerful thermo-nuclear state that only wants peace with the US, President Trump and any of his appointees who spoke to a Russian are unfit for office! This madness is the position of the idiot liberal/progressive/left, the CIA, the Democratic Party, the right-wing morons of the Republican Party such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and the two-bit whores that comprise the Western media.
Dear reader, ask yourself, how did communications with Russians in the interest of peace and the reduction of tensions become a criminal act? Have laws been passed that it is forbidden for US officials to speak with Russian officials? Are you so utterly stupid that a presstitute media that has never in your entire life told you anything that was truthful can convince you that those who seek to avoid a conflict between thermo-nuclear powers are "Russian agents"?
I have no doubt that the vast bulk of Western populations are insouciant. But if there is no intelligence and awareness left anywhere in the population, and most certainly there is none whatsoever in the governments of the West or in the Western media or the Identity Politics of the liberal/progressive/left, then don't expect to be alive much longer.
The entirety of the world has been put on the knife edge of existence by the arrogance, stupidity, and hubris of the neoconservative pursuit of American world hegemony. The neoconservative ideology is perfect cover for the material interest of the military/security Deep State that is driving the world to destruction.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/So-What-Is-To-Be-Done-by-Paul-Craig-Roberts-CIA_Lenin_Politics_Presstitutes-170303-801.html
Some of Steve Bannon's biggest intellectual
influences are Fascists and White Supremacists
By Ben Norton
Steve Bannon just can't help himself. Despite the media glare that comes with being the president's chief strategist, the former Breitbart editor-in-chief continues to cite fascists and white supremacists without compunction or even discretion.
A recent investigation by the Huffington Post exposed how Bannon's fondness for The Camp of the Saints, an obscure French novel that portrays a race war between the "civilized" white West and the evil brown hordes of the so-called East. The Huffington Post highlighted several interviews in 2015 and 2016 in which Bannon compared global politics and the refugee crisis to the plot of the book, which has been likened to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
The Camp of the Saints, which takes its title from the Bible, was written by ultra-reactionary French author Jean Raspail, who openly describes himself as a "royalist" who wants to restore the Catholic monarchy. In the book, he describes hordes of Indians trying to conquer white Western Christendom as "thousands of wretched creatures" and "turd-eaters."
The Huffington Post described the novel Bannon admires as "nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within."
Yet Bannon's admiration of The Camp of the Saints is by no means an isolated example of his extreme far-right politics. The New York Times pointed out that Trump's right-hand man cited Nazi-affiliated Italian philosopher Julius Evola in a 2014 speech at a Christian conference.
Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italian fascism, greatly admired Evola. The Italian leader of the extreme right-wing Traditionalist movement wrote for fascist publications and journals, espousing anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian ideas. Evola was virulently racist and anti-Semitic and openly claimed that non-European races were inferior. He also condoned patriarchal domination of women and advocated rape.
A big fan of Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, Evola spent years in Nazi Germany, where he gave lectures. He personally welcomed Mussolini to the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's military headquarters. In a post-war trial in 1951, Evola denied being part of Mussolini's fascist movement, which was apparently not bombastic enough for his tastes; instead, he proudly declared himself to be a "superfascist."
Neo-fascist leader Richard Spencer told the Times he was excited that Bannon knew of Evola.
"It means a tremendous amount," Spencer said, adding that Trump's chief strategist "is at least open to them."
I reported on Bannon's 2014 speech, in which he described his belief in an intractable violent conflict between the "enlightened" Christian West and the forces of Islam, secularism and socialism.
"We're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict," Bannon warned. "We are in an outright war against jihadists, Islam, Islamic fascism."
He condemned the "immense secularization of the West" and the increasing secularism among millennials, and insisted that Christians must "bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the Church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity."
Right-wing pundit Glenn Beck went so far as to compare Bannon to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, calling Bannon "quite possibly the most dangerous guy in all of American politics."
Fascist forces in the West are not the only ones that find a kindred spirit in Bannon. Bannon's mortal enemy, Islamist extremists, share Bannon's eschatological, clash-of-civilizations worldview. In fact, al-Qaeda identifies so much with Bannon's ideas, it put him on the front page of an affiliated newspaper, al-Masra.
The genocidal Islamic State has made it clear that its goal is to destroy the so-called Grayzone, or space where Muslims are accepted in Western countries. Far-right leaders like Trump and Bannon—along with their extreme, anti-Muslim counterparts Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and beyond—help extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda fulfill their missions.
ISIS has rejoiced at Trump's presidential victory. An ISIS-affiliated media network said, in a translation quoted by the Washington Post, "Trump's win of the American presidency will bring hostility of Muslims against America as a result of his reckless actions, which show the overt and hidden hatred against them."
Before becoming Trump's right-hand man in the Oval Office and CEO of Trump's campaign before that, Bannon was previously chair of the far-right website Breitbart News, and a founding board member. Bannon proudly described Breitbart as "the platform for the alt-right," using the popular euphemism for the white supremacist movement led by neo-fascists like Richard Spencer.
