Glenn Kirschner – New evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump committed felony obstruction of justice
Meidas Touch – MAGA Republicans repeat BLATANT RACISM at Arizona Trump Rally
The Lincoln Project – America or MAGA
MSNBC – Maddow: Humans Have A Muscle For Authoritarian, Fascist, Anti-Semitic, Racist Wedge Politics
Armageddon Update – Death Walker of Democracy
Beau – Let’s talk about DOD changing the cars you see….
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
It’s all very well to discuss how to deal with a tyrant or an autocrat when you actually have one – whether in your own country, or from the outside looking in at another country. But, you know, things change. It seems pretty clear that Texas, for instance, is a virtual autocracy right now. But it hasn’t always been so. Ann Richards was governor once – up until 1996. Between then and 2015, something happened. But what exactly? During those years, one assumes Texas was sliding into autocracy. How exactly?
NATO was formed to be an alliance of western democracies. Turkey is a member. Turkey is being described as “sliding into autocracy.” How far down that slippery slope is it really? Is it far enough to be expelled from NATO? Is there even any provision for a country to be expelled from NATO if it ceases to be a democracy? At one point does a nation cease to be a democracy?
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Ronald Suny, University of Michigan
After decades of neutrality, the two Nordic states that have to date remained out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by declaring an intention to join the American-led alliance. But there is a major obstacle in their way: Turkey.
The increasingly autocratic and anti-democratic president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said he will not agree to the entry of these two countries. And as a member of NATO, Turkey’s approval is needed for Finland and Sweden to join.
Erdogan is alone among NATO leaders in publicly stating that he is against the two countries’ joining the alliance.
The Turkish president’s opposition is based on his view that Finland and Sweden support “terrorists.” What Erdogan means is that both countries have given protection and residence to members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK – the major armed group mounting resistance to Turkey’s harsh treatment of its millions of Kurdish citizens. The plight of the country’s Kurds, part of a large but stateless ethnic group in the region, has long been a bone of contention between Turkey and parts of the international community.
Despite the PKK’s being listed by the U.S. and EU as a terrorist group, Finland and Sweden have been reluctant to extradite members of the group to Turkey over human rights concerns. Erdogan has responded by calling Sweden a “hatchery” for terrorism and claiming neither country has “a clear, open attitude” toward terrorist organizations, adding: “How can we trust them?”
Erdoğan’s ire with Finland and Sweden has also been exacerbated by the country hosting followers of Turkish scholar and cleric Fethullah Gulen. These followers are part of an educational and political movement with which Erdogan had been allied, but with which he broke as it grew more powerful. The Turkish president accuses the Gulenists of staging a failed coup against his government in 2016.
As if that were not enough, the neutral northern Europeans condemned Turkey’s 2019 incursion into Syria. In that operation, the Turks targeted Rojava – a socialist, feminist autonomous Kurdish enclave near the Turkish border. Complicating the matter, the Syrians of Rojava were – despite their links to the PKK – allies of the American forces. The Kurds of Rojava played a crucial role beating back the Islamic State group in Syria but were later abandoned by the Trump administration, which pulled U.S. troops back from the Turkish border, allowing its NATO ally to launch a military operation against the Kurds.
Foreign policy is almost always intimately tied to domestic concerns. In the case of Turkey’s government, a major fear is the threat to its grip on power posed by the Kurds – and international pressure over Turkey’s record of repressing the group.
Turkey’s Kurdish populations are not allowed free elections in the eastern Anatolian region, where they are the majority. Meanwhile, education and cultural institutions in the Kurdish language face a de facto ban.
Finland and Sweden are neutral countries not beholden to the strategic compromises that the United States and NATO are forced to make to hold the alliance together. Both countries have to date been free to take a moral position on Turkey’s position on Kurdish rights and have officially protested the repressions of dissidents, academics, journalists and minority groups.
Meanwhile, NATO countries have equivocated before their fellow member, agreeing to label the PKK a terrorist organization.
So where does this all leave Finland and Sweden’s application for NATO membership?
The rules for entry into the strategic alliance require unanimity of the current NATO members.
As such, Turkey can effectively veto the entry of Finland and Sweden.
