Frank,
The "real, honest to goodness" pain will not be felt for some time.
But it's coming, just as sure as Sunrise. The good news is that we
can stop sitting around pissing and moaning over how poorly our
Democratic President is treating us. Now the gloves are off and the
word "compromise" is out of Webster's dictionary.
Remember that you heard it from me first...when Trump says he will not
forget the people, he means he and his Minions will rob us all,
equally.
I'm thinking that after we put up a Green House, we'll trade the
horses for some chickens and cows, and then stock the Beaver Pond with
trout. I'm thinking of building a Bear Trap, too. But when we run
out of Propane and gasoline, we'll need to adjust our sleeping to the
dark hours and cook over an open fire in our fire place.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/21/17, Frank Ventura <frank.ventura@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl, I just had major surgery on Tuesday but somehow the pain spiked on
Friday ... go figure.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2017 1:06 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Damage Already Done by Trump's
Presidency
Think of this; Donald J. Trump is America's new Poster Boy, modeling the way
for all of our impressionable youngsters. Gives you something to keep you
awake nights, doesn't it?
Carl Jarvis
On 1/21/17, M Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dickinson writes: "Donald Trump moves into the White House already
having done damage to the presidency, our democracy, the economy and
America's place in the world."
Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States
Friday, with historically low approval ratings, and despite losing the
popular vote.
(photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
The Damage Already Done by Trump's Presidency By Tim Dickinson,
Rolling Stone
20 January 17
Trump's just taking office, but he's already cost America gravely
Donald Trump moves into the White House already having done damage to
the presidency, our democracy, the economy and America's place in the
world.
We have watched this unfold in the open: Trump has thumbed his nose at
custom and the Constitution by refusing to resolve the conflicts of
interest that will now shadow his presidency. He has used his Twitter
account – a 21st-century bully pulpit – not to unify Americans behind
his agenda, but to settle personal scores in a sustained assault on
freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. Trump
has installed an inner circle that aims to marginalize millions of our
countrymen, even as it seeks to degrade the institutions of our
government. Finally, Trump has clutched Russia in a perplexing bear
hug. Whether he's done this out of genuine admiration for its brutal
regime, because he's indebted to its oligarchs, or because Trump has
somehow been compromised by former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin we have
yet to resolve. For Americans, and for our NATO allies, none of these
alternatives will be reassuring.
Republicans in Congress have stood by quietly, almost without objection.
They've acted as enablers – even as Trump has inserted himself as the
ur-chairman of publicly traded companies, blessing their manufacturing
plans or tanking their stock prices with a single tweet. Republicans
used to object to politicians "picking winners and losers." Just last
July, Speaker Paul Ryan called it "a recipe for a closed economy – for
cronyism."
History will judge this period harshly.
Conflicts of interest
Trump has not released his tax returns. The American public remains in
the dark about the debts and deals that could bind the 45th president
against the national interest or pervert the foreign policy of the United
States.
The lack of transparency matters because Donald Trump has not divested
from his businesses. His promises to set up a blind trust and to halt
new business deals were both empty. As the director of the U.S. Office
of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, described it, Trump's decision to
hand daily management of the Trump Organization to his adult sons
instead is "meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective."
Sounding more than a bit like Richard Nixon, Trump has proclaimed that
"the president can't have a conflict of interest." By a lawyerly
reading of 18 U.S.C. § 208, that may parse as true – but the claim is
false from any moral perspective. The Supreme Court has written that
when our leaders "engage in activities which arouse suspicions of
corruption," those office-holders endanger "the very fabric of a
democratic society." Trump, Shaub insisted in remarks delivered
January 11th at the Brookings Institution, has failed to rise to the
standards "that every president in the past four decades has met."
In fact, during the transition period, Trump and his children appeared
to trade on his status as president-elect: The Trumps have reportedly
secured a stalled building permit for a tower in Argentina; Ivanka
Trump joined her father in a meeting with the prime minister of Japan,
where she has business with a state-backed enterprise; and the Trump
Organization's new leaders, Don Jr. and Eric Trump, took seats at the
conference table for a once-in-a lifetime meeting with executives from
Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft and others at the
"tech summit" convened by their president-elect father at Trump Tower.
Even Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been pursuing
lucrative business deals with foreign investors.
Trump has now named Kushner a senior adviser, skirting anti-nepotism
laws.
The president's global business enterprise remains an invitation to
corruption – from interests who may try to ingratiate themselves to
Trump by leasing his properties, golfing at his resorts or lodging at
his hotels, including the new Trump International, down the street
from the White House.
