In Defense of Edward Snowden

 

 

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  –Benjamin Franklin

 

 

 

A friend of mine and I in a recent telephone conversation touched on the subject of Edward Snowden but it wasn’t the time or place to get into a long, political debate. So, I thought I would express my views on the subject in the form of an essay.

 

My friend said he understood why Snowden did what he did but that he disapproved of his doing it. I feel that the reasoning of why he did what he did, contains the justification of his actions.

There are several different perspectives on why it was wrong of him to release so much classified National Security information, some people argue from an ethical or moral stance, some from a pragmatic view, some from a patriotic perspective, and some from a military or national security viewpoint. There may be more perspectives but these are the ones that first came to me.

 

Now from everything that I’ve seen or read about or by Snowden, he comes across as a very humble guy & he definitely doesn’t brag about his skills unlike the braggart & national embarrassment in the White House at present. For instance, Snowden never tells us how much he was being paid by the government but it was clearly a significant amount. My guess is that it would’ve been probably somewhere around a couple hundred thousand dollars a year? Moreover, he was stationed in Hawaii which many consider paradise. Why would someone give all this up knowing that the full weight of the U.S. government would come down on him mercilessly?

 

My opinion is that he is a person with tremendous integrity & a strong moral compass. And personally speaking, I stood-up against the U.S. Army so-to-speak when I kept going AWOL because I didn’t want them to be able to send me to Vietnam and that was one of the most frightening times of my life.

They wanted to make me an officer but I didn’t even want to be a squad leader.

 

Returning to the topic at hand, I believe him when he said that he was becoming more & more alarmed at what the NSA was up to. And he was well aware that they were violating the U.S. Constitution. Now some people like that moron behind the desk in the oval office, see the Constitution as little more than a quaint & amusing list of suggestions & feel that they are above the law. Obviously, Snowden’s superiors at the NSA felt this way too because they violated the laws daily & to such an extent that it was hard for Snowden to accept the degree of corruption in the intelligence community.

Worked for NSA for 30 yrs. retired 10/31/01 disgusted at what was going on!

 

Moreover, Snowden because of his amazing level of expertise in computer systems, security, programming, etc. knew on a much deeper level than me or the average American citizen. He also knew what happened to other whistleblowers like Bill Binney & Thomas Drake who had followed the official chain of command & protocol for reporting misconduct, illegal spying on American citizens, etc. etc. etc.

 

Obama, the supposed champion of the people, had prosecuted more whistleblowers than all the other presidents combined since the Espionage Act was passed over a hundred years ago. It’s become very clear that anyone who dares to reveal the secrets of the temple so-to-speak, will be locked up most likely for the rest of their life. And you can forget about any semblance of a fair trial because you’re not allowed to present your argument from anything which may reveal state secrets i.e. anything they consider a matter of national security, is off limits in your defense. Step back for a second & reflect on that i.e. they are violating federal laws & Constitutional law on a massive scale & in effect, they get to claim the protection of the very laws they’re violating.

Obama’s idea of “Change” was kissing Wall St.’s ass

The prosecutors of these whistleblowers are de facto judges, jurors, & executioners if the accused can’t fully defend themselves in open court. Don’t worry, just trust us because we know what is right & wrong and we will protect you. Yeah right, how many times & ways have they, the powers that be, violated that trust?

 

Nope, I don’t blame Snowden one bit for not being willing to turn himself in to the legal authorities in this nation because he’d basically face a kangaroo court with a rubber-stamp of guilty guaranteed. If you think I’m going too far afield in these assertions, just consider the U.S. Patriot Act which was rammed through shortly after 9/11. It basically gutted our Bill of Rights. But hey, who cares? Americans in general don’t care about what the intelligence agencies are up to & believe them when they’re told that this surveillance of American citizens is necessary in order to protect us from terrorists. Yeah right!

One sentence from Snowden in the documentary; Citizen Four sent my mind into overdrive, he said it’s about control. I believe this is the central fact or the key truth in this whole convoluted & complex issue. And for the record, No, I’m not a fan of Alex Jones. I think he is a dangerous imbecile like his fan, Trump.

 

Mull this over if you will i.e. we are told now that all this information about us, what they call metadata, is not important & that we needn’t worry about their collecting it. Snowden has informed us that all this metadata can be easily connected to form a detailed profile of us & which can be used against us in the future if any legal authority wants to build a case against us.

 

And the typical brilliant response is; Hey, I got nothing to worry about because I’m doing anything wrong so let them collect all the metadata they want to. This is one of the most ignorant responses a person can spout. So, you wouldn’t mind if these “intelligence agencies” which are collecting a lot of their data with the help of good old Mark Zuckerberg, Google, Apple, etc. etc. etc. and they’re sharing our data with corporations so they can more effectively target perspective customers with their personally designed ads.

Use it or Lose it doesn’t just refer to your physical muscles

 

Furthermore, it’s even more sinister than this & if you’re curious about what I’m referring to, watch the documentary; The Great Hack which isn’t just a stupid conspiracy piece & is the product of a carefully researched & edited investigation of Cambridge Analytica.

This company is part of a larger corporation that was headquartered in England & in a nutshell, with the help of Zuckerberg who has no ethical standards when it comes to making money, sold Cambridge Analytica over 50 million of Facebook users’ personal data. By the way, having access to those 50 million Americans’ personal data, also gave them access to every friend those people had in their lists of friends.

 

I just realized that I’ve strayed off topic to some extent, so back to why you should be concerned about the metadata being collected about us. Here’s a list I came up with some time ago for another essay of possible things or scenarios that you might be embarrassed about the government & the corporate world having at their fingertips. This took about ten minutes to come up with, I’m sure someone could generate a list hundreds of pages long of private matters:

 

  • Cheating on your wife or husband
  • A homosexual experience
  • You masturbating
  • Making love to your spouse
  • Shitting your pants
  • A sexual disease you contracted
  • A diagnosis of cancer
  • Fights with your kids or your spouse
  • Getting fired
  • Losing your home
  • Being obese
  • Being homeless
  • Your kids’ private lives
  • Your spouse naked
  • Porn you watch
  • Paying a hooker for sex
  • Funerals you attend
  • Your breaking down emotionally
  • Your spouse telling you they want a divorce
  • Your dying in the hospital
  • Being drunk & starting a fight and seriously hurting someone
  • You drunk driving
  • Whipping your child
  • Beating your wife
  • Threatening someone
  • Cheating on your taxes
  • Having sex with someone you’re embarrassed to have been with
  • Your daughter’s period
  • Your home burning down
  • Stealing something
  • Cheating on a test

 

And remember, it’s not just a matter of being embarrassed by this kind of data but anytime the government or the private corporate sector want to build a case against you so they could dismiss, ignore, or destroy you should they wish to. Do you still have nothing to hide?

 

Continuing with the monumental harm done to us by Facebook in selling our data to Cambridge Analytica, a very strong case could be built to charge Zuckerberg was largely responsible for Trump’s victory in 2016. You see, a lot of the data that proved to be so valuable to Cambridge Analytica came from those seemingly innocent tests on Facebook that asked; What kind of person are you? A pragmatist? A dreamer, An artist, etc. And with all this data, they were able to create detailed files on these 50 million Facebook users  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election

& all their friends & then zero in on those they considered persuadable i.e. easier to manipulate intellectually or emotionally like Trump fans. And under the tutelage & loving guidance of Steve Bannon the far-right’s Dr. Mengele who dreams of the American government in a big pile of rubble, and the White Supremacists taking over, they bombarded all those persuadable with thousands of anti-Hillary & pro-Trump propaganda ads & videos.

 

So, when the Democratic party raised so much hell & focused on the Russian interference in our election, I have to agree with my intellectual hero, Noam Chomsky. He pointed out the inconvenient truth that the U.S. has been interfering with other countries’ elections for decades. I’m sure the vast majority of Americans aren’t even aware of the hundreds of times our C.I.A. have funded coup d’états, trained people in guerilla warfare tactics & skills, assassinated democratically elected leaders, etc. around the globe. If you’d care to skim a brief list of these crimes against humanity, check out this link; http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html

 

I share these ugly facts with you not because I take some perverse pleasure in criticizing America but because I sincerely believe that the American public needs to know what’s been done in our names & usually without our awareness if we are to ever put a stop to it. I have given-up hope that any real change will come about through the DNC. They are so corrupt & willfully blind to their own ignorance, lack of integrity, & desire to hold on to what power they have at any expense. And that includes losing the presidency & another four years of Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan.