The standoff highlights an underlying problem the alliance is facing. NATO is supposed to be an alliance of democratic countries. Yet several of its members – notably Turkey and Hungary – have moved steadily away from liberal democracy toward ethnonational populist authoritarianism.
Finland and Sweden, on the other hand, fulfill the parameters of NATO membership more clearly than several of the alliance’s current members. As the United States proclaims that the war in Ukraine is a struggle between democracy and autocracy, Turkey’s opposition to the Nordics who have protested its drift to illiberalism are testing the unity and the ideological coherence of NATO.
Ronald Suny, Professor of History and Political Science, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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AMT, I have one word: “filibuster.”
The Furies and I will be back.
Yesterday, among other things, I heard from Mitch (our Mitch, I mean, of course – not BBM!) I had passed on a little info from comments about how we all are doing, and he was grateful to know and sends encouragement. He also gave me permission to pass on that he had his first cario rehab (yesterday); and it went well. It was a combination of assessment and workout, and he did more execcise than he had done since the day before the attack, and ended up not feeling not that bad. This coming Monday he will be doing it 3x weekly. He’s not up to commenting yet. He’s grateful for everyone’s concern. Of course I told him to take all the time he needed (where have I heard that before?)
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
CPR News – After almost 80 years, roses from Colorado’s Amache internment camp may bloom again
Quote – It was during an archaeological dig that the rosebush was discovered. Bonnie Clark, an archaeologist with the University of Denver, and her team were on-site at Camp Amache when they found the bramble crawling across the remnants of a barracks doorway in 2012. It had survived a dark time in American history and the unforgiving extremes of Colorado’s southeastern plains…. Clark, who leads the DU Amache Research Project and Field School, believes people who were imprisoned at the camp planted the roses. “It’s hard to know which family planted them,” she said. “But most of the people who lived in the block where we found them at Amache were from Los Angeles.”
Click through to learn what all it took to accomplish this. Not only is this good news, but it comes at a time when the White House Rose Garden has just been partially restored and is colorful again.
Robert Reich – What you need to know about the anti-democracy movement
Quote – Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier who is among those leading the charge, writes “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel is using his fortune to squelch democracy. He donated $15 million to the successful Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of J.D. Vance, who alleges that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” And Thiel has donated at least $10 million to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claims Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.
Click through for more – I suppose, since no one is perfet, there are times when the Reich on the left is not right, but I haven’t seen it yet. This may be the most important thing about our drift to autocracy which has yet been said – that it isn’t a drift, it’s a conscious push.
Crooks and Liars – Katie Porter: Dems Are Actually Doing Something About Inflation
Quote – “We have monopolies today in virtually everything. There is a bread monopoly, there’s a cereal monopoly, beef monopoly. So we need to create this competition. It’s going to help not only consumers, but small businesses wanting to enter these marketplaces. More competition is better for our economy, period. The only people who benefit from monopolies are the monopolists themselves.”
Click through for some details and how to message. This is difficult because it is complex yet the solution is pretty clear – and proven to work (Remember the Sherman Anti-Trust Act?) there’s also a video, if you can stand Joe and Mika for a few minites.
Food For Thought
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
I can’t say that there’s much, if anything, new in this article. It does juxtapose two issues of which we are only too well aware, and demonstrates that the two are actually more or less the same. Hopefully we can learn something from that.
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Eve Darian-Smith, University of California, Irvine
Around the world, many countries are becoming less democratic. This backsliding on democracy and “creeping authoritarianism,” as the U.S. State Department puts it, is often supported by the same industries that are escalating climate change.
In my new book, “Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis,” I lay out connections between these industries and the politicians who are both stalling action on climate change and diminishing democracy.
It’s a dangerous shift, both for representative government and for the future climate.
In democratic systems, elected leaders are expected to protect the public’s interests, including from exploitation by corporations. They do this primarily through policies designed to secure public goods, such as clean air and unpolluted water, or to protect human welfare, such as good working conditions and minimum wages. But in recent decades, this core democratic principle that prioritizes citizens over corporate profits has been aggressively undermined.
Today, it’s easy to find political leaders – on both the political right and left – working on behalf of corporations in energy, finance, agribusiness, technology, military and pharmaceutical sectors, and not always in the public interest. These multinational companies help fund their political careers and election campaigns to keep them in office.
