Friday, November 8, 2024

Concepts of democracy

America's own Cassandra, Sarah Kendzior, who has a degree in studies of autocratic regimes, has been writing about the road to fascism in America for several years.  Here are some excerpts of some articles she's published.
The day before we hit the road in December 2021, I finished writing my book, They Knew. T

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“The 21st century's most desirable currency is impunity,” I wrote. “Impunity, the sadist's conception of freedom, mainstreamed and marketed as the new American Dream.”

Victims positioned as oppressors, the powerful playacting as the powerless, lies told with the smirk of people who love to get caught because they know they will not be punished. The Trump administration was the culmination of America’s worst tendencies, a consequence of institutions so rotted they needed to be gutted and reborn.

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The Biden administration has continued Trump policies while refusing to hold Trump and his backers accountable, to the point that Trump can run for president again like Mafia Grover Cleveland.

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Under Biden, the United States became the first country to face an attempted coup and not only fail to punish the coup plotters but allow them to hold office and make laws. There is no parallel in world history. Even Hitler had a prison interlude between his putsch and his presidency.

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The Biden administration falsely proclaimed the pandemic over and blocked public health data from view as millions died or became disabled. They abandoned the tenets of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in favor of Cop City. They greeted the reversal of Roe as a fundraising opportunity, not even offering meaningful rhetorical opposition.

They continued the migrant abuse that took place under Trump and let the abusers remain at large. They sanctioned Russian oligarchs while letting their proxies fund campaigns in both parties. The most egregious offender is the DOJ. Under Merrick Garland, the best friend of Jared Kushner’s ethics lawyer Jamie Gorelick, the DOJ refused to prosecute Trump administration crimes even after the criminals confessed. They let the statute of limitations run out on the Mueller probe, ignored the repercussions of Trump’s network of mafiosos gaining classified intelligence, disregarded blatant criminality on the Supreme Court, and slow-walked a response to the theft of stolen documents containing nuclear secrets.

This is not a serious country, but a country in serious crisis. This is not a sovereign country, but a country under the tyranny of the minority regardless of who is in charge. We have elections, but we do not have choice.

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[Biden] fist-bumped MBS, bear-hugged Netanyahu, and announced the appointment of Iran-Contra war criminal Elliot Abrams. Biden was in the middle of waiving 26 federal regulations to build Trump’s Wall when he was interrupted by Israel’s genocide, to which he pledged material support. We don’t know how far the complicity goes, because in an unprecedented move, the Biden administration has decided to conduct arms deals with Israel in complete secrecy.

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In late September, Biden rolled out an ad bragging about his ability to work across the aisle. Across the aisle sit Republican seditionists, aspiring autocrats, and stooges propped up by dark money plutocrat networks. A person cannot rightly claim democracy is under attack and then brag that they are working with the people trying to destroy it.

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Democrats are worried about how Biden’s nonchalance over the slaughter of over 10,000 Palestinian civilians, roughly 4000 of them children, will affect the next election. This is possibly progress: in the beginning, he refused to believe the death toll was even real.

Now, faced with bombed schools and bombed hospitals and bombed refugee camps and Palestinian parents carrying the remains of their children in plastic bags while screaming in agony as the electricity is cut and the food supply ends and Israelis mock Palestinians deaths for a Tik-Tok challenge and Netanyahu uses Biblical references to convey his annihilatory intent.

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There are many reasons for the US government’s unwavering support of Israel no matter how authoritarian it becomes. I explain some of them in this article.

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But Israel is also a nexus for organized and white-collar crime, the money of which streams into US elections through lobbying groups and megadonors. That money is often far darker in origin than it seems. Ask any of the oligarchs and mafiosos who have long abused Israel’s right of return policy in order to escape criminal charges and launder their filthy gains.

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Ask Ghislaine Maxwell, since you can’t ask her father, Mossad agent and mafioso Robert Maxwell, or her partner, Jeffrey Epstein. Ask genocide abettor Antony Blinken. He might know since his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was Robert Maxwell’s best friend and lawyer before offering his services to Epstein. It’s a small, dirty world.

It is a world of elite criminal impunity, and now we are seeing the cracks.

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The most notable foreign policy difference between Trump and Biden has been Ukraine. Biden generated global goodwill for supporting a struggling country being invaded in sharp contrast to Kremlin lackey Trump. But that goodwill is vanishing and Ukraine – now gutted – may end up abandoned.

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Our crisis is beyond elections. You cannot vote out the mafia. You cannot wait for a referendum on ongoing mass murder. But you can look evil in the eye and stand up for those targeted. You can hope that if you are targeted, someone will do the same for you. If no one does, you still did the right thing, and that still matters.

  Behold, a Pale Horse Race NOV 05, 2023
In 1991, I did not feel threatened by the fact that Trump, a career mobster, had avoided prosecution. He lived in a golden tower, and I went to middle school. The Jeffrey Epstein case wasn’t public, so I didn’t know I was the same age as the trafficked girls Trump allegedly raped.