 

The Democratic party used to represent the working class & help defend us against the Republicans who are simply more brazen in their greed & lust for power. And both parties are soft on illegal surveillance & corporate crime. I agree with Gore Vidal when he said; “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

 

In short, we, the 99%, are at the mercy of some very powerful forces & we need every bit of help we can get. In the documentary; Citizen Four when Snowden was pressed on the issue of what he was most afraid of, he said; (my paraphrasing) That the public simply wouldn’t care & even after he’d released all this information, files, etc. on how & why the NSA was spying on us, they’d simply go back to the way they were & not care or do anything about it.

 

In the past, I felt that the government was guilty of benign neglect of the public’s interests or welfare but now, with this boastful, vile, naked thief in the White House, I’d say “our” government is guilty of criminal neglect!

 

Whistleblowers are every bit as important to a functioning democracy as the Free Press & Free Speech. And petty tyrants like Trump try to muzzle the press & whistleblowers because they want to go on draining the federal treasury in perpetuity. We need more Edward Snowdens & he should be honored as a true patriot of the highest order!

Addendum

     The big picture? This is the rationale or the “logic’ behind this massive spying on the American public, They couldn’t find or weren’t aware of the likelihood of the events of 9/11 even though Richard Clark, who was National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism for the United States between 1998 and 2003, had repeatedly reported the likelihood to his superiors.

And they, the men in the highest positions of our “intelligence agencies” & the overall structure of these 17 or better agencies who like children with fragile egos, wouldn”t communicate or cooperate with one another prior to 9/11, but now, we’re supposed to rest easy with many of the same players in charge? You see, they all jealously guard their turf because they fear losing even a fraction of their power & authority and most importantly, their funding.

Before the tragic events of 9/11, the truly valuable intel, the accurate intel was like a needle in a haystack even with the world’s most sophisticated information gathering programs & now, they are vacuuming up astronomical quantities of our metadata & we’re supposed to believe they’ll catch the next 9/11 before it happens?

They’ve basically increased the size of that haystack exponentially & I’m sure their “critical & analytical abilities” haven’t kept up even remotely to their new workload. No, what we need are far more individuals like John O’Neill who wined & dined his Middle East contacts in the finest restaurants in New York & Washington D.C. and made them feel respected & valued. We need people who speak the languages in this boiling cauldron of the Middle East that we bear a large part of the responsibility for creating.

Instead, our “power elite” prefer to send in our troops like blundering giants causing far more unnecessary deaths & hence sowing the seeds of greater & greater hatred towards America & spawning a never-ending crop of terrorists willing to sacrifice their lives in defence against the Great Satan!

Snowden & other courageous souls like him showed us that we don’t need to conduct this massive & indiscriminate collection of our data because they can do the necessary collection of data in a far less invasive manner & for far less money than is currently being wasted on these efforts. But, it’s the same old sad story of individuals with petty egos & agencies who fear losing out on the largesse,  who continue to rule the day & meanwhile, we are less safe than we’d care to admit or face!

John O’Neill, was a counter-terrorism expert in the F.B.I. & eventually became the special agent in charge of counter-terrorism in the F.B.I. but because of personal clashes with some of his superiors in the F.B.I. his warnings of the likelihood of another attack on the World Trade Center were ignored & he was pushed out of the F.B.I. and the day after he left the F.B.I., he became the head of security at The World Trade Center and was killed on 9/11 as he was helping people evacuate the North Tower.

So for people to accuse Snowden of being a traitor is a gross travesty of justice & mind-boggling ignorance about what is actually happening behind the closed doors of the various intelligence agencies & the NSA in particular. The real traitors are all those who enable this corrupt system & all the morally bankrupt people who turn a blind eye to what’s being done in the name of National Security.

One last, perhaps insignificant point to some, Snowden clearly had the wherewithal to do considerably more damage to the NSA & the whole corrupted system of surveillance but he didn’t. He didn’t name any specific individuals who could be targeted for assassination or who could even lose their jobs. His actions were clearly not those of a person who was seeking fame or fortune. He simply wanted to ease his guilt at having participated & helped in this illegal & immoral program. And he simply gave his potentially serious treasure trove of classified material to two journalists he had immense respect for; Laura Poitras & Glenn Greenwald along with a newspaper he trusted, The Guardian.

He simply left it to them to decide on which stories to reveal to the public. He was again, clearly not seeking notoriety or fame. It was his heartfelt conviction that the truth needed to be told. And his critics have not been able to point to a single case of anyone mentioned in the files he gave to these trusted journalists, being harmed, let alone killed. I am reminded of a quote from the venerated John Milton;

“Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

[if you’d like to watch Part 2 of the Frontline story; “The United States of Secrets” which is even more pertinent to this whole issue i.e. of whether Snowden is a traitor or a national hero & the frightening state of affairs. today in Silicon Valley, you can watch it here https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of-secrets/#video-2 It’s available for purchase on You Tube but you can’t find it there for viewing. Okay, two final points.

  1. the fact that they built the data storage facility in Utah that can store astronomical amounts of data proves that they i.e. the government, are storing every single thing about us (recall that they kept promising that they weren’t storing it?)
  2. Newsflash: terrorists aren’t retarded & know all this as well and they’ve simply gone back to the old fashioned way of plotting attacks i.e. they go off-grid & only meet & pass information along in person. So why do we need to spend trillions on this Orwellian spying apparatus that is being used to control us, sell us shit, & keep us afraid of one another & indifferent to the complete gutting of what used to be a Republic with a Democratic government???

 

 

Mafia Nation

 

 

 

Isn’t it time to just come out & admit that we’ve thrown in the towel and given up on democracy? We’re certainly not fooling the rest of the world, they are scratching their heads in confusion as to how we could’ve elected such a corrupt moron as Trump to represent us. And two thirds of the American public know full well what a racist & sexist megalomaniac Donny is but I guess that third of the electorate that are in the Trump cult must cling to the charade that America is still a republic. I refer to these people as the Duck Dynasty Klan because they have clearly drunk Trump’s Kool-Aid & are living in Trumptown waiting for the signal to self-destruct.

Jim Jones cult weren’t that different from Trump’s

 

Here’s a brief overview for those of you in post-literate America, of Donny the misanthropic misanthrope’s background.

 

Donald Trump brands himself as a builder and manager of luxury developments, including Trump Tower, where he resides. He is surrounded by marble and gold, as well as the finest furniture. However, what most people fail to see that the roots of his fortune were built on the lower and middle classes, largely with the assistance of the government.  http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/ignatoff/160219 

the humble populist his supporters find so reassuring

 

If your memory hasn’t calcified, you’ll note that Donny with the girly hands & bone-spurs, came to power proclaiming his defense of the real Americans i.e. the working class & the ever-dwindling middle class. But if you’ll do even a little reading & research, you’ll soon learn that Donny & his daddy built their “real estate empires” on the backs of those same people Donny now claims to be defending. The Trumps took advantage of government loans to build many of their low-income projects (recall how much Donny hates the government?) & basically, became slumlords who often refused to make necessary repairs for their tenants. Moreover, the Trump crime family often turned-down rental applications from people of color.

People on Welfare Bad! People who get govt. contracts to screw the welfare people, Good!

Furthermore, in Atlantic City, Donny got a special building permit which allowed him to erect one of his casinos right next to a freeway offramp because of his promise to build low-income housing which he never delivered on like the tens of thousands of promises & lies he has made in his road to success. And if you give a damn about facts & truth, you know, those concepts so foreign to Donny boy, one of the best historians of Trump’s rise to celebrity & wealth is the late, Wayne Barrett in his book; “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth.”

 

You see, Trump like so many corrupt politicians & businessmen count on people’s intellectual laziness & pitiful memories. Here’s another insightful little snippet from the link I provided above:

 

The Trump Organization was built by his father, Fred Trump, and later headed by Donald Trump from 1971. The senior Trump built small homes in the boroughs of New York City after WWII, largely with the help of low interest government loans. He also built and managed apartment complexes that were far from luxurious, also with help from the government. He built the Beach Haven Apartment complex in Brooklyn, New York over swampland, and the foundations were continually settling. These and other developments would eventually bring in great wealth from the United States government, utilizing the federal Section 8 housing program, which was designed to assist low income people.

 

Yep! That terrible government of ours which Trump refers to as The Swamp but if it weren’t for that same government, the Trump tyranny might very well never have come into existence? So, it seems the Trumps have been promising to “drain the swamp” for decades but they failed to mention the swamps under their building projects & how it affected their trapped tenants. I don’t know about you, but I’ve known more than my fair share of slumlords in my life, owners who refused to make repairs & always seem to find an excuse to not give me my security deposit back when I moved out? Yet Trump’s Walking Dead believe he’ll protect them from the government which helped make him obscenely wealthy by manipulating building codes & permits and gave him fraudulent tax breaks at the same time?

