Allan Nairn on America during Trump Admin

Cops' beating, killing, imprisoning and harassing people is a
fact of life getting worse under the rightist Trump
administration. Above is a shot from a video of a cop
beating a black teen caught by a cell phone. The
video elicits equal parts outrage and approval in
Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in May 2018. See Mal Contends.

Rightist Republicans demolish the Republic

Donald Trump's campaign boast about hypothetically killing a man in public and maintaining his core political support is one of the few truisms the lunatic in the White House has emitted.

Trump is a radical rightist leader of a mass base of fascistic Americans—they hate black and brown people and would be happy to see them all warehoused in prisons.

If Trump were to declare the black-and brown problem must be solved with a final solution begun with a declared state of emergency, Trump's white supporters would declare approvingly, 'yep, Trump's doing something, MAGA.'

Republicans in Congress would weasel their way to express their support.

Across America emboldened, politicized municipal police departments target citizens for any or no reason with the assurance their careers are secure. Liberal mayors and municipal officials—in Wisconsin, think Madison's Paul Soglin and Milwaukee's Tom Barrett—go along.

After the recent beating of a NBA player in Milwaukee, Tom Barrett expanded on his tame expression of concern, and offered a public apology to the police victim. Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales had said the assaulting cops acted "inappropriately," as though the vile gang of white cops committed a breach of etiquette and not a human rights violation.

Black and brown people get hit the worst.

The lunatic in the White House routinely boasts about his standing among cops and Evangelicals who flock to police departments to kill, harass and imprison for Christ.

Allan Nairn is interviewed by Jeremy Scahill in The Intercept today.

This is critical reading on the nature of Republican America and the white supremacist Donald Trump administration. They block voters and try to slash any federal expenditures that help people, working at all levels of elected government though no Republican dares campaign on these intentions.

Said Allan Nairn:

Well, Trump dragged a rightist revolution into power. It’s the Paul Ryan agenda which could never have gotten elected in its own right, because it’s anathema to most Americans — slashing Medicare, slashing social security, transferring trillions of dollars from the working people, and even the poor and the middle class to the very rich. Mitt Romney kind of tried to run on that and failed. Ryan, in his own right, could never get elected president. But Trump, with his genius for unleashing the beast in white America, touching these deep chords of racism that succeeded in turning a crucial number of previous white Obama voters into Trump voters, precisely, in large part, because of his racist appeals and his appeals to fear.

He succeeded in dragging the Republican Party into the White House with a minority of the votes. And this is a Republican Party that is one of the most radical mainstream political parties in all of American history, perhaps with the exception of the pro-secessionist Democrats at the time of the Civil War. And they’ve been in there, they’ve been implementing a rightist revolution, doing the massive transfer of wealth in part via the tax bill, but also an important part by systematically, agency by agency, trying to gut the constraints on large corporations and the oligarchs, regarding the environment, their treatment of labor, their ability to discriminate, their ability to commit fraud without fear of being sued by the public, increasing the rights of rich individuals to intervene in politics, decreasing the rights of collectives of working people to intervene in politics, like the Gorsuch-led Supreme Court decision just the other day, inhibiting the ability of workers to file class-action lawsuits against their employers.

It’s a systematic program that’s been in the works since 1980, really. In a sense, it dates back to the old Powell memorandum, where Powell, who later joined the Supreme Court, said we, the representatives of the rich, we’ve got to fight back against this new environmental movement, against this consumer movement, against the labor movement, and also implicitly against the Civil Rights movement. 'These people have been making too many gains, we’ve got to organize ourselves.'

And they did! They created Heritage, and this whole other elaborate apparatus, and later the Koch Brothers came in, and they created ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. They sent people down to the state legislature. And they’ve been working on this program for decades.