In the U.S., this relationship was cemented by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United. The decision allowed almost unlimited spending by corporations and wealthy donors to support the political candidates who best serve their interests. Data shows that candidates with the most outside funding usually win. This has led to increasing corporate influence on politicians and party policies.
When it comes to the political parties, it’s easy to find examples of campaign finance fueling political agendas.
In 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen testified before a U.S. Senate committee about the greenhouse effect, both the Republican and Democratic parties took climate change seriously. But this attitude quickly diverged. Since the 1990s, the energy sector has heavily financed conservative candidates who have pushed its interests and helped to reduce regulations on the fossil fuel industry. This has enabled the expansion of fossil fuel production and escalated CO2 emissions to dangerous levels.
The industry’s power in shaping policy plays out in examples like the coalition of 19 Republican state attorneys general and coal companies suing to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
At the same time that the energy sector has sought to influence policies on climate change, it has also worked to undermine the public’s understanding of climate science. For instance, records show ExxonMobil participated in a widespread climate-science denial campaign for years, spending more than US$30 million on lobbyists, think tanks and researchers to promote climate-science skepticism. These efforts continue today. A 2019 report found the five largest oil companies had spent over $1 billion on misleading climate-related lobbying and branding campaigns over the previous three years.
The energy industry has in effect captured the democratic political process and prevented enactment of effective climate policies.
Corporate interests have also fueled a surge in well-financed antidemocratic leaders who are willing to stall and even dismantle existing climate policies and regulations. These political leaders’ tactics have escalated public health crises, and in some cases, human rights abuses.
Many deeply antidemocratic governments are tied to oil, gas and other extractive industries that are driving climate change, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and China.
In “Global Burning,” I explore how three leaders of traditionally democratic countries – Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Scott Morrison of Australia and Donald Trump in the U.S. – came to power on anti-environment and nationalist platforms appealing to an extreme-right populist base and extractive corporations that are driving climate change. While the political landscape of each country is different, the three leaders have important commonalities.
Bolsonaro, Morrison and Trump all depend on extractive corporations to fund electoral campaigns and keep them in office or, in the case of Trump, get reelected.
For instance, Bolsonaro’s power depends on support from a powerful right-wing association of landowners and farmers called the União Democrática Ruralista, or UDR. This association reflects the interests of foreign investors and specifically the multibillion-dollar mining and agribusiness sectors. Bolsonaro promised that if elected in 2019, he would dismantle environmental protections and open, in the name of economic progress, industrial-scale soybean production and cattle grazing in the Amazon rainforest. Both contribute to climate change and deforestation in a fragile region considered crucial for keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.
Bolsonaro, Morrison and Trump are all openly skeptical of climate science. Not surprisingly, all have ignored, weakened or dismantled environmental protection regulations. In Brazil, that led to accelerated deforestation and large swaths of Amazon rainforest burning.
In Australia, Morrison’s government ignored widespread public and scientific opposition and opened the controversial Adani Carmichael mine, one of the largest coal mines in the world. The mine will impact public health and the climate and threatens the Great Barrier Reef as temperatures rise and ports are expanded along the coast.
Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement – a move opposed by a majority of Americans – rolled back over 100 laws meant to protect the environment and opened national parks to fossil fuel drilling and mining.
Notably, all three leaders have worked, sometimes together, against international efforts to stop climate change. At the United Nations climate talks in Spain in 2019, Costa Rica’s minister for environment and energy at the time, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, blamed Brazil, Australia and the U.S. for blocking efforts to tackle climate injustice linked to global warming.
Brazil, Australia and the U.S. are not unique in these responses to climate change. Around the world, there have been similar convergences of antidemocratic leaders who are financed by extractive corporations and who implement anti-environment laws and policies that defend corporate profits. New to the current moment is that these leaders openly use state power against their own citizens to secure corporate land grabs to build dams, lay pipelines, dig mines and log forests.
For example, Trump supported the deployment of the National Guard to disperse Native Americans and environmental activists protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, a project that he had personally been invested in. His administration also proposed harsher penalties for pipeline protesters that echoed legislation promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, whose members include lawmakers and lobbyists for the oil industry. Several Republican-led states enacted similar anti-protest laws.
Under Bolsonaro, Brazil has changed laws in ways that embolden land grabbers to push small farmers and Indigenous people off their land in the rainforest.