 

Again, with just a little bit of effort & research, you’ll discover that the super-rich, the G.O.P., & many, if not most of the sell-out Democratic party, have been manipulating the government via their armies of lobbyists who help or literally write the legislation that protects their wealth & gives them perpetual loopholes to avoid paying taxes, ignore regulations, & make the public pay for all their “mistakes” i.e. environmental destruction, pollution of our rivers, create the infrastructure for them to do their business, etc. etc. etc. And their refrain is always the same i.e. we can’t afford universal health care, a quality public education system, welfare, food stamps, etc. No, whatever money is available must go to the military/industrial complex which the 1% coincidentally happen to own.

 

 

Returning to that lovable liar in chief of ours, who learned the three most important tactics of his business & political life from the infamous, mob lawyer, Roy Cohn. And they are; Deny, Divert, & Detract. If you’ll make an effort to remove your rose-colored glasses while watching any video of Trump, you’ll see countless examples of him sticking to these three tactics 100% of the time.

 

Another bit of historical background is the fact that Roy Cohn, one of the most disgusting & despised lawyers of his time, served as Senator McCarthy’s hatchet-man during the McCarthy hearings that destroyed countless American writers, journalists, etc.’s lives & with little to no evidence to support their character assassinations. McCarthy relied on the lies, the gossip, the propaganda, etc. supplied to him by Cohn who built his fortune on defending the mafia crime bosses of New York, New Jersey, & Philadelphia to name a few. And Cohn, a self-hating homosexual who kept it in the closet until his battle with AIDS could no longer remain hidden, introduced Donny to his mob boss friends/clients.

 

Of course, the fact that many, if not most of these new friends of Donny’s happened to be in the construction business & concrete in particular, had nothing to do with Trump’s growing real estate empire. Nope! Donny didn’t receive any special rates on the cement he used in his building projects that he bought from the mafia bosses. Moreover, Trump didn’t benefit from his new friends’ control over labor unions in the construction business either. And once again, it was just a stroke of good luck that when all the other casinos’ employees went on strike in Atlantic City, Trump’s employees didn’t go on strike as well.

 

We’re supposed to believe that it was Donny’s business savvy that made him so rich, just ignore those countless mafia movies we grew up on, especially The Godfather which was so popular. Nothing to do with reality, right? But the “reality” of T.V.’s avalanche of “reality T.V. shows over the past 20 years is “real,” right? Obviously, the fact—remember Kellyanne’s ‘alternate facts?’ —that Donny, the self-proclaimed billionaire who demanded that every time his name was mentioned on the show, must be followed by the words; “the billionaire,” also had nothing to do with his “success” & clearly wasn’t a major factor in his becoming president.

 

Here’s another troubling fact for the blowhard in charge, King Trump the Dumb, appointed the most corrupt cabinet in U.S. history but hey, remember, he has always felt most comfortable in the company of crooks. And here’s another inconvenient truth for you Trump zombies who prefer to remain willfully ignorant (from the same article I quoted earlier)

 

When the former Soviet Union immigrants arrived in New York in the late 80’s and early 90’s, they needed a place to live. The Trumps were more than accommodating. First, they bought condemned buildings in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York and brought them barely up to code to rent to them. However, they also had multiple apartment buildings that they could convert to Section 8 for low income people, and the immigrants fell into that category. Most came from the Ukraine, and many were released from Soviet prisons.

They could only take the equivalent of $200 American dollars out of the Soviet Union, and these people had no jobs waiting for them. Also, most did not speak English, and the possibility of work seemed remote. However, they were eligible for Welfare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Education, Job Training, and Section 8 housing.

 

Gee? Guess Russian immigrants are okay in Donald’s world-view? Just not Mexican or Muslim immigrants. I can’t help but wonder if this was when Donny boy started his love relationship with Vladimir Putin & the other Russian mobsters who took over Russia’s government? Of course, now that Trump is supposedly so wealthy, he’s declared war on all those programs that assisted Trump’s Ukrainian friends because now he’s concerned with assisting his best buddies in the 1% of America’s wealthiest who are suffering under the weight of their billions of dollars. How I would love to be there to watch each of Trump’s blind followers when they lose their food stamps, public assistance, section eight housing, Medicaid, etc. I wonder if they’ll still be chanting; Make America Great Again?

 

So obviously, Trump has expanded his network of friends from the Italian mobsters who terrified the working class in New York, etc. to the Russian mobsters (oligarchs) who terrorize the entire Russian public. Are you beginning to understand why Trump the Mendacious loves & respects the world’s most vicious, bloody dictators like; Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Duterte, Xi Jinping, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi (Egypt), Erdogan (Turkey), Mohammad bin Salman (Saudi Arabia), Netanyahu (Israel), Bolsenaro (Brazil), & President Modi (India). And because these days, one can’t even assume that most people even have common sense, let me spell it out for you i.e. the people you admire says a lot about you—your values, your ethics, your principles. Gone are the days when our leaders & especially our presidents used to proclaim our respect for & our support for democracy, freedom, equality, and the law. Now we have a brazen lover of authoritarians & murderous dictators & a despiser of many of our former allies. So, what did all our friends & family members die for in the non-stop wars we’ve been involved in all my life (since 1952)?

Why do we have this vile, crude creature from the Black Lagoon sitting behind the desk in the oval office? One of the two forces we fought against in WWII was fascism which originated in Italy & the Nazis whom Trump & a sizeable number of his staunchest supporters love & respect i.e. the Neo-Nazis who attacked & beat the anti-Trump protestors in Charlotte, South Carolina and killed one young woman & Trump said; “They’re many good people on both sides.” Be careful what you wish for you Walking Dead & morally-bankrupt because Trump & his kind have brought fascism to a large extent to America already.

 

Continuing on with Trump’s reign of error & terror against America’s citizens, Donny has been laundering money for the Russian mafia for decades & mostly through his condos & other real estate holdings. Again, if you can bother to take the time or aren’t afraid of having your little world collapse, read on. After Trump declared bankruptcy on three of his casinos, Trump Plaza Hotel, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, & Trump Entertainment Resorts, American banks would no longer loan him the money to buy even a hot dog. And don’t forget his long list of business failures like Trump University which was proven a scam from the beginning & the countless Trump products that failed.

 

But for the Russian mafia, Trump was the ideal business partner because they could launder the billions they stole from the Russian people by buying condos in Trump’s gaudy & tasteless hotels, etc. & in return, they loaned him all the money he needed to keep from going completely belly-up in his businesses. American banks didn’t prosecute Trump for the hundreds of millions he still owed them because they figured they might eventually recoup some of their losses from this business tycoon that all the country rubes believed in.

 

Here’s some food for thought? Why is it that not only the republicans but also the corporate democrats keep attacking Bernie Sanders as being a socialist like it’s some sort of horrible crime yet Donald sings the praises of communist leaders from China & Russia and etc. & does business with them but I don’t hear any criticism of Donald for being in bed with communists & his supporters don’t seem to mind one bit? And here’s another historical tidbit that very few seem to remember or having ever known, if it hadn’t been for the Russian communists in WWII, we might have lost the war. The Russians lost something like 20 million of their citizens but overnight, after the war, they were all of a sudden Public Enemy Number One? Could it be the machinations of that slimy 1% who have all of us under their boot-heels?

 

Note that all authoritarians need a scapegoat to focus the citizens anger & hatred while they rob us all. Trump has clearly distracted his zombies on the vulnerable Mexican immigrants who are fleeing the drug cartels & even more obviously corrupt than our own government, their government leaders. Also significant is the fact that the Mexican crime lords have been murdering journalists in record numbers & Trump would obviously like to be able to do the same thing here.

 

Like all successful dictators, you must discredit the press because they investigate corruption & report the facts. Trump hates the media, especially the New York Times because they had an investigative team that spent over a year & a half investigating Trump’s claim to be a self-made billionaire who only received a small loan of one million dollars from daddy. They discovered & reported that in fact, Daddy Warbucks bailed his failure of a son out repeatedly & used his political contacts to get special deals for Donald in his real estate endeavors like tax breaks, special zoning permits, etc. And in fact, Donald the Dip-shit actually got more than $400 million dollars from daddy. My bet is that it’s probably far more than that but the investigative team could only substantiate the $400 million.