And, now, as the Republican Party has evolved to the most radical extreme, Trump dragged them into power again. They happen to have control of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. And they’ve been going around rigging the system so that a diminishing minority of people can hold power and continue to govern. Just as Trump was elected with a minority of the votes, they’re trying to set it up through a long list of tactics, including purging of voter rolls, voter suppression shortly before Election Day, gerrymandering, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, smaller and smaller numbers of people can win elections and retain power.

In Wisconsin, a reformist candidate for the Democratic Party nominee for governor, Matt Flynn, is campaigning on a platform of emptying the jails of those convicted of non-violent crimes. "Stop destroying lives," said Flynn.

Flynn faces a lot of opposition from both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Destroying lives is an objective of the most dangerous political party in American history, the Republican Party, which tries to insulate their rule from the democratic process.

Trump and his movement have not reached the bottom yet.

Wisconsin Gov Race — Matt Flynn Vows to Empty Jails of Non-violent Offenders

Matt Flynn is a candidate for the Democratic Party
nomination for Wisconsin governor

"My object is to stop destroying lives. ... I will review and accept petitions for review from a pardon board of any non-violent offense."
— Matt Flynn on mass incarceration

Madison, Wisconsin — Reached Matt Flynn, candidate for Wisconsin governor, by phone in March on his way to a national student walk-out event in solidarity with victims and survivors of the Parkland massacre.

Our topic was a different type of violence: State-inflicted devastation by the criminal justice system and what Flynn proposes to do about it, if elected governor.

Matt Flynn sounds a lot like he lost a family member to a criminal justice system. He didn't.

But the attorney has obviously been personally affected by family after family watching in horror as municipal police and state prosecutors throw another Wisconsinite into prison.

"I want to empty the jails and prisons of as many non-violent offenders as possible," said Flynn, outlining the scope of a major campaign plank that just a few years ago might be considered radical.

Criminal justice reform is an idea whose time has come as America has endured decades of becoming "a leviathan unmatched in human history," (Loury, Boston Review).

Gov. Scott Walker's part in the prison industry and the assault against Wisconsin families is not as well-known in our state as it should be.

"Walker pushed dozens of proposals in the state house to lengthen criminal penalties, for everything from perjury to privacy invasion to intoxicated boating. In just the 1997–98 legislative session, Walker authored or co-sponsored twenty-seven different bills that either expanded the definition of crimes, increased mandatory minimums for offenders, or curbed the possibility of parole," notes Scott Keyes in The Nation.

Walker openly bragged about his bill, the infamous Truth-in-Sentencing law, which limited early parole, as having come from the corporate bill mill, the American Legislative Exchange Committee.

Most Wisconsin Democrats went along with mass incarceration out of fear or for careerism.

Not Matt Flynn.

As brutality and cruelty have accelerated the erection of the American prison system, Flynn offers a competing vision.

Below is an extended quote from Flynn on the topic:

I had a kid come up to me in Eau Claire a couple of months ago, and he said, 'my dad just got out of prison after 20 years and he can't find a job. What can do we do?'

I said, 'that's a terrible thing; what did he do to get 20 years?'

The predicate offense that sent him off was something that was not violent, no way it should warrant 20 years. How it God's name did they give 20 years for that?

It was he had three prior convictions for marijuana possession. Two possessions can be a felony. Some of these judges, they want to be hard-nosed cowboys. They look at it and say, 'well, three prior felonies and fourth felony that in itself merits a longer sentence' without giving any consideration to the reality. So, if a man gets 20 years in jail, he loses his family, loses his wife, loses contact with his kids, can't get work, destroys his life.

I resolved that we're not going to that. And I think that there is something of an economic incentive for parts of government to build prisons. We spend more money on prisons than on the UW-System. I think we have to stop that, and turn that around. What I said is, and I got angry, I will pardon anybody who is in for a non-violent marijuana possession. I will review and accept petitions for review from a pardon board of any non-violent offense.

And consider commutation of that offense, or pardon depending on the circumstances. I want to empty the jails and prisons of as many non-violent offenders as possible.