Trump's business conflicts raise not only ethical but constitutional
concerns. Can profits earned from foreign governments paying
exorbitant sums for luxury rentals, hotel rooms, golf retreats or $24
cocktails be construed as either bribes or "emoluments" (i.e., gifts)?
Those would be impeachable offenses under the Constitution.
The Republican Congress could act to place limits on Trump's ability
to profit from his office. Congress could also force Trump to reveal
his tax returns, which 74 percent of Americans want him to release.
But the only move a Republican from the legislative branch has made on
presidential ethics so far is to threaten the independent government
watchdog who dared criticize Trump.
This has left our 45th president, in the words of Harvard legal
scholar Laurence Tribe, "a walking, talking violation of the
constitution from the moment he takes the oath."
Creeping authoritarianism
As he did on the campaign trail, Trump has continued to do violence to
both America's political norms and its constitutional values, striking
an authoritarian tone and railing against "my many enemies" –
including the Senate minority leader, whom Trump now calls "head clown
Chuck Schumer."
During his time as president-elect, Trump showed contempt for free
speech and free assembly in behavior that the executive director of
the ACLU calls "incredibly troubling." After his win in November,
Trump lashed out at "professional protesters, incited by the media,"
calling their street marches "unfair." He proposed punishing Americans
who burn the flag with a "loss of citizenship or year in jail!" And in
a series of tweets, he accused the cast of Hamilton of having
"harassed" Mike Pence with "rude" and "terrible behavior" after the
cast appealed to the vice president-elect "to uphold our American
values and to work on behalf of all of us."
Trump also relentlessly bashed the "crooked" and "dishonest" media. He
brought a paid cheering section to his lone press conference. And he
used that forum to club CNN as "fake news" and to call BuzzFeed a
"failing pile of garbage" for, respectively, reporting on and
publishing an intelligence dossier authored by a former British spy
that alleged a "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between
Trump's campaign and the Russian government.
Trump warned that BuzzFeed, in particular, would "suffer the
consequences."
Anti-government agenda
When he wasn't trashing the First Amendment, the president-elect was
building an inner circle of ideologues who are either hostile to large
segments of the American public or to the idea of government itself.
The first list starts with senior adviser Steve Bannon, the hero to
white nationalists who built Breitbart into the media platform for the
"Alt-Right." Trump tapped as his national security adviser retired Lt.
Gen.
Michael Flynn, who has tweeted that "Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL" and
declared that Islam is a "malignant cancer."
Trump's pick to enforce civil rights and the rule of law at the
Justice Department is Jeff Sessions – the Alabama senator who was
notoriously denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s over allegations
of racism as well as his prosecution of voting rights activists who
had been close to Martin Luther King Jr. (Trump, himself, used King's
birthday weekend this year to bash Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights
hero and King confidant, as being "all talk, talk, talk" and for
neglecting the "burning and crime infested
inner-cities.")
Trump's anti-government brigade is headlined by EPA nominee Scott
Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who repeatedly sued the agency
he has been tapped to lead – including in a failed attempt to strike
down limits on emissions of neurotoxic mercury. It includes
billionaire Betsy DeVos, the would-be education secretary who
testified this week that states should decide whether to enforce the
federal civil rights law guaranteeing education to students with
disabilities; energy secretary nominee Rick Perry, who famously wanted
to eliminate his future department; housing secretary nominee Ben
Carson, who had assessed himself unqualified to lead any federal
agency; and treasury secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin, who profited
from both the housing bubble and its aftermath, pivoting from the
mortgage desk at Goldman Sachs to running a bank dubbed a "foreclosure
machine" by critics – which tossed military service members out of
their homes and tried to foreclose on a 90-year-old lady who owed the
bank 27 cents. Mnuchin's "number one priority," he's said, is to
"strip back" the Dodd Frank financial reforms that Congress passed in
2010 to prevent another housing-market crash.
The Russian cloud
To borrow a line from Churchill, Donald Trump's relationship with
Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. We have at
best spotty information, but what we do know should alarm any American.
Vladimir Putin's Russia invades its neighbors, threatens NATO allies,
is linked to murders of dissidents and journalists, and subverts
democracies – including our own. The CIA, FBI and NSA have concluded
that Putin had "a clear preference" for Trump over Clinton in the 2016
election and that Russia orchestrated a multifaceted "influence
campaign" to help boost Trump, including by hacking emails of the DNC
and "senior Democratic officials"
ultimately published by WikiLeaks.