Here’s another conjecture for you, my imaginary reader, that is definitely not my original idea but I do add my personal touch to it. It just dawned on me today as I’m writing this essay that even though Al Capone committed numerous crimes including murder many times, the government couldn’t convict him on anything until they nailed him for tax evasion. Think about it, why do you think Donald Duck has been fighting tooth & nail for decades to keep his tax reports hidden? The most obvious reason that many have suggested is that if his tax records were revealed, they’d most likely show him to be the biggest phony & liar that he’s always been because he’s not really a billionaire.

 

I read somewhere that Trump used to call in to radio shows when he was still struggling to gain fame and he’d pretend to be someone else & would sing his own praises & grossly exaggerate and lie about his business successes & the amount of wealth he had. In fact, he lied about how much he was worth to Forbes magazine so he’d be placed on some list of the super wealthy. This is the guy who keeps proclaiming “fake news?” Wake-up people!

 

Trump has been a bully all his life & this too is why he loves dictators because after all, they’re bullies on a grand scale with their imprisonment, torture, & killing of their dissenters. You see, Trump has been on a non-stop self-promotion tour all his life because his most valuable commodity is the brand he’s built up over the decades i.e. his name which he leases out to corporations because of its name recognition. But sadly, most of his cult believe he actually owns everything that bears his name & therefore believe he’s nothing but one huge success story & that they too can become successful if they just listen to his wisdom & accept his principles as their own, that is to say, having no principles.

 

And this is why we have the first Twitter president who behaves more like a malicious, teen-age bully attacking every single person who dares to point out his lies & contradictions. So much for the “social media,” and its illusory bringing people together. No, Trump is like that Wizard in the Wizard of Oz who hid behind a curtain & used a loud, bellowing & spooky voice to intimidate his subjects and only the seriously challenged mentally & morally could fall for such a scam & sham as P.T. Barnum Trump.

 

Need I point out the obvious like the fact that the mafia uses verbal threats, then physical intimidation, & finally if all else fails, murder to keep people fearful & turning over their hard-earned money? Particularly revealing is when Trump in his Nazi rallies calls on his henchmen to beat the hell out of a protestor & get them outta here. I am truly fearful that this may only be the beginning of these brown-shirt tactics?

Also like his mafia role models, Trump hands out favors to those who are loyal to him & publicly kiss his ass or do his dirty work but when they get busted every now & then, all of a sudden Donny declares; “I don’t know that guy.” That’s girly man’s idea of loyalty, a person who will take the fall for him even when he publicly claims he doesn’t know you or had nothing to do with whatever crime you committed at his request.

 

Talk about a nation of suckers, roughly a third of America’s citizens are slavishly loyal to this fake megalomaniac & we have now reached a point where it can literally mean their lives! Yep! When the coronavirus first came to our attention, Trump declared it a hoax created by the Democrats to hurt him in the 2020 presidential election. And this declaration as well as advising people to go to work even if they’re feeling sick proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he doesn’t give a damn about anyone except himself & his reelection because as long as he’s president, he can’t be prosecuted for his long list of crimes.

 

It really boggles the mind that his supporters will back him on every dirty deed he commits no matter how egregious & now, no matter how deadly believing in him can be. If this isn’t the hallmark of an authoritarian wanna be dictator, they’d better change the definition? Like mafia bosses whose words were absolute & anyone who didn’t follow their orders to the T, are silenced one way or another.

 

Returning to the pandemic now terrifying the world, Trump’s cult also conveniently ignores the fact that Trump in his obsession to eliminate every single act, no matter how valuable it may have been to the general welfare of all Americans;

 

“In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure.”  https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-r

 

“Building on the Ebola experience, the Obama administration set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House National Security Council (NSC) and another in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—both of which followed the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.”

 

The last quote is from the same link above & for the record, “Foreign Policy” is a conservative & highly respected journal among America’s academic & military elite, hardly a liberal publication.

 

“But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.”

 

Doesn’t this make you feel safe & secure? Yeah, about as safe & secure as living in an inner-city ghetto controlled by drug lords or cartels. Trump’s hatred of everything Obama is clearly pathological & my perhaps simplistic take on it —but then again, we are dealing with a guy who reads & speaks on a fifth grade level—is that Obama humiliated Trump at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 2011, showing him for what he is i.e. a fake who built his political base by starting the “Birther Movement” that just wouldn’t stop in its obsession of proving that Obama wasn’t born in America.

 

Of course, this stirred the blood of America’s racists & bigots who refused to accept the fact that a black guy had been elected president & Trump’s base to this day is primarily made up of such patriots. Here’s the video clip if you’d like to enjoy a few laughs?

 

https://youtu.be/HHckZCxdRkA

 

But returning to the deadly seriousness of our situation re: the coronavirus, here are a few more details of how mind-bogglingly irresponsible this moron in the oval office has behaved;

 

“In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10.” (again, from the same article as above)

 

I could continue citing more depressing info from the article but I’m sure you take my point already. Perhaps some of you may recall how another great Republican president, George W. Bush, responded after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Well this time it’s not only the Black residents of New Orleans who are going to be thrown under the bus, but all of us.

But don’t say the G.O.P. doesn’t have a sense of humor, no, because they clearly do i.e. George Bush Sr. declared that under his leadership, America was becoming a “kinder & gentler nation.” I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself as to the veracity of that claim. And not to be outdone by daddy, George W. Bush, declared that under his stalwart leadership, the Republican party were now known as “Compassionate Conservatives.” Yeah, I’m sure the Iraqis would agree with that self-assessment as well.

 

Okay, back to our present “compassionate conservative” who proves his patriotism by hugging a U.S. flag in a somewhat perverse manner, Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan aka Mafia Don.

 

Because I have a habit of trying to educate people by way of my writing, my essays are often lengthy & in this post-literate society of ours, very few are likely or perhaps even capable of such sustained attention. So, I’m going to just list the rest of the points I’d like to make in my assessment of how we, the U.S., who have been kicking ass & taking the resources of a large part of the Developing Nations for decades now while under the banner of; ‘”Bringing Freedom & Democracy to the World,” have de facto become a nation ruled by Mafioso but legal mobsters because they got the stamp of approval by their captains in Congress.

 