Spencer, who adores Trump, is an avowed white supremacist who coined the term "alt-right" and edits a website of the same name, where he has published articles justifying "black genocide." At a fascist conference in Washington, D.C., in November, Spencer was caught on camera shouting "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!" a reference to the Nazi slogan "Sieg Heil."
Ben Norton is a reporter for AlterNet's Grayzone Project.
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/steve-bannon-fascist-white-supremacist
Bannon Called for Christian Holy War
By Ben Norton
Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump's right-hand man, made what was essentially a call for a Christian holy war in a speech in a international conference only a few years ago.
Bannon, chief strategist and senior counselor to Trump, is notorious for his extreme right-wing views. He previously served as the CEO for the far-right president's campaign, and now sits on the National Security Council.
In remarks to a 2014 conference at the Vatican, Bannon warned his Christian audience, "We're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict."
"We are in an outright war against jihadists, Islam, Islamic fascism," Bannon continued. He likewise condemned "the immense secularization of the West" and the increasing secularism among millennials.
Bannon stressed that "the people in this room, and the people in the Church" must "bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the Church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that's starting that will literally eradicate everything that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000 and 2,500 years."
In his speech, Bannon articulated a view of the world as a constant conflict between the capitalist "Judeo-Christian West," which is a benevolent force of "enlightenment," and the malevolent forces of socialism, atheism, and Islam.
Trump's chief strategist, who will now play a crucial role in crafting U.S. foreign policy and sit in on meetings of the National Security Council Principals Committee, has been described even by hard-line conservatives as an extremist.
Ultra-right-wing pundit Glenn Beck compared Bannon to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, a close ally of Adolf Hitler, and said the Trump campaign was “grooming Brownshirts,” in reference to Nazi paramilitaries. According to Beck, Bannon is “quite possibly the most dangerous guy in all of American politics.”
Republican strategist John Weaver, who worked on Republican John Kasich's 2016 presidential campaign, likewise warned that, with Bannon as Trump's chief strategist, "The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office." (The Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party praised Trump for appointing Bannon to his top positions.)
Bannon made these holy war remarks in a speech—which has previously been reported on by BuzzFeed—at the 2014 International Conference on Human Dignity, the third annual meeting organized by the Rome-based Christian organization Dignitatis Humanae Institute.
The Dignitatis Humanae Institute is a religious group that advocates for "the active participation of the Christian faith in the public square." It promotes what it calls "authentic human dignity" by, in its words, "supporting Christians in public life, assisting them in presenting effective and coherent responses to increasing efforts to silence the Christian voice in the public square."
A glowing endorsement from Bannon is conspicuously featured at the top of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute's website, in which President Trump's right-hand man calls the group's founder Benjamin Harnwell "the smartest guy in Rome" and "a very tough guy."
The religious organization uploaded footage of Bannon's speech at its 2014 conference to YouTube. The video had only a few thousand views at the time of the publication of this article.
When he made his remarks, Bannon served as chairman of the far-right media company Breitbart, which is infamous for publishing racist and sexist material. Bannon has identified Breitbart as "the platform for the alt-right," a popular euphemism for the growing white supremacist, neo-fascist movement in the U.S. and Europe…..
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/steve-bannon-christian-holy-war-islam-donald-trump-capitalism-secularism-atheism
The Conservative – March 3, 2017
U.S. mass deportation system is rooted in racism
By Kelly Lytle Hernandez
A rowdy segment of the American electorate is hell-bent on banning a specific group of immigrants from entering the United States. Thousands upon thousands of other people – citizens and immigrants, alike – oppose them, choosing to go to court rather than fulfill the electorate’s narrow vision of what America should look like: white, middle-class and Christian.
Soon a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings could grant unrestrained power to Congress and the president over immigration control. More than 50 million people could be deported. Countless others might be barred from entering. Most of them would be poor, nonwhite and non-Christian.
This may sound like wild speculation about what is to come in President Donald Trump’s America. It is not. It is the history of U.S. immigration control, which is the focus of my work in the books “Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol” and “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles.
Historically speaking, immigration control is one of the least constitutional and most racist realms of governance in U.S. law and life.
Made in the American West
The modern system of U.S. immigration control began in the 19th-century American West. Between the 1840s and 1880s, the United States government warred with indigenous peoples and Mexico to lay claim to the region. Droves of Anglo-American families soon followed, believing it was their Manifest Destiny to dominate land, law and life in the region.
But indigenous peoples never disappeared (see Standing Rock) and nonwhite migrants arrived (see the state of California). Chinese immigrants, in particular, arrived in large numbers during the 19th century. A travel writer who was popular at the time, Bayard Taylor, expressed the sentiment settlers felt toward Chinese immigrants in one of his books:
“The Chinese are, morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth… their touch is pollution… They should not be allowed to settle on our soil.”