Fortunately, there is a lot that people can do to protect democracy and the climate.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and reducing the destruction of forests can cut greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest obstacles, a recent U.N. climate report noted, are national leaders who are unwilling to regulate fossil fuel corporations, reduce greenhouse gas emissions or plan for renewable energy production.
The path forward, as I see it, involves voters pushing back on the global trend toward authoritarianism, as Slovenia did in April 2022, and pushing forward on replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. People can reclaim their democratic rights and vote out anti-environment governments whose power depends on prioritizing extractive capitalism over the best interests of their citizens and our collective humanity.
Eve Darian-Smith, Professor of Global and International Studies, University of California, Irvine
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, it really should not surprise anyone that climate change and authoritarianism are being backed by the same people – because, when your own greed is more impostant to you than other people’s lives – well, that is who you are. And, like any other problem, we won’t find solutions easily (or at all) if we are not honest and clear-sighted about what the issue is. For that reason, I would change the phrase “on both the political right and left” to something like “most generally on the political right, but with some notable and egregious examples on the left as well.” Not just my opinion – the graph a couple of paragraphs down shows the truth (and also that it is getting worse). But words should be accurate too.
The Furies and I will be back.
Glenn Kirschner – Trump Admits to Georgia Election Crimes; Brookings Institute Publishes Piece on Trump’s GA Crimes
VoteVets – Hurts
Thom Hartmann – The “Businessman‘s Conspiracy” Authoritarian Plot Is Close
RepresentUs – John Oliver on How to Fight Voter Suppression
Robert Reich – Trump & Biden BOTH Use This Law to Prevent Asylum
Mrs. Betty Bowers – “Bringing Integrity To Christian Homemakers” Awards Dinner
Beau – Let’s talk about water in the southwest US….
Glenn Kirschner – Bannon’s Attempt to Justify His Seditious “Crib” Statement Produces Deeply Incriminating Admission
Chris Hayes: Tucker Carlson ‘A Lot More Overt’ With His Bigotry Than David Duke
Thom Hartmann – Trump Inspired Bullies Mobilize Authoritarian Psychopaths
Armageddon Update | Dogs, Bruh!
Liberal Redneck – Review of Louie Gohmert Excerpt)
Couple Finds A Tiny Calico Kitten Outside of Starbucks
Beau – Let’s talk about Rudy being banned from Fox….
Glenn Kirschner – With Tom Barrack Indictment (& Weisselberg Indictment & Giuliani Search Warrant) Justice Is Trending (Kind of a recap, which is OK)
Meidas Touch – Tucker Carlson WRECKED by Montana Man: “The worst human being known to mankind!” [With Captions]
The Damage Report – Company Sells Shooting Targets Of AOC & Greta Thunberg
CNN – Jim Acosta: Fox News viewers may have a case of whiplash
The Happiest, Cuddliest Duck Ever Is Obsessed With A Giant Dog
Beau – Let’s talk about Huckabee Sanders and giving up on…
In July 2017, Stephen Walt wrote Top 10 Signs of Creeping Authoritarianism Revisited to examine the extent to which criminal Fuhrer Trump* and the Republican Reich were conforming to authoritarianism, the neo-Nazi model. Here is what he found.
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, I wrote a column listing possible “warning signs” of democratic breakdown under his leadership. A few other people did, too. I wasn’t predicting Trump would become a dictator — although some of his statements and actions during the campaign were worrisome; the column was simply a checklist of warning signs that would tell us how well U.S. political institutions were holding up in unusual circumstances (and with a most unusual president).
We’re now a bit more than six months into Trump’s presidency, and it is high time to review the list and see how America is doing. Has Trump undermined America’s constitutional order? Is he consolidating executive power the way democratically elected leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have? Or are U.S. institutions holding up reasonably well, either because they have proved to be surprisingly resilient or because Trump has been less adept at politics than he claimed to be?The record is mixed. Although some of the warning signs are flashing red, others are glowing yellow (at worst), and one or two don’t seem that worrisome at all. My worst fears of further democratic breakdown have not been confirmed — thus far — though in some cases it is not for want of trying.
Grab your No. 2 pencil and go down my original list. Feel free to keep score at home.