  • Forget the obsession by the DNC that Russia put Trump in the White House (this is a distraction by the DNC to avoid their own incompetence as a major factor in why Hillary lost But the Russian government is made up of & headed by a mobster & Russian troll farms did spread millions of false rumors, etc. about Hillary & pro-Trump ads and Facebook sold Americans’ data to Cambridge Analytica which it used to zero in on the “persuadables” which they bombarded with their fake news & this did indeed play a major role in Trump’s theft of the presidency.</li>
  • Rule #1 in the Mafia, keep your mouth shut & we’ll take care of you & this is Trump through & through though he rarely keeps his word to his flunkies who fall on their swords for their amoral boss
  • And like mafia bosses who have judges, police commissioners, D.A.s, etc. in their pockets, Mafia Don has the Attorney General in his pocket & the Justice Dept. so it’s “All Skate Day” for Trump’s cronies
  • The girly-man also hands out favors like mob bosses to those who have been loyal to him
  • The Emoluments Clause of our Constitution, the bedrock of our legal & political system, (the Constitution) is crystal clear i.e. a sitting president can’t receive money, expensive gifts, etc. or in other words profit off the presidency. Trump says fuck that! And even more brazenly, he tells foreign leaders, etc. to stay at his properties so he collects tributes (bribes) in full display but no one has the balls to nail him on his blatant disregard of our laws.
  • Donald Duck has been a consistent business failure throughout his career but daddy bailed him out time & time again, then the Italian mafia bailed him out in his Atlantic City casinos, then the Russian mafia when U.S. banks wouldn’t loan him any more money because he was already in debt over $4 billion but Donny Boy’s skillful manipulation of the media throughout his life has enabled him to dodge, bury, & switch the attention of the media, to scapegoat selected targets & divert the attention from his failures, incompetence, & corrupt business practices</li>
  • Like mafia loan sharks, Donald tells his Walking Dead cult members to beat people up i.e. “get him out of here & if you get sued, I’ll pay for your legal fees” Mafioso start with breaking people’s knees, then burning their businesses or their homes, & finally in “eliminating” their public enemies not unlike in Las Vegas where they end up buried in the desert
  • Donny follows similar tactics Mussolini, the fascist leader of Italy in WWII whom many of our top business leaders loved, & coincidentally, the American mafia got started in Italy, Sicily in particular
  • One of the most nauseating facts about this swine in the White House is that he was able to dupe so many poor & working-class people into believing he was/is their champion. This is akin to the mafia bosses who took over America’s labor unions, claiming they’re the defenders of the American workers, who fought for a decent wage, overtime, workplace safety, etc. for decades i.e. the Teamsters being the most infamous case. American mobsters ran a decades long program of intimidation, beatings, & killing of union leaders. And now, Trump has fooled the gullible, though understandably fed-up with the spine-less Democrats who sold them out in the 1970s, into believing he, a guy who has screwed poor, working class tenants & employees, & contractors throughout his artificial rise to billionaire status. So, if you believe a mafia boss is your friend & champion, you clearly need to remove the scales from your eyes.
  • Like mafia bosses, Trump is eliminating every program that offers help to the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, and the dying, so you will have no one to turn to for help but him, the Emperor with No Clothes who decides your fate like the Kings & “nobility” in the feudal ages depending on his mood at the moment. No laws, no rights, no nothing unless you bow, scrape, & grovel at his feet and praise him as he does himself
  • “Fake News?” Yeah, the duplicitous duck knows all about this subject because he has mastered it over the course of his fake life. Trump clearly believes in Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda) major insight i.e. the bigger the lie & the more often you tell it, eventually will become a “truth,” or a “fact” in Kelly Anne’s “alternate facts” universe. “Inconvenient truths” are dismissed as “fake science” or “fake facts” and only the almighty Oz (Donald) knows what is fact & what is fake i.e. anything that is critical of him is fake, and anything that says he’s a genius & etc. ad nauseam, is a fact!
  • Here’s a little-known fact for you—here in the real world where the laws of gravity for example, are a real fact—Donald the Insecure demanded that every time his name was mentioned on “The Apprentice,” they must say “billionaire.” The creators, producers, & writers of the series have openly admitted that the show was fake from beginning to end but evidently, many, if not most Trump believers took it as proof of Trump’s superiority & business expertise. And for-the-record, I’m going to interject here & brag about myself—Trump does it 24/7 but I’ll probably be accused of making this all up just to tarnish the image of Little Lord Fauntleroy, the Fuhrer from Queens. I watched one episode of “Survivor” over 20 years ago which I believe was the first “reality” t.v. show & was immediately turned-off. I thought & I said to any who would listen, first of all, there’s something wrong here when we watch T.V., an artificial medium designed to dupe us into buying products we don’t need, to get a picture of reality.? This is an oxymoron or blatant contradiction in terms. And secondly, from the beginning of this tragic phenomenon, these shows all have one thing in common & that thing is what Trump has built his fortune on i.e. lie, cheat, steal, do whatever you have to do to come out on top. And this is our national leader? The kind of role model we want our children to emulate? So, Hell yeah, I’m proud as Hell that I saw through this bullshit from the get-go!
  • And America’s election system has become almost as indistinguishable as that of the so-called “Banana Republics” we love to look down our noses at. In other words, our political system is just as corrupt as any mafia’s hierarchy where he who has the most money & the most politicians & judges in their pockets, “wins.” I have long recognized the fact that the Democratic Party is basically spineless but I deluded myself into believing that at least they cared a little about the poor & the working class but I no longer believe this. Bernie Sanders is not perfect by any means, but he clearly has a very long track record of fighting for the common man. Yet, I have to face the fact that the DNC with the help of the so-called “liberal” MSNBC cable network is blatantly sabotaging Bernie’s bid for the presidency. Why? Quite simply because he represents a very real threat to their corruption as usual policies & practices just a little less overt than the G.O.P. Again, not that different from the mafia-controlled unions who pretend to defend the American worker. By-the-way, I have not forgotten that the supposedly “liberal news network, MSNBC, fired Phil Donahue for his unforgivable crime of having on one “anti Irag invasion guest for every two, pro Iraq invasion guests.” So much for MSNBC’s reputation as a bulwark against the Right wing’s assault on Democracy. (there are many other examples but I need to get to the point of this essay)

 

 

In conclusion, I was going to end this essay without including one of the most obvious facts which I’d forgotten i.e. it was the Italian/American mafia that built Las Vegas & Atlantic City so they could launder the hundreds of millions they’d gained from their criminal empires. And Trump clearly never would’ve made it to where he is without being in bed with the American mafia in the beginning of his ‘career.’ So now our president is a former casino owner i.e. laundered millions for both Italian mobsters & Russian mobsters? Boy has the bar dropped in terms of the caliber of man we’ll allow to be president of the most powerful nation on Earth. At this rate, we won’t be on top much longer!

 

Then the Russian mafia saved his stupid ass i.e. how dumb a businessman do you have to be to fail as an owner of a casino? For example, it never dawned on Donald the Dip-Shit that opening other casinos in the same town would be competing against yourself for business. And only mafia figures who had so much to gain by backing Donald the Moron,  no matter how stupid he was because he was very valuable as a circus master to distract the public & the government from looking too close in to their shady deals, would loan this loser money.

 

And like the millions of suckers every year who lose their money, sometimes their entire life-savings in gambling, all those who voted for Trump & bet on his making a real change for the better in their lives, will maybe someday realize what a fool’s errand they were on? The house always wins & the house is the mafia dons, the corporate cockroaches, & the political “leaders” like Mitch McConnell who have sabotaged every single piece of legislation that could help us, the poor, working (well, sometimes?) class to live with just a modicum of dignity or self-respect?

 

You see, my imaginary reader, the common factors between mafia organizations, drug cartels, dictatorships, etc. is that in order to maintain power, you must rule with an iron fist. And to do so, you must master the techniques of effective threats, intimidation, & fear. Say what you want about Donald’s inability to speak in coherent sentences or a semblance of logic or rational thought, but he is a master manipulator & fear monger.

 

And a “successful” mafia boss must never be troubled by things like a conscience, empathy, sympathy, morality, or principles. Donald is clearly at the top of that class along with his favorite despots around the world like Putin, Duterte, Erdogan, Xi, Bosonaro, & his love interest, Rocket Man of North Korea, to name just a few, in terms of not being hampered by those irritating humanistic qualities.

 

Unfortunately for humanity, all those who are not members of the 1%, the mob bosses are gambling with our lives & if the coronavirus doesn’t kill us, global warming, or a possible nuclear exchange which Trump with his 5th grade intelligence level & impulsiveness & preference for running the American government via Twitter just might be tempted to launch in one of his frequent temper-tantrums at imagined or real, public sleights or criticisms?

Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, OR March 8, 2020

 

 

 

 

Dangerous Stupidity!

 

 

 

Of course, nowadays on the Left side of the political spectrum, it’s not PC to call people stupid. No, we’re supposed to be sensitive of others’ feelings, etc., no matter how hate & violence-spewing they are.  Well I say, fuck that shit!

the laws against hate speech don’t apply to Trump or the rich

 

We’re being killed and you tell me to be polite? Is it any wonder that we’re constantly beat by the far Right? Michael Moore said that he was talking with Steve Bannon some time back & that he asked Bannon about this & Bannon said; “the liberals or democrats are having a pillow fight while we go for the head shot i.e. shooting to kill.”

Greta Thunberg’s “How Dare You?” to world leaders says it all!

 

And let’s face it, he was at least honest in this regard. Speaking of Steve Bannon, let me lay out for you how this vile, Machiavellian strategist for Trump who played a major role in getting Trump into the White House, capitalized on the public’s general stupidity to do so.

Bannon is on a Crusade stirring-up racial hatred around Europe

 

You see, Bannon was vice-president of a company called Cambridge Analytica & the Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica to help in Trump’s run for the presidency. Well, Cambridge Analytica bought access to Facebook’s data base & because of Zuckerberg’s greed & not bothering to place any limits on Analytica’s use of their data on over 80 million Americans, Analytica was able to target those American voters it refers to as “persuadable.”

Brittany Kaiser, supposed whistleblower but I don’t buy it (Cambridge Analytica)

 

If you are or were a Facebook user like myself, you’ve probably come across those apparently innocent little quizzes that are posted now & then asking if you’d care to see how you measure up against others in your type of personality or some other respect. Well, from the results of these “quizzes,” and the treasure trove of other data we willingly posted & divulged on Facebook, Analytica was able to brag to the corporations it tried to sell its services to that it had over 5,000 data points on every American citizen.

 

And unbelievable as it may sound, something like 70% of Americans get their news from Facebook & I don’t know what percentage of regular FOX “News” viewers we have but FOX is de facto America’s version of Pravda (look Pravda up for yourself; hint, it’s Russia’s major, perhaps only newspaper).

 

Access to the personal data of over 80 million Americans’ personal data & all their friends’ personal data as well, gave the Trump campaign a powerful weapon with which they were able to pinpoint the stupid, the weak-minded, the gullible in every voting precinct in the U.S. & they created over a million political “ads” designed sometimes for just a handful of voters whom they knew they could manipulate into voting for Trump with their absurd, obscene, & outright lies in obvious political propaganda ads attacking Hillary Clinton.