I will pardon a lot of people.

Flynn emphasizes he will as well work for "full legalization of marijuana" in Wisconsin.

Flynn speaks with erudition and an acuity missing from Wisconsin politics during the state's Lost Decade, 2011-2019.

Using stories from Wisconsin families and works from history such as Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol and the intellectual historian, Carl Schorske's, disquisitions on 1890s Vienna politics and culture presaging 20th century totalitarian, Flynn has staked out a position, if not unique among his opponents for the nomination of the Democratic Party for governor, certainly the most full-blooded and convincing this writer has heard in this mindless pit of a state.

Hey Wisconsin Dems, Listen to Charles Barkley on Black Folks

Madison, Wisconsin—It would be nice if Gov. Scott, never-had-a-real-job, Walker were bounced from elected office before he and his arsonists inflict more damage here.

Charles Barkley from Alabama has a message applicable to Wisconsin and the moribund Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

Said an ebullient Barkley on Election Night, (King, The Intercept):

Well, this is a wakeup call for Democrats. … They’ve taken the black vote and the poor vote for granted for a long time. It’s time for them to get off their ass and start making life better for black folks and people who are poor.

They’ve always had our votes, and they have abused our votes and this is a wakeup call. We’ve got it in a great position now, but this is a wakeup call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people.

To put another way: Wake up Dems, or fuck off:

Former NBA player and Alabama native Charles Barkley: “This is a wake-up call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people” https://t.co/D6ZnRJT3Um

— CNN (@CNN) December 13, 2017

Scott Walker Will Take Wrong Lesson from Roy Moore Defeat

Wisconsin for whites, vote Republican in 2018, say white
supremacists. But decency can triumph against hate.

Wisconsin Republicans Will Attempt to Stop Black Voters in 2018, White Supremacists Remain Emboldened

The defeat this week of the child-molesting Roy Moore in Alabama—supported by Donald Trump, Scott Walker and far-too many Republicans—courses thorough the political world.

Hey, decency can win elections.

A signal of the coming 2018 anti-Republican wave? Could be.

Report Richard Fausset and Campbell Robertson:

The word traveled, urgently and insistently, along the informal networks of black friends, black family and black co-workers: Vote.

[Black Alabama human beings] voted out of a more general concern that the country, in the Trump era, was going back to a place best left in the past.

'There’s no state in America where black people recognize the horrors of turning back the clock more than the State of Alabama. There is a consciousness about this history in the African-American community,' said Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which is based in Montgomery, (New York Times).

History instructs.

Today, there's no state in America where being black is as dangerous to life, liberty and health today as in Wisconsin. Lynchings are police executions of blacks, and wrongful convictions. Harassment and public trolling is accomplished by Scott Walker and assorted Republicans on municipal police units. No need for a burning cross, when a state has Scott Walker.

A prediction

Naturally, Scott Walker, Republicans and white poll workers will do their worst to obstruct black, young and progressive voters, lest Wisconsin becomes an Alabama with black folks leading the way towards defeat of white supremacists in 2018.

Voter obstruction in Wisconsin, as bad it has been since 2011, is a project with many more assets to be utilized.

But voting is simply one important deliverable of the Wisconsin anti-black project.

By way of explanation, in Wisconsin, if you have darker skin, many whites and most Republicans DO NOT LIKE YOU.

You're black, there are perceived associated problems with your character, intelligence and decency, and you surely do not belong in a voting booth diluting elections and canceling out the votes of white folks who know better. [Public service tip: If you're black, avoid Fitchburg, Wisconsin in particular: Cops are Republican and unmoored; City Hall crats are corrupt; and the Common Council is a disgrace.]

In Wisconsin, blacks folks, aka the urban vote, are concentrated in Milwaukee and the south-eastern quadrant of the state, including Kenosha, Racine, Rock and Dane counties.