We know that Trump – who touted the WikiLeaks disclosures ad nauseam
on the campaign trail – laboriously resisted linking Russia to to the
hack, insisting "it is very hard to determine who was doing the
hacking," that "the whole age of computer has made it where nobody
knows exactly what's going on" and that "I know things that other
people don't know." Only during his press conference – following an
in-person classified briefing by the heads of the intelligence
community – did Trump finally admit, "I think it was Russia," only to
once more praise the product of Putin's cyber op, telling reporters,
"Look at what was learned from that hacking."
We have come to know Donald Trump as a man who relishes dominance
displays and bullying his adversaries. Recall: "low-energy Jeb," "lyin'
Ted,"
"little
Marco" and "crooked Hillary." But when it comes to the former KGB
colonel who leads Russia, Trump has a very different posture. The new
American president doesn't hold himself up as the new big wolf on the
global stage.
Instead, Trump acts like Putin is his alpha – praising him in December
as "very smart!"
Far from letting Russia's meddling in American elections spoil the
bromance, Trump tweeted in January, "Having a good relationship with
Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. Only 'stupid' people, or
fools, would think that it is bad!" With his foreign policy team,
Trump has surrounded himself with Russia-friendly advisers, including
Gen. Flynn, and Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state nominee and
former Exxon CEO on whom Putin pinned a medal of friendship in 2013.
Trump's praise for Putin is so effusive, and his administration's
posture toward Russia so deferential, it is not difficult to believe
the Russians have some sort of leverage. Is it financial? As remarked
above, Trump refuses to release his tax returns or business records.
We don't know. Back in 2008, Trump's son Don Jr. revealed that
"Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of
our assets." Donald Trump has loudly denied in recent days that he
owes "Russia"
anything. But as the journalist David Cay Johnston has smartly
observed, Trump's disavowals seem lawyerly, never extending to
"Russians." After all, Russian oligarchs, not the state of Russia, are
the lenders Americans would be concerned about.
A more salacious alternative is that the Russians have compromising
material – kompromat – that they are holding over Trump. This
possibility is addressed in the scandalous but unverified dossier
published by BuzzFeed that Trump has blasted as "A COMPLETE AND TOTAL
FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE," and "A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!"
suggesting it had been leaked by the U.S. intelligence community,
which he likened to "Nazi Germany."
A third, and perhaps more disturbing, possibility is that Trump simply
and genuinely admires Putin, and seeks to emulate his rule. That Trump
sees little value in the NATO alliance that has kept the peace in
Europe, and that he'd rather align himself with the Russian autocrat
than with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
On day one of the Trump administration, we have far more questions
than answers. But we know that the 45th president – historically
disliked, elected despite losing the popular vote – has already done
real damage to our republic.
And that we owe America our resistance.
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valid.
Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States
Friday, with historically low approval ratings, and despite losing the
popular vote.
(photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-damage-already-done-
by-tru
mps-presidency-w462022http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/th
e-dama
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The Damage Already Done by Trump's Presidency By Tim Dickinson,
Rolling Stone
20 January 17
Trump's just taking office, but he's already cost America gravely
onald Trump moves into the White House already having done damage to
the presidency, our democracy, the economy and America's place in the
world.
We have watched this unfold in the open: Trump has thumbed his nose at
custom and the Constitution by refusing to resolve the conflicts of
interest that will now shadow his presidency. He has used his Twitter
account – a 21st-century bully pulpit – not to unify Americans behind
his agenda, but to settle personal scores in a sustained assault on
freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. Trump
has installed an inner circle that aims to marginalize millions of our
countrymen, even as it seeks to degrade the institutions of our
government. Finally, Trump has clutched Russia in a perplexing bear
hug. Whether he's done this out of genuine admiration for its brutal
regime, because he's indebted to its oligarchs, or because Trump has
somehow been compromised by former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin we have
yet to resolve. For Americans, and for our NATO allies, none of these
alternatives will be reassuring.
Republicans in Congress have stood by quietly, almost without objection.
They've acted as enablers – even as Trump has inserted himself as the
ur-chairman of publicly traded companies, blessing their manufacturing
plans or tanking their stock prices with a single tweet. Republicans
used to object to politicians "picking winners and losers." Just last
July, Speaker Paul Ryan called it "a recipe for a closed economy – for
cronyism."
History will judge this period harshly.