 

So, with Facebook’s selling of all our personal data to Cambridge Analytica & the unscrupulous machinations of the likes of Steve Bannon, the stupid, the conspiracy cult believers, the Duck Dynasty crowd, the racists & haters of everyone not a White Supremacist, & especially the faux “Christian” voters, this combination of dark forces put Trump in the White House.

 

And since Trump the simpleton & malignant narcissist who refused to even follow the rule of putting his companies in a trust so he couldn’t be accused of profiting from being president, has been systematically destroying our government.

 

As a matter of fact, in today’s headlines, the Trump administration is now trying to take away Social Security funds from those with disabilities. Yep! All you stupid morons who believe this lying piece of shit, this crook, this traitor to America, this sexual predator is cutting food stamps & every part of the social safety net that many of you probably rely on & you sing his praises? Yeah, that is indeed some “special kind of stupid!”

 

To elaborate on the dangerous aspects in the big picture regarding this tin-pot would-be dictator (an autocratic ruler with little political credibility & delusions of grandeur), malignant narcissist, con man, huckster, & sexual predator the morons put in office, reflect on this; Trump knows absolutely nothing about foreign policy but loves to strut the world stage like he’s some sort of gangster.

 

You see, Trump has been partnering with the Italian mafia for most of his life i.e. they got the contracts for cement in his buildings, ensured that his employees in his Atlantic City casinos wouldn’t strike with the other hotel employees who were striking, etc. And now he has “progressed” to relying on the Russian mafia for loans because American banks will no longer give him loans because he defaulted on hundreds of millions in previous loans—yeah, this is the “successful businessman” you’ve all been suckered into believing.

 

He thinks he can bully & bluster his way through his presidency but his latest truly stupid move against Iran is playing with a very deadly fire. Iran is by far the most powerful nation in the Middle East & if we were to seriously engage in a war with them, it’d be all over for all of humanity!

 

If Trump truly had a brain, he wouldn’t have threatened every school he’s ever attended if they dared to release his grades. Moreover, his trade wars are actually hurting the American economy but he’ll lie & deny until the day he dies & his cult will turn a blind eye no matter what.

 

For example, roughly a third of the American public don’t believe the Holocaust actually happened, what do you bet they’re the same third of our fellow citizens who think Trump is the next best thing to the Second Coming?

 

It’s taken America over two hundred years to evolve & yes, we have a lot of ugly history or crimes against humanity to answer for but how in the Hell can Trump zombies actually think that the total destruction of our government’s structure & institutions is a good thing just proves my point i.e. they’re fuckin’ morons!

 

Trump is so brazenly corrupt that it boggles the mind? Step right up suckers. Stay at my hotels, play gold at my resorts, buy my products, etc. And thanks to the totally spineless G.O.P., he is given free rein to defy every norm of human decency, decorum, & law.

 

Some of you may recall that when John Kerry was running for the presidency, they made a big deal out of his so-called, “flip-flopping” on issues? This idiot flip-flops within the same sentence time & time again. He says stuff, it’s recorded, and ten minutes later he denies ever having said it. He’s called on it & claims it’s all a conspiracy against him by the Deep State. Yeah, they’re so powerful that they can immediately alter video tapes of his speaking within a matter of ten minutes. People who believe this bag of shit shouldn’t be allowed to operate a car let alone own a gun.

 

And one of the scariest things about this orangutan in the oval office is the fact that approximately 70% of so-called evangelicals love him because they believe he’ll bring us Armageddon. The destruction of the Earth is their dream.

“Christian” evangelicals’ Wet dream i.e. WWIII

 

In conclusion, here’s a little thought experiment for you; if you’re familiar with the long-running, hit T.V. series, “The West Wing,” it was a very educational program in that it showed a lot of the inner workings in the White House i.e. the wheeling & dealing in the passing of bills, how compromises are reached, what happens in times of serious international crises, etc. Now this was classified as a fictional television series but a large part of its popularity was due to the fact that it was so closely modeled on the reality of our government & how it does & doesn’t function in so many ways.

 

Now consider the thousands of insights we’ve gotten over the three years that Trump has been the president & how himself & his administration can’t seem to function in even the simplest of tasks. It’s clear to all who aren’t willfully ignorant, Trump doesn’t have a clue, won’t even read his daily briefings let along attempt to inform himself on the critical issues facing us both domestically & internationally. He prefers to spend his days watching FOX “News,” tweeting, & playing golf or holding his Nuremberg-like fear & hate rallies & promoting his hotels & resorts.

 

Now ask yourself, would I rather have this dangerous buffoon running our country & ensuring our safety & prosperity or would I rather have a real actor like Martin Sheen, in the oval office? A man of compassion & intelligence!

 

Moreover, this total moron behind the desk in the White House decides to play chicken with Iran (which is clearly the most powerful nation in the Middle East) for absolutely no reason at all other than to “look tough.” It seems pretty clear to all with a functioning brain that Trump is desperately trying to distract us from impeaching his ass because he knows that once he’s out of office, a prison cell will be his next home. Gee, I wonder if they’ll let the girly-man Tweet from prison?

The Fake News President

 

 

The ultimate irony is that this phony braggart who keeps accusing the press of being fake, wouldn’t have become president were it not for the tsunami of fake news posts on Facebook. And depressingly, almost half of all Americans get their news from Facebook. This conspiratorial assault on the hearts & minds of the American electorate was designed & implemented by Cambridge Analytica’s then vice-president, Steve Bannon.

And the great Fear & Hate Monger spreading it throughout Europe now

 

Bannon just happened to be the CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign & once Trump became the occupant of the oval office, he was the White House’s chief strategist for seven months until he criticized the boy-king in a book he’d written.

funny how he doesn’t tell it like it is when he loses?

 

Moreover, another key factor in how Trump stole the presidency was the fact that the “public enemy” i.e. the mainstream media, gave Donny over 23 times the media attention that Sanders got. Why? Because Trump would say things so outrageous that it made for better television ratings. And obviously the better the ratings, the more money the networks bring in. Obviously, the fake news circus maximus waged by team Trump has been & continues to be the key to his success.

“Freedom of the Press,
if it means anything at all,
means the freedom
to criticize and oppose”
― George Orwell

 

Of course, the most egregious example of fake news is FOX “news.” I have been putting the news in that reference in parenthesis for well over the past decade because I refuse to refer to them as a legitimate news organization. And the fact that the rest of the mainstream media in this country have gone along with this farce for the 20 years that FOX has been in business, reveals how little integrity they have as well.

You can be sure of one thing i.e. this isn’t the first time he’s been charged with fraud

 

Most notably during the George W. Bush reign of error & terror, the White House issued its daily talking points & FOX “news,” dutifully echoed it. Whenever I get into a brief, political discussion with someone, I can tell within a couple of minutes if they’re a FOX “news” devotee because they simply spew out the same tired propaganda they just watched on FOX.

Yeah I bet all the families of our soldiers who died in Iraq thought this was real funny

 

However, in the spirit of full disclosure, let’s review briefly that minor incident we call the Iraq War. Of course, FOX “news” beat the drums for invasion louder than any “news” network but The New York Times, supposedly the “paper of record” i.e. the paper that sets the standard for all the rest of the major newspapers in America, also beat the war-drums. Judith Miller was their star reporter covering the lead-up to the war & she basically just served as a stenographer to Ahmad Chalabi. A few weeks after Miller’s complete lack of journalistic ethics, she was forced to leave the New York Times staff.

the kind of reporter that Trump loves

This was a guy that would’ve been a perfect business partner for Trump. He’d amassed a fortune of over $100,000,000 through bank fraud in Jordan, being an Iraqi businessman in the oil industry, etc. But his primary value was as a source for the Bush administration’s claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So much for the Times’ reputation of research & fact-checking. Oh yeah, Chalabi hoped that his dishonesty & dirty deals with the Bush administration would be rewarded by his being made president of Iraq after the U.S. leveled the country.

he won’t release his taxes because they’ll prove he’s a tax cheat & not a billionaire!

 

What the above example reveals is that yes, to some extent, all media is fake but to conclude that Trump is therefore justified in his ad nauseam attacks on the media as the public enemy is reducto ad absurdum (argument to absurdity). And I often hear people claim that MSNBC is equal to FOX “news” in terms of their biases which is ridiculous as well.

If you give a shit about how the media really works, this man is the greatest intellectual alive!