One task for white supremacist Republicans is to stop unwanted voters in these locales.

One solution

If there is not a voter-protection infrastructure in Milwaukee, for example, Scott Walker and other white supremacists win in 2018. It's that easy. Voter protection.

One hopes the Democratic Party realizes the stakes. As a life-long Wisconsinite, I don't think they get it. I know my black friends and family agree.

Lesson for Wisconsin Is Don't Become Alabama

On Nov. 10, Gov. Scott Walker defended sexual predator Roy Moore, saying allegations of child sexual assault are not credible, comparing women's complaints with unfounded rumors that Walker had a "love child," (Wisconsin State Journal).

Walker reversed himself three days later after widespread criticism left Walker looking ridiculous.

Walker's support for Moore is one of the stories where his character is on display, explaining why Walker avoids unscripted public appearances where he has to answer questions.

Now, as the nation celebrates simple decency, the fundamentalist Walker is back to making Wisconsin into Alabama, if we let this project continue.

Scott Walker's False Claims He Has Held "Listening Sessions" Across Wisconsin

Scott Walker appears on ABC News This Week
and offers his third position on amending
the Fourteenth Amendment in seven days.

Updated - "The impression is fast setting in that Scott Walker, former King of Iowa, is a nonsense person and a ridiculous presidential candidate. (Newell, Salon)"
 ---
To understand Scott Walker is to see an undeveloped psyche, a man with no essence who will say anything with facts posing no barrier.

This morning the Wall Street Journal reports Walker saying, "We’re doing the hard work of the town-hall meetings, the small-group sessions. I think that pays off because, while the national media is focused a lot on another candidate, in the end, voters in these early states clearly take this stuff seriously." (O'Conner, Wall Street Journal)

Last week, Walker said his flip-flop on Common Core education standards is the result of holding listening session across Wisconsin: "We'd hold sessions around the state, we'd listen to people, we'd talk to people," said Gov. Walker. (Neumann, WKOW-TV)

Actually, Scott Walker has held zero townhall-style, unscripted listening sessions in Wisconsin.

Walker's recent false claims to the contrary are asserted out of concern that Walker doesn't know much about public policy, displaying not-even a pedestrian grasp of major public policy issues, ala Sarah Palin with whom Walker does not wish to branded this early in the campaign.

This is a guy whose press office demanded that all questions be pre-screened on a press phone call on Walker's healthcare plan 'to phase out ObamaCare on Day One' last week. (Politico)

This is considered open and accessible for Scott Walker who regularly bans reporters in an attempt to keep his lack of policy knowledge a secret.

This is not a well-kept secret, it's just not many in the campaign press write about it. Writes Dylan Byers in the right-leaning Politico:

In March, Walker made public appearances in Texas and South Carolina but closed the events to press and refused to take questions from the media. In April, while visiting Europe, he held no public events and took no questions from reporters. In May, while visiting Israel, he did the same. An aide told the Journal that Walker was going to 'focus on educating himself about Israeli issues and won’t hold public events or take questions from reporters.'

Walker's refusal to hold listening sessions, from the Midwest to the Middle East, should be news, as should his lying about it.

It is understandable from Walker's point of view why Walker avoids unscripted question-and-answer sessions.

Take this the latest headline on CNN: Scott Walker on birthright citizenship: 3 positions, 7 days. Writes CNN's Eric Bradner:

The Wisconsin governor and Republican presidential candidate was asked on ABC's 'This Week' whether he backs Trump's push to end the 14th Amendment's mandate that all children born in the United States are automatically granted citizenship. 

'Well, I said the law is there. And we need to enforce the laws, including those that are in the Constitution,' Walker said

United States Constitution

What "laws" are in the United States Constitution?

For Scott Walker's edification, here is a link to the Leonere Annenberg Institute for Civics explaining the United States Constitution. There are no laws in the Constitution.