Conflicts of interest
Trump has not released his tax returns. The American public remains in
the dark about the debts and deals that could bind the 45th president
against the national interest or pervert the foreign policy of the United
States.
The lack of transparency matters because Donald Trump has not divested
from his businesses. His promises to set up a blind trust and to halt
new business deals were both empty. As the director of the U.S. Office
of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, described it, Trump's decision to
hand daily management of the Trump Organization to his adult sons
instead is "meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective."
Sounding more than a bit like Richard Nixon, Trump has proclaimed that
"the president can't have a conflict of interest." By a lawyerly
reading of 18 U.S.C. § 208, that may parse as true – but the claim is
false from any moral perspective. The Supreme Court has written that
when our leaders "engage in activities which arouse suspicions of
corruption," those office-holders endanger "the very fabric of a
democratic society." Trump, Shaub insisted in remarks delivered
January 11th at the Brookings Institution, has failed to rise to the
standards "that every president in the past four decades has met."
In fact, during the transition period, Trump and his children appeared
to trade on his status as president-elect: The Trumps have reportedly
secured a stalled building permit for a tower in Argentina; Ivanka
Trump joined her father in a meeting with the prime minister of Japan,
where she has business with a state-backed enterprise; and the Trump
Organization's new leaders, Don Jr. and Eric Trump, took seats at the
conference table for a once-in-a lifetime meeting with executives from
Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft and others at the
"tech summit" convened by their president-elect father at Trump Tower.
Even Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been pursuing
lucrative business deals with foreign investors.
Trump has now named Kushner a senior adviser, skirting anti-nepotism
laws.
The president's global business enterprise remains an invitation to
corruption – from interests who may try to ingratiate themselves to
Trump by leasing his properties, golfing at his resorts or lodging at
his hotels, including the new Trump International, down the street
from the White House.
Trump's business conflicts raise not only ethical but constitutional
concerns. Can profits earned from foreign governments paying
exorbitant sums for luxury rentals, hotel rooms, golf retreats or $24
cocktails be construed as either bribes or "emoluments" (i.e., gifts)?
Those would be impeachable offenses under the Constitution.
The Republican Congress could act to place limits on Trump's ability
to profit from his office. Congress could also force Trump to reveal
his tax returns, which 74 percent of Americans want him to release.
But the only move a Republican from the legislative branch has made on
presidential ethics so far is to threaten the independent government
watchdog who dared criticize Trump.
This has left our 45th president, in the words of Harvard legal
scholar Laurence Tribe, "a walking, talking violation of the
constitution from the moment he takes the oath."
Creeping authoritarianism
As he did on the campaign trail, Trump has continued to do violence to
both America's political norms and its constitutional values, striking
an authoritarian tone and railing against "my many enemies" –
including the Senate minority leader, whom Trump now calls "head clown
Chuck Schumer."
During his time as president-elect, Trump showed contempt for free
speech and free assembly in behavior that the executive director of
the ACLU calls "incredibly troubling." After his win in November,
Trump lashed out at "professional protesters, incited by the media,"
calling their street marches "unfair." He proposed punishing Americans
who burn the flag with a "loss of citizenship or year in jail!" And in
a series of tweets, he accused the cast of Hamilton of having
"harassed" Mike Pence with "rude" and "terrible behavior" after the
cast appealed to the vice president-elect "to uphold our American
values and to work on behalf of all of us."
Trump also relentlessly bashed the "crooked" and "dishonest" media. He
brought a paid cheering section to his lone press conference. And he
used that forum to club CNN as "fake news" and to call BuzzFeed a
"failing pile of garbage" for, respectively, reporting on and
publishing an intelligence dossier authored by a former British spy
that alleged a "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between
Trump's campaign and the Russian government.
Trump warned that BuzzFeed, in particular, would "suffer the
consequences."
Anti-government agenda
When he wasn't trashing the First Amendment, the president-elect was
building an inner circle of ideologues who are either hostile to large
segments of the American public or to the idea of government itself.
The first list starts with senior adviser Steve Bannon, the hero to
white nationalists who built Breitbart into the media platform for the
"Alt-Right." Trump tapped as his national security adviser retired Lt.
Gen.
Michael Flynn, who has tweeted that "Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL" and
declared that Islam is a "malignant cancer."
Trump's pick to enforce civil rights and the rule of law at the
Justice Department is Jeff Sessions – the Alabama senator who was
notoriously denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s over allegations
of racism as well as his prosecution of voting rights activists who
had been close to Martin Luther King Jr. (Trump, himself, used King's
birthday weekend this year to bash Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights
hero and King confidant, as being "all talk, talk, talk" and for
neglecting the "burning and crime infested
inner-cities.")