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Kids were expected to know Trump was evil. All Americans knew, until the American media forgot 25 years later.

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Trump was first investigated by the Department of Justice in 1973, and they let him go with a slap on the wrist. His criminal activity grew bolder the longer officials let him do it. Trump committed crimes my entire life, cocooned in impunity, until hatching like a butterfly effect in 2016. Transnational autocratic alliances strengthened during his presidency.

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Trump is part of an American criminal elite that does not run from the law, but runs for office in order to become the law.

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Controlled opposition issues “strong statements” of condemnation but, in reality, countenances sedition, ignores confessions, and blames the American people for anything going wrong. They tweet that America is in danger like they are passive spectators, instead of the few people with the legal power to investigate state crimes.

Sometimes they take breaks from streamlining elite criminal impunity to fund genocide. It’s how Congress likes to bond across the aisle.

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Every day, I watch a massacre in Gaza. Every day, I watch liberals play down this massacre, which is funded with their tax dollars, and speak of the looming danger of Project 2025.

Project 2025 is a right-wing plot to turn the US into a fascist state. It is indeed threatening, but much like the Trump mafia project that abets it, it has been building for my entire life and no one seems serious about stopping it.

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Instead of explaining their plan to prevent Project 2025, Democrats use it as an excuse to change the subject. They tell me to stop talking about Gaza because beheaded Palestinian babies make Biden look bad.

“You need to shut up,” they threaten, “or Biden will lose, and then you’ll lose your reproductive rights!”

“Well, joke’s on you,” I reply, “because I already lost my reproductive rights!”

This comeback always sounds better in my head.

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I haven’t had legal bodily autonomy since 2022. It’s not a loss you get used to. I wake every morning keenly aware of it, and keenly aware that the Democratic Party traded my uterus for fundraisers after the Republican Party raped my rights.

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I live in the land of the Aftermath People. My dark-money, gerrymandered state of Missouri enforces many of the terrible policies the Republicans promise nationwide for 2025. My vote is meaningless in a presidential election, and a foreign country’s henchmen are trying to oust my congresswoman.

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I am told I must vote to get my freedom back. This should be easy: my representative, Cori Bush, is a strong supporter of the right to bodily autonomy. But the Democrats are trying to get rid of her. So are the Republicans. They tried to oust her in a 2022 primary with the same tactics they are using now. [ed note: They finally succeeded in August 2024, losing her primary.] Every two years, my home is spammed with propaganda from fake PACs with names like “Progressives for Missouri” that are secretly funded by hard-right Zionist fanatics.

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I rarely hear “democracy is dying” from Aftermath People. I hear fury and disgust with the system, but not surrender, because we cannot afford that.

I hear “democracy is dying” the most from representatives trying to get my money.

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Aftermath People have to always think in terms of survival, and what powers the will to survive is moral clarity. You learn new ways to stand your ground. Never live your life on your enemies’ terms. Never emphasize the villains over the victims.

That’s why the Trump verdict doesn’t matter much yet: the real victims, the American people, are no freer than they were before.

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I’ve been writing about Trump for nine years, and about autocracy for over twenty. It’s frustrating to see people catch on when it’s too late.

  The Aftermath People Jun 11, 2024
[Donald Trump] is a pathological liar who spent his life in organized crime before committing sedition, and then getting immunity when no one — not Congress, not the January 6 committee, not the DOJ, not the very president he tried to overthrow — used the legal means granted to them to contain him in time.

For four years, Trump played his favorite, most predictable game — running out the clock — as officials let our freedom tick away. What does the constitution mean to these politicians, anyway? Just a paper, just a joke. Just “justice”, a concept at which they sneer behind the scenes while striking a pose of solemnity when they beg for your money on camera.

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Because Trump is widely loathed, beating him should have been easy — in the debate, and in the 2024 election.

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It is telling that bombing the debate instead of bombing the children of Gaza was the dealbreaker for Biden’s backers.

Biden’s cult is so loyal that they had long given up on him fulfilling his 2020 campaign pledges, including enforcing accountability for Trump’s many crimes. Instead, they spent years reciting a long list of why those promises were always impossible, and stressed the importance of voting for Biden again, so he can let down America with less surprise next time.

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The Blame Room is mirrored and infinite. Blame the media, blame the lighting, but above all, blame yourself — blame yourself, voter, you did not vote hard enough! Blame yourself for having expectations! Blame yourself for being betrayed.

But never, ever blame the officials who tore up America’s last chance like it was a losing lottery ticket and laughed as the pieces scattered in the wind.

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It has been heartbreaking to see a widespread loss of compassion over the past four years, along with abandonment of policies and people who were championed in 2020. The acceptance of mass death through covid during Biden’s term, greeted with horror during Trump’s term, was followed by the acceptance of mass murder abroad.