Walker would do well to begin with Article 1, Section 1:

Section 1 - The Text
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Section 1 - The Meaning
The framers of the Constitution separated the powers of government into three branches, granting legislative power (the power to pass laws) to Congress, executive power (the power to administer the laws) to the president, and judicial power (the power to interpret and enforce the laws) to the courts. The unique and limited powers of Congress are contained in Article I.

Fourteenth Amendment Citizenship Clause

With respect to Scott Walker's on-again, off-again commitment to amend the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, Jenna Johnson in today's Washington Post has a timeline of Walker and his campaign's statements over the last week. It's pretty funny and at Walker's expense. Last Monday evening Walker blamed his change-the-Fourteenth Amendment-citizenship-clause position on a confusing "three-hour roving [press] gaggle."

Last Friday, Walker explained he was for changing the Fourteenth Amendment citizenship clause because he was "tired." (Blue Cheddar) (ThinkProgress) (CognitiveDissidence) (Mal Contends)

Johnson's piece ends with a quote from AshLee Strong, Walker's campaign spokeswoman, saying in part: "His position is very firm."

Firm, and strong and bold. Unfortunately for the nation, Walker's idea of a bold unscripted question-and-answer session is to yell at an audience, "Unintimidated! I am not intimidated by you, sir, or by anyone else out there."​

Career Politician Scott Walker Hits "Career Politicians"

Brianne Pfannenstiel reports Scott Walker said the American people have "had it with Washington" and career politicians in the Maid-Rite diner in Webster City, Iowa last night (Des Moines Register).

Pfannenstiel did not mention that Scott Walker (47-years-old) is a career politician who first ran for office at age 22, months after leaving Marquette University in 1990, lost; then moved into a white Wisconsin Assembly district ringing Milwaukee in 1992 to run for an open seat, won, and has been in elected office since.

Walker's record in office, winning or not, has been marred by scandal and corruption, a perverse inclination to demonize large swaths of the population while avoiding listening sessions with the Wisconsin people and refusing to campaign on what he does as a policymaker.

Caught behind closed doors, Walker has been videotaped assuring a billionaire, Diane Hendricks, that he will "divide and conquer" the Wisconsin people when asked if Walker could turn Wisconsin into a "red state."

Walker refuses to repeat the "divide and conquer" phrase, while still demonzing non-Walker supporting citizens.

Notes Charlie Pierce:

"[A]lone among the crowd of candidates, Walker most clearly is running on his record of being a complete prick to the right people – which include teachers and nurses and the people who clean up after Alzheimer's patients in group homes. Running against the right people is a staple of all campaigns, right and left, but it's rarely as clear the raison d'etre of one as it is the raison d'etre of the Walker campaign. It is a toxic combination of belligerence and aggressive victimhood. You have to go all the way back to the George Wallace campaigns of 1968 and 1972 to find one that is so clearly defined by the people whose political power it wants to crush.​"

Scott Walker Heads to ALEC — Corporate HQ of Big, Bold Ideas

The New York Times notes today:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Huckabee will be among the speakers at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s [ALEC] annual meeting in San Diego, which began on Wednesday and runs through Friday. ALEC is a conservative group with ties to the brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch ... .

The next time Walker says he has a big, bold idea like taking away local government control of communities, or driving down wages for working families, ask Walker where he got the idea.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is so tight with Walker that the group who did groundbreaking reporting on ALEC notes of Scott Walker that he would become "the First ALEC President" in a piece in June.

Walker has been fronting for ALEC for decades.

Notes Brendan Fischer of the Center for Media and Democracy's PRWatch:

After Walker entered the governor’s office in 2011, he quickly pushed many ALEC priority measures 'by request of the Governor.' In his first year, Walker signed 19 ALEC bills into law‬, which went after unions, preempted paid sick days bills, enacted voter ID restrictions, and made it harder to hold corporations accountable in the courts. 

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a neo-fascist, underground movement operating in a media world of make-believe.