1. Systematic efforts to intimidate the media: Check
There’s little doubt that Trump and his associates have repeatedly tried to intimidate mainstream media organizations, whether through tweets deriding the supposedly “failing” New York Times, the repeated references to the “Amazon Washington Post,” or White House chief strategist and former Breitbart head Stephen Bannon’s referring to media organizations as “the opposition party.” Trump and Fox News also falsely accused the Times of thwarting efforts to kill or capture top Islamic State leaders, and the White House has arbitrarily excluded reporters of some organizations from press pools, press conferences, and other events. The obvious message: Play ball with us a bit more or expect to be marginalized. And that’s just a small sample of Trump’s war on the press.
But, on the other hand, these efforts don’t seem to be working very well. A few media organizations have made ritual acts of appeasement (e.g., CNN keeps hiring Trump apologists as on-air talent), but Trump’s presidency has given most media organizations a renewed sense of purpose and a growing audience. And the administration’s continued shenanigans, conflicts of interest, ever-changing rationalizations, and sheer buffoonery have created a target-rich environment: The same outrageous behavior that helped boost Trump’s 2016 campaign has given the media a mother lode of material to mine and an eager audience for everything they can dig up. So the good news is that while Trump clearly likes to browbeat media outlets that aren’t reliably in his corner and would undoubtedly like to discredit them, his efforts to date have mostly failed.
2. Building an official pro-Trump media network: Partial check.
Back in November, I speculated that Trump might “use the presidency to bolster media that offer him consistent support” or even try to create a government-funded media agency to disseminate pro-Trump propaganda. There’s little doubt Trump has tried to favor outlets that embrace him, which is why the White House gave press credentials to the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit and has given the reliably wacky and pro-Trump Breitbart privileged access. And as one might expect, the Trump administration has backed the expansion plans of the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. Apart from the White House press office itself (which has been a train wreck from Day One), there’s no sign that the president intends to build a publicly funded pro-Trump media organization. But with Fox News and Sinclair and the various alt-right websites in his corner, he may not need one.
3. Politicizing the civil service, military, National Guard, or the domestic security agencies: Partial check.
An obvious counterweight to executive overreach are career civil servants who remain sensitive to precedents, have lots of expertise, and tend to follow the rule of law. And as Samuel Huntington pointed out many years ago, an important barrier to excessive militarization is having a professional military whose direct political role is limited. My concern in 2016 was the possibility that Trump would try to politicize the civil service in various ways or turn the military and the intelligence and domestic security agencies into tools of the White House instead of independent defenders of the Constitution.
Once again, I’d score this one as mixed. Trump has tried to put his stamp on key government agencies by demanding that senior officials resign or by firing people who declined to do his bidding, such as (now former) Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey. He has declined to make top appointments in a number of agencies, at one point telling Fox News, “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary.” And if Comey and others are to be believed (and, on this issue, I think they are), Trump seems to think civil servants and his own appointees should be more loyal to him than to the Constitution, even though it is the latter they swore an oath to defend. Trump has also questioned the integrity of the nonpartisan and highly respected Congressional Budget Office, and he crossed another line last weekend by telling uniformed military personnel to call Congress and lobby for his defense spending and health care proposals.
But there’s a silver lining here, too: You can’t run the federal government without lots of help, and most people don’t like being dissed and intimidated by a group of wealthy insiders who clearly view them with contempt and seem to regard the country as their personal plaything. Combine that with Trump’s world-class ability to sow divisions within his own team, and you have a recipe for the veritable Niagara of leaks that have made life easier for journalists and kept the White House scrambling from scandal to scandal. (Of course, the White House could have avoided all this by telling the truth from the start and by learning how to fill out security clearance forms properly the first time.) As with his effort to intimidate the media, in short, thus far Trump’s desire to get the government bureaucracy to dance to his tune hasn’t gone so well…
Inserted from <FP>
I have shared the first three signs out of ten. Please click through for the other seven.
Of the ten, Walt rated five as check, three as partial, and two as little or none. Three years and a month later, I rate all ten as check or check plus.
Yesterday Brian Stetler reported the same theme.
Stelter: We are witnessing creeping authoritarianism
Both Walt and Stetler are spot on, with one exception. The authoritarianism of the Republican Reich, with or without Trump*, does not creep. It stampedes!