 

Time to return to the Master of Fraud, Trump. Everything about this blowhard (an arrogantly & pompously boastful or opinionated person; braggart, windbag) is fake from his glued-down toupee to his “bone-spurs.” We witness daily how mind-bogglingly stupid & incompetent he is yet nearly half of America love his chest-beating & his racist hatred of all who aren’t from “his base.”

not that I have any love for Romney but here he’s speaking the truth

 

This “teller like it is,” is so insecure that he employs a platoon of lawyers 24/7, 365 days a year who protect him from lawsuits filed against him & who threaten lawsuits against anyone who dares to besmirch his “good name” and his entire business career has been one continuous stream of lawsuits as either defendant or plaintiff.

Trump’s mentor & mafia lawyer on the right, Joseph McCarthy’s hatchet-man, Roy Cohn

What his Jonestown cult members refuse to acknowledge is Trump’s paranoid fear of being exposed for the epitome (a perfect example of a class or type) of a fraud. There’s a good reason why lawyers, politicians, & used-car salesmen are on the lowest rung of America’s social ladder & Trump is the lowest of the low when you take the time to check out his past. Yet his Walking Dead cheerleaders will never betray him because he gives them their daily fix of dopamine every time he lashes out at immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, Democrats, liberals, etc. etc. etc.

Is this what it’s going to take before Trump fans wake-up? Another Jonestown?

 

Furthermore, what’s truly amazing is that those who support this charlatan are those whose mantra is “All you need is common sense.” I know these kinds of people. I used to argue with them all the time in my mom’s house in my 20s when we’d be partying & they’d blindly defend Ronald Reagan. So, where is the “common sense” of the typical Trump fan?

Is America really so dumb as to fall for this fake???

 

How can a person who owns a casino, go bankrupt & not just once but four times even when given special zoning permission that other casino owners in Atlantic City weren’t given? Seems rather obvious to me that he’s a colossal failure as a businessman. And if he’s such a genius as he loves to boast ad nauseam, why has he threatened lawsuits against any of the schools he’s attended from elementary school to college if they dare to reveal his grades? Duh! He’s always been the fuckin’ moron we see before our eyes & only the willfully blind fail to see it.

The state of higher education in America; hundreds of fraudulent, on-line “universities” & massive student debt

 

And speaking of blind, America as evidenced by the millions who believe in Trump are clearly also members of the deaf, dumb, & blind and clearly represent a threat to not only our fragile democracy but often a physical threat to those who dare to speak out.

 

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane for those of you who may not remember the beginning of the “reality T.V. phenomenon.” The first & the only “Reality T.V. show” I ever watched as far as I can remember, was “Survivor.” I watched perhaps two or three episodes of it with my dear, departed wife and I commented to her, think about it, what is this series telling us? It’s telling us to win at any cost i.e. lie, cheat, steal, backstab, etc., you know, the seven cardinal virtues that all Christians aspire to. (No, I’m being facetious here but I did point out the negative lessons the show was promoting)

This is the kind of leader Trump admires i.e. cruel & fascist

 

Don’t get me wrong, but what I’m about to say isn’t because I consider myself holier than thou but rather due to the fact that I’ve been an outsider or a loner all my life. My “friends” in L.A. as I was progressing through my 20s, often mocked or ridiculed me because they weren’t readers like I am and therefore a lot of what I tried to tell them sounded preposterous.

the IRS goes after far more ordinary Americans than the 1% tax cheaters who make billions

 

Well I believe it’s been close to 20 years now & we now have clear evidence of the harm that our infatuation with “reality t.v.” has wrought on our society & culture. I have tried for years to point out to people the Alice in Wonderland absurdity of watching a fake “medium” (technology used to communicate) to supposedly get a view of our reality. I’d say things like, Hey, I have an idea, how about instead of watching T.V. to get a view of “reality,” you go out and live real life, you know, what’s happening right outside your door?

Authoritarians appeal to people when they are desperate & worried about their economic future

 

Of course, my concerns were dismissed and mocked as usual but it gives me no pleasure to point that out now, my worries have clearly been proven correct. Donald J. Trump, the phony star of a phony t.v. series built on a formula perfect for such a vile & corrupt person as Donny, with the critical help of this series, The Apprentice, has become the president of the most powerful nation on earth & is clearly a serious threat to our national security & our economic well-being.

like some of the Roman Emperors, Trump is a megalomaniac & poses a threat to the planet!

 

I also heartily recommend that you check out the documentary series on Netflix called “Dirty Money,” and the episode titled; “Confidence Man,” which of course is about Trump. Again, those of you who believe you have “common sense,” might ponder why it is that Donnie demanded that every time that his name was mentioned on The Apprentice, they had to add; “the billionaire?” If he’s so confident of his wealth, why does he need to keep on saying he’s very, very rich or fantastically rich, etc. etc. etc. so often that it makes me feel like puking? Or reflect on this; We had something like 585 billionaires in America as of 2018 but we don’t hear them bragging to the world daily of their wealth, why do you think that is?

I don’t know about you but I have always detested braggarts and when I’m around one, I usually make a quick escape. I prefer to be around people who are humble and if they are talented in some areas, I usually discover their talents on my own. I feel that this is a good point at which to lay-out just how significant Steve Bannon & Cambridge Analytica’s role was in dumping this human trash-can, Trump on us. I am going to give you a thumbnail overview of the subject & if you’d care to look a bit deeper, I suggest you check out the fantastic documentary also available on Netflix called “The Great Hack.”

In a nutshell, Cambridge Analytica was a branch of a larger corporation that had been doing psychological operations work or contracts with governments, corporations, intelligence agencies, etc. for decades i.e. disrupting, manipulating, etc. elections with fake news stories or propaganda. And when Zuckerberg sold them the data of over 90 million of American Facebook users, supposedly unaware of the harm it could cause, Cambridge Analytica went to work.

the facts behind the fraud & no, not “alternative facts”

 

Bannon is like an evil wizard who immediately realized just what a powerful weapon this data could be & probably started salivating from the beginning. And one of their primary tools for gaining insights into American voters’ personalities, character, etc. was the use of the seemingly simple personality tests they posted on Facebook. And I too fell for these tests several times. Cambridge boasted in their sales campaigns that they had over 5,000 data points on every American user of Facebook.

 

And all this data they had collected illegally & immorally on us, made it easy for them to target those whom they called “persuadable.” These were the Facebook users that they targeted with their fake news stories i.e. propaganda portraying Hillary Clinton as the head of a child sex ring that drank children’s blood & assorted other National Enquirer type “news stories.” Remember the fact that nearly half of America’s citizens who are on Facebook, get their news from this so-called, “social media platform.”

Get the picture? Facebook, the most powerful social media platform in the world with over two billion users, along with FOX “news,” Alex Jones’ “Info Wars” website, the Conspiracy Channel in other words i.e. the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children from six to seven years old along with six adult staff at this elementary school was called a hoax by Alex Jones.

 

“…. claims that the massacre was “a giant hoax” and “that the whole thing was fake” — staged by the federal government, which hired professional actors for the purposes of undermining Second Amendment rights.”  https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603223968/sandy-hook-parents-sue-conspiracy-theorist-al

 

And America’s infamous “Anti-intellectualism” (see the classic by Richard Hofstadter) have combined in a perverse sort of perfect storm to bring us one of the most despicable creatures to ever walk upright, Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan.

“Trump has repeatedly cited or pushed claims that were traced back to infowars.com” Moreover, Jones two areas of “expertise” are conspiracy theories and fake news. What an amazing coincidence? If, unlike Trump, you are capable of compassion or empathy, try to imagine what the parents of those children who were murdered must’ve felt like with this evil propagandist, Alex Jones, calling this horrific nightmare a grand conspiracy.

 

A few of the parents of the murdered children filed a law suit against Jones for his horrible behavior in pushing this conspiracy theory for I’m not sure how long but I do know that Jones finally lost in court. And now he claims that “a form of psychosis caused him to believe that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged.” Yeah, right! And this is the kind of guy that our fake news president cites & promotes conspiracy theories from? This shows just how gullible millions of Americans are & how quick they are to believe the most absurd claims of nut-jobs.