When discriminatory laws and settler violence failed to expel them from the region, the settlers pounded Congress to develop a system of federal immigration control.
In response to their demands, Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country for 10 years. The law focused on Chinese laborers, the single largest sector of the Chinese immigrant community. In 1884, Congress required all Chinese laborers admitted before the Exclusion Act was passed to secure a certificate of reentry if they wanted to leave and return. But, in 1888,” Congress banned even those with certificates from reentering..
Then, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was set to expire in 1892, Congress passed the Geary Act, which again banned all Chinese laborers and required all Chinese immigrants to verify their lawful presence by registering with the federal government. The federal authorities were empowered by the law to find, imprison and deport all Chinese immigrants who failed to register by May 1893.
Together, these laws banned a nationally targeted population from entering the United States and invented the first system of mass deportation. Nothing quite like this had ever before been tried in the United States.
Chinese immigrants rebelled against the new laws. In 1888, a laborer named Chae Chan Ping was denied the right of return despite having a reentry certificate and was subsequently confined on a steamship. The Chinese immigrant community hired lawyers to fight his case. The lawyers argued the case up to the U.S. Supreme Court but lost when the court ruled that “the power of exclusion of foreigners [is an] incident of sovereignty belonging to the government of the United States” and “cannot be granted away or restrained on behalf of anyone.”
Simply put, Chae Chan Ping v. U.S. established that Congress and the president hold “absolute” and “unqualified” authority over immigrant entry and exclusion at U.S. borders.
Chinese exclusion cases
Despite this loss, Chinese immigrants refused to comply with the 1892 Geary Act, submitting themselves for arrest and risking both imprisonment and deportation rather than registering with the federal government.
They also hired some of the nation’s best constitutional lawyers. Together, they swarmed the courts with challenges to the Geary Act. In May 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear its first deportation case, Fong Yue Ting v. U.S. and quickly ruled that deportation is also a realm of “absolute” authority held by Congress and the president. The court wrote:
“The provisions of the Constitution, securing the right of trial by jury and prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures, and cruel and unusual punishments, have no application.”
In other words, the U.S. Constitution did not apply to deportation. Immigration authorities could develop practices to identify, round up and deport noncitizens without constitutional review.
It was a stunning ruling even by 19th-century standards. So stunning that three of the justices issued scathing dissents, arguing that the U.S. Constitution applies to every law enforced within the United States. As Justice Brewer put it:
“The Constitution has potency everywhere within the limits of our territory, and the powers which the national government may exercise within such limits are those, and only those, given to it by that instrument.”
But such dissent held no sway. Six years later, the U.S. Supreme Court tripled down on immigration control as exempt from judicial review. In that 1896 ruling, Wong Wing v. U.S., which was issued on the same day as the court upheld racial segregation laws in its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the court held that the Constitution does not apply to the conditions of immigrant detention.
By 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court had granted Congress and the president nearly unrestrained power over excluding, deporting and detaining noncitizens, both at U.S. borders and within the national territory. To date, they have used that authority to deport and forcibly remove more than 50 million people and ban countless others from entering the country. Most of them are nonwhite, many of them poor and a disproportionate share non-Christian.
Making America great again
Over time, Congress and the courts placed several limits on what is allowable in immigration control. For example, the 1965 Immigration Reform Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, gender, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.” And several court rulings have added a measure of constitutional protections to deportation proceedings and detention conditions.
But, in recent weeks, Trump and his advisers have tapped into the foundational architecture of U.S. immigration control to argue that the president’s executive orders on immigration control are “unreviewable” by the courts. As Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller put it: The president’s executive powers over immigration control “will not be questioned.”
On Feb. 9, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit turned down the administration’s “unreviewable” argument regarding the so-called Muslim ban. But Trump’s immigration enforcement order still stands. This includes a provision that subjects even those unauthorized immigrants who are simply suspected of crime to immediate removal. It also denies many of the immigrants who unlawfully cross our borders the due process protections recently added to deportation proceedings.
If implemented as promised – that is, with a focus on “bad hombres” and the U.S.-Mexico border – Trump’s immigration plan will exacerbate the already disproportionate impact of U.S. immigration control on Latino immigrants, namely Mexicans and Central Americans. U.S. immigration may no longer target Chinese immigrants, but it remains one of the most highly racialized police projects within the United States.
Trump’s executive orders are pulling U.S. immigration control back to its roots, absolute and racial. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit pushed back against this interpretation, affirming the reviewability of the seven-country ban. But the decisions made during the Chinese exclusion era are likely to protect many of the president’s other orders from judicial review. That is, unless we overturn the settler mentality of U.S. immigration control.
Kelly Lytle HernandezοΎ - Associate Professor, History and African-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
Executive Editor: Abdus Sattar Ghazali
www.amperspective.com Online Magazine