I have begged Americans not to give into cruelty. The surrender of the soul is the most dangerous act a person can commit — to others and to themselves. It is also the surest route to authoritarianism.

  Last Chance, USA JUL 10, 2024
I do not want to talk about Merrick Garland again. It feels like doing homework for a class my country already failed.

But it is necessary to do so. There is a shroud over the USA. It is woven of decades of deceit and impunity, but it is not interminable. There are threads that, when pulled, cause the shroud to unravel and Americans to see the light.

One of those threads is Merrick Garland’s rise to power, and the role of his mentor and lifelong best friend, Jamie Gorelick, in that rise.

I have told this story in pieces over the years. I am now putting the information in one article to make it easier to find. The story touches on so many atrocities that it is impossible for me to cover them all, and I encourage folks to pick up where I left off. The point of describing a crisis is to give people tools to fix it. This shadow network affects everyone, regardless of where you live or for whom you voted.

It is common to hear Garland described as an institutionalist. This is true. He protects a broken and corrupt institution, the Department of Justice. He protects it instead of protecting the United States or its people. He protects it above democracy or freedom or a future. He protects it over justice itself.

The DOJ Industrial Propaganda Complex that emerges when any critique of Garland is made insists that justice is imminent. They bleat that Garland is merely “dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s”.

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Garland is not unique in his role as a mafia state enabler. He follows a long line of DOJ cover-up operatives marketed as saviors of American democracy: James Comey, Robert Mueller, Bill Barr, Cy Vance, and so on. Over and over, Americans are told that these prosecutors are going to “get Trump” and dismantle his criminal network. Over and over, they serve their real role, which is to run out the clock and allow criminal elites to escape accountability.

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Among them are William Sessions and Louis Freeh, FBI heads who went on to serve Semyon Mogilevich and his transnational mafia operation. I explain this complex network in my books Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew.

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These servants of the mafia state would not intervene even when public safety was at grave risk. The longer they waited, the more power Trump accumulated.

As a career criminal with deep ties in business, media, and organized crime as well as access to classified information, Trump now has more leverage over the American government than they do over him.

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Trump is a career mafioso trained in the arts of blackmail and bribery by his mentor, Roy Cohn. He and his backers continually threaten physical violence against anyone in their way. But it is not necessary to deploy threats when the ostensible target – the DOJ -- is their willing accomplice.

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It is easier to attribute disaster to one political party instead of examining networks and recurring figures responsible for a multitude of tragedies over the past twenty-five years.

Jamie Gorelick is one of these figures, a Forrest Gump of 21st century corruption. Like Garland, she is a Democrat who serves GOP objectives, the most notable of which for Garland was working as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s lawyer and getting them the White House clearances that they should have been denied due to conflicts of interest.

As a result of Gorelick’s actions, Kushner gained classified intelligence that he likely shared with or sold to foreign states, including Saudi Arabia, from which he pocketed two billion dollars, and Israel, to which he has been tied since birth due to his family’s long friendship with the Netanyahu family.

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Garland has refused to investigate Kushner. A likely reason is that, were he to investigate Kushner – who remains a profound national security threat – he would also be investigating his best friend.

It is one big club, and it is destroying our country.

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Merrick Garland gained national prominence when he was blocked from the Supreme Court by Republicans in 2016. The refusal of the GOP to hold hearings gave the Americans the false impression that Garland is a staunch Democrat and defender of liberty.

In reality, the GOP refusal had little to do with Garland, but with their desire to pack the court with right-wing extremists once Trump ascended. Garland is not a right-wing extremist. He is a cog who serves corrupt interests under the guise of being “moderate” and “cautious” – stalling investigations and blocking evidence from public view. That is what he did during his brief tenure at the Clinton DOJ from 1994-1997. That is what he does at the Biden DOJ now.

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In 2017, after Trump fired James Comey, Mitch McConnell suggested that Garland become the FBI director.

“I have spoken with the president about it. I recommended Merrick Garland,” McConnell said in May 2017.

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McConnell is not the only Republican linked to Russian oligarchs to praise Garland. In 2010, when Garland was being considered for the Supreme Court, Republican operative Joseph DiGenova commended Garland as “a profoundly serious guy” who would be a great addition to the court.

DiGenova is a seasoned GOP criminal abettor and Trump operative who has -- among other things -- attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, worked with Rudy Giuliani on the 2019 Ukraine shakedown plot, and represented oligarchs immersed in transnational organized crime.

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In October 2021, Donald Trump praised Garland as “a good man” and said he was glad Garland was Attorney General. At that point, the DOJ had not even opened an inquiry into the Capitol attack, a dereliction of duty that was obvious to anyone with eyes and ears, but which Garland’s backers staunchly denied until time had run out, and it was too late.

  Servants of the Mafia State NOV 16, 2023 
Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

photo courtesy of Sarah Kendzior

PS:  For more on Garland's part.

UPDATE 04:21 pm:  Could be a big part of the problem...



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