 

In conclusion, I am going to pull back the curtain on Trump’s greatest fraud which is his claim to fame i.e. that he’s a self-made billionaire. But before I do so, it’s appropriate to remind you, my imaginary reader, of a fantastic statement by the liar-in-chief;

 

“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

This is almost a little too on-the-nose Orwellian. In 1984, George Orwell described the totalitarian government’s ultimate demand of its subjects:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.  https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22547037/donald-trump-orwellian-truth-reality-eyes-ears/

This admonition is clearly from the mind of a megalomaniac and any rational person capable of even a semblance of critical & analytical thinking would be frightened but not Trump’s Walking Dead army. In other words, Trump is telling his pro-Nazi & neo-fascist fan club to only believe whatever he says. Trump is clearly a textbook example of a demagogue & let me save you the effort to go to your dictionary, if you were so inclined?

 

demagogue /ˈdɛməɡɒɡ/ (from Greek δημαγωγός, a popular leader, a leader of a mob, from δῆμος, people, populace, the commons + ἀγωγός leading, leader)[1] or rabble-rouser[2][3] is a leader who gains popularity in a democracy by exploiting prejudice and ignorance to arouse the common people against elites, whipping up the passions of the crowd and shutting down reasoned deliberation.[1][4] Demagogues overturn established norms of political conduct, or promise or threaten to do so.[5]

 

Of course, Trump’s Conspiracy of Ignorance campaign is two-pronged i.e. pretending to be going after the elites of which he is a member at least financially-speaking. By-the-way, Trump tried his best to gain acceptance into New York’s intellectual & cultural elite for many years in his 20s but they laughed at him & rejected him time & time again. So, I believe a lot of his animus towards this pseudo elite, accounts for a lot of his bitterness nowadays? And the second prong of Trump’s war against America is his base which adore him & feed his super-ego.

 

Okay, now for the piece de resistance (French for; an outstanding item or event: showpiece), upon which Trump has built the edifice of his empire, his wealth. By-the-way, my guess is that this expose (to make known: bring to light) done by a team of investigative reporters from The New York Times is probably the main reason he detests this newspaper above all the rest?

 

Back in 2005, David Cay Johnston, revealed three pages of one of Trump’s tax returns that he had gotten his hands on. He has closely observed Trump’s career for over 28 years & has challenged Trump on many occasions to sue him but Trump has never taken him up on his invitation. The three pages caught the attention of this small team of journalists at the Times & they began a 14-month investigation of Donnie Darko.

And here is what they discovered thanks in large part to getting their hands-on Donnie’s daddy’s Will. Moreover, because Donnie’s sister, who was a federal judge, had to file a full financial disclosure each year that she was a judge & dutifully listed the details of every trust, business organization, etc. from which she received money, they were able to zero in on Donnie’s true sources of his wealth. Each of Donnie’s siblings received the same amount in Fred Trump’s Will but from the age of three when Donald Duck was receiving $250,000 a year & throughout his life, Daddy Warbucks never stopped funneling millions of dollars every year to the spoiled & intellectually-challenged Donald Duck.

 

In brief, Donnie the Despicable has never been a true entrepreneur because Daddy had to co-sign for every loan he used to get in his early years until the banks had their fill of his defaults on his loans. In 2005, his tax return showed that he had earned $150,000,000 but the investigative team discovered that this was a one-shot thing & it was because he had inherited it from daddy. Again, you can do a brief check to see just how many times his “brilliant” business mind has failed. And in the early 1990s, he was over $3 billion in debt with three of his Atlantic City casinos bankrupt. But then came his saving grace i.e. The Apprentice.  https://people.com/politics/apprentice-creators-donald-trump-scam/

 

Obviously, Trump’s entire life has been a gargantuan fraud and he has focused on expanding the Trump name & its façade of his being a self-made billionaire for decades. This is why he is so quick to sue anyone who dares to defame his “good name” i.e. his name plastered on buildings around the world make the unthinking believe he actually owns all those buildings when in fact, he’s simply the front-man, like the doorman standing outside a fancy hotel proclaiming; “Come on in to the greatest hotel in the world!”

 

It’s the sheer audacity of his hypocrisy (phrase used by Scott Horton) that has enabled him to survive along with his inheritance that has kept his head above water financially, not to mention his countless criminal acts.

 

And if you watch the video about how he got his fortune from daddy whom he has always claimed only gave him a “small loan of one million & which he had to pay interest on,” they also reveal how Donald & his siblings ripped daddy off for hundreds of millions so they wouldn’t have to pay 55% in taxes on their inheritance. Yep! Like I’ve showed in several instances, this racist, hate-monger, & national embarrassment has been nothing but a fake & a fraud all his life and yet he struts the world stage as if he were a present-day Mussolini and expects us to all grovel at his feet in awe of his magnificence. Well, here are my parting words for all of you who will persist in this grand delusion, but first I thought I might lighten things up briefly because I forewarn you, my last thoughts on this subject are very dark.

 

 

The Emperor Wears No Clothes
P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and boy was he right

 

And here is Steve Bannon, the conspiracy theorist who is very sly and intelligent & this makes him a very dangerous person indeed because he is out to destroy every government that is pro-democracy and he wants to create a New World Order of Fascism!

And now back to the real “reality” of our lives in this dark time, this era of Trump and the darkness that has spread over the land.

 

You grin and cheer for this fake because like a lynch-mob, he can whip you up into a frenzy so easily. He helps you vent your anger that comes from your fears about how you’re going to pay your bills & your family’s future but this is the demagogue’s oldest trick in the book i.e. blame others, immigrants, Muslims, democrats, liberals, etc. etc. etc. when you should be ashamed of yourselves for not seeing that Trump isn’t your champion, he’s the enemy.

 

He represents the bankers who illegally foreclosed on your home and evicted you. He’s the hedge fund manager who wiped-out your pension fund. He’s one of the corporate crooks who pay lawyers & politicians to write laws that allow all the fraud & theft.

 

The government by and large works for the corporate cockroaches just like every one of us who works for thieves like Walmart, Amazon, etc. Trump, like his other swamp creature friends like Jeffrey Epstein for example, have gotten rich by fucking us all & using the government and the “law” to do so legally. But this doesn’t mean that we should therefore tear down the government completely because our government provides hundreds of positive functions & services as well.

 

You see, ever since FDR passed the New Deal, the Republicans have vowed & waged a non-stop propaganda campaign and war on every aspect of our government that does some good for we, the people. The G.O.P. has only one agenda and that is the unfettered pursuit of profit & power over the rest of us. So, take all their assaults on the government for what they truly represent i.e. an assault on us which is crystal clear as evidenced by the ever-expanding inequality financially speaking.

 

What Trump excels at is distracting us from what the 1% are doing behind the scenes i.e. Paul Ryan & Mitch McConnel being the key architects of the grand theft of our federal treasury as well as enablers of it. Trump’s actions & rhetoric has delivered a perhaps fatal blow to what we used to believe America stood for. And as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the rest of the world now fears America more than any other nation or supposed terrorist threat.

 

Trump’s reign of ignorance & terror is shameless & unbridled and dishonors all those who have died in defense of America. I am truly saddened that so many of you just disregard his behavior & dismiss it as Donnie just being “real.”

Is Trump’s vision for America what she lost her love for?

 

Trump is causing physical, mental, & emotional harm to millions of Americans and you cheer him on? Well when the flaps of the giant circus tent that Trump is the ringmaster of go down, you won’t be grinning because you’ll be the present-day Tom Joad family (John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”).

 

I’m not a religious person but if there is a God and a heaven, when you stand before St. Peter & those pearly gates, he’s going to tell you to Go to Hell for your cruel indifference & inhumanity towards your fellow human beings. You show a total lack of compassion or empathy for all the poor souls, men, women, & children locked up in cages like animals at our border. And you have clearly forgotten entirely what your savior, Jesus, boiled it down to in his Sermon on the Mount.

 

These dehumanized and discarded people bleed red just like you & I when cut. And they put their pants on one leg at a time like your or me. They simply want to live and to enable their children to grow up healthy and not live in a constant state of fear. The drug cartels prey on them like vultures and if their teenage children refuse to join the drug gangs, they are threatened with the death of their entire family. They are fleeing the droughts caused mainly by the pollution of their Northern neighbor and other so-called “technologically-advanced nations.” And they are fleeing the absolute corruption of their government & their corporate sector.

 

America is a leader in corporate corruption but we’re more discrete about our abuses & we have a very effective propaganda system in place to disguise the ugly history of our corporate cockroaches:

 

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
― Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier 

These drug cartels have become obscenely wealthy because of our absolutely asinine & insane War on Drugs and like Trump, they have become so rich because their drugs help people to escape at least temporarily from the nightmares of their daily lives. And the U.S. is the world’s largest market for their drugs because so many Americans hate their lives & your idol is the biggest drug dealer of them all because he pushes the most seductive drug of all i.e. fear & hate!

Oops?

 

 

—Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, Oregon October 12, 2019