Trump's anti-government brigade is headlined by EPA nominee Scott
Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who repeatedly sued the agency
he has been tapped to lead – including in a failed attempt to strike
down limits on emissions of neurotoxic mercury. It includes
billionaire Betsy DeVos, the would-be education secretary who
testified this week that states should decide whether to enforce the
federal civil rights law guaranteeing education to students with
disabilities; energy secretary nominee Rick Perry, who famously wanted
to eliminate his future department; housing secretary nominee Ben
Carson, who had assessed himself unqualified to lead any federal
agency; and treasury secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin, who profited
from both the housing bubble and its aftermath, pivoting from the
mortgage desk at Goldman Sachs to running a bank dubbed a "foreclosure
machine" by critics – which tossed military service members out of
their homes and tried to foreclose on a 90-year-old lady who owed the
bank 27 cents. Mnuchin's "number one priority," he's said, is to
"strip back" the Dodd Frank financial reforms that Congress passed in
2010 to prevent another housing-market crash.
The Russian cloud
To borrow a line from Churchill, Donald Trump's relationship with
Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. We have at
best spotty information, but what we do know should alarm any American.
Vladimir Putin's Russia invades its neighbors, threatens NATO allies,
is linked to murders of dissidents and journalists, and subverts
democracies – including our own. The CIA, FBI and NSA have concluded
that Putin had "a clear preference" for Trump over Clinton in the 2016
election and that Russia orchestrated a multifaceted "influence
campaign" to help boost Trump, including by hacking emails of the DNC
and "senior Democratic officials"
ultimately published by WikiLeaks.
We know that Trump – who touted the WikiLeaks disclosures ad nauseam
on the campaign trail – laboriously resisted linking Russia to to the
hack, insisting "it is very hard to determine who was doing the
hacking," that "the whole age of computer has made it where nobody
knows exactly what's going on" and that "I know things that other
people don't know." Only during his press conference – following an
in-person classified briefing by the heads of the intelligence
community – did Trump finally admit, "I think it was Russia," only to
once more praise the product of Putin's cyber op, telling reporters,
"Look at what was learned from that hacking."
We have come to know Donald Trump as a man who relishes dominance
displays and bullying his adversaries. Recall: "low-energy Jeb," "lyin'
Ted,"
"little
Marco" and "crooked Hillary." But when it comes to the former KGB
colonel who leads Russia, Trump has a very different posture. The new
American president doesn't hold himself up as the new big wolf on the
global stage.
Instead, Trump acts like Putin is his alpha – praising him in December
as "very smart!"
Far from letting Russia's meddling in American elections spoil the
bromance, Trump tweeted in January, "Having a good relationship with
Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. Only 'stupid' people, or
fools, would think that it is bad!" With his foreign policy team,
Trump has surrounded himself with Russia-friendly advisers, including
Gen. Flynn, and Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state nominee and
former Exxon CEO on whom Putin pinned a medal of friendship in 2013.
Trump's praise for Putin is so effusive, and his administration's
posture toward Russia so deferential, it is not difficult to believe
the Russians have some sort of leverage. Is it financial? As remarked
above, Trump refuses to release his tax returns or business records.
We don't know. Back in 2008, Trump's son Don Jr. revealed that
"Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of
our assets." Donald Trump has loudly denied in recent days that he
owes "Russia"
anything. But as the journalist David Cay Johnston has smartly
observed, Trump's disavowals seem lawyerly, never extending to
"Russians." After all, Russian oligarchs, not the state of Russia, are
the lenders Americans would be concerned about.
A more salacious alternative is that the Russians have compromising
material – kompromat – that they are holding over Trump. This
possibility is addressed in the scandalous but unverified dossier
published by BuzzFeed that Trump has blasted as "A COMPLETE AND TOTAL
FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE," and "A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!"
suggesting it had been leaked by the U.S. intelligence community,
which he likened to "Nazi Germany."
A third, and perhaps more disturbing, possibility is that Trump simply
and genuinely admires Putin, and seeks to emulate his rule. That Trump
sees little value in the NATO alliance that has kept the peace in
Europe, and that he'd rather align himself with the Russian autocrat
than with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
On day one of the Trump administration, we have far more questions
than answers. But we know that the 45th president – historically
disliked, elected despite losing the popular vote – has already done
real damage to our republic.
And that we owe America our resistance.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
