Fascist America Remains a Grave Danger, Giant Step Backwards Looms

Madison, Wisconsin—Fascism is here in the United States, and has been since our nation's birth.

In our country built upon slavery, social dominance, and enduring, widespread imbecilic conceptions of race, fascism is a defining feature of America, an exercise in domestic terror.

If you're a black person at, or past adolescence walking, driving, shopping or breathing, there remains an expectation of police harassment, perhaps prison, and death-by-cop is a distinct possibility. [Note to black readers: Avoid Fitchburg, Wisconsin, in Dane County.]

Carving out a career while advocating human rights risks jail time and death in America; ask colleagues and friends of the late Sandra Brand, driven to suicide by Texas police.

Occasional massacres and 1,000-plus annual police killings are the norm, not tragic anomalies, (Kantrowitz, Mal Contends). But as President* Donald Trump struts and fumbles about, fascism can become much worse, taking us back as the last 60 years have more-or-less seen forward strides in human rights.

So, when Trump makes sadistic public appeals as the chief executive, the terror that Trump strikes is a familiar experience to a lot of Americans.

It matters what a president says. It matters that Trump minimized the Holocaust in one of his first public statements.

This lunatic is dangerous and in virtually every policy sphere is a public menace.

Today, every American should be ready with a plan to support Robert Mueller.

America already is a police state in many municipalities with occupying forces politically aligned with Trump.

Consider what is the predictable reaction of Trump to a criminal indictment of any member of his family or Trump himself? A lunatic in the White House is capable of inflicting much damage to our country.

Democrats and proponents of the experiment that is America need to stand up for the values and standards that animate their popular movements.

This means actively supporting Robert Mueller. This means actively speaking against Roy Moore.

That means speaking up loudly against Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, to pass a tax cut that will greatly benefit the wealthiest corporations and individuals, as a prelude to devastating Social Security and Medicare.

Democrats are not adept at getting their messages across to the American people.

Sure, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and sometimes Joe Biden speak eloquently on the ideals that make America great.

But the messages of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump must resonant louder or at least hit more chords with a majority or Trump wouldn't be sitting in the Oval Office and Bannon would not be getting Republicans to support the child-molester, Roy Moore.

The lights are blinking red.

Romare Beardon's work on American lynching

Charleston Is an Act of Domestic Terrorism, by Definition

Update: " The murders of nine churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, is being investigated by the Justice Department as a possible case of domestic terrorism, a U.S Justice Department spokeswoman said on Friday." (Reuters)
 --
The Charleston Massacre (Grandin, The Nation, New York Times) is much worse than a hate crime from the American South.

It is an act of domestic terrorism by definition and should be treated as such.

18 U.S. Code § 2331 (5)
the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that—
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

This is an easy call.

"Black churches suffered at the hands of thugs and terrorists throughout the Civil Rights era, as they had for a century before, but such attacks aren’t a matter of remote history. As recently as the 1990s, a wave of fire-bombings hit black churches," notes Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

Perhaps the Republican Party can see its racial taunts, racist dog whistles and its war on black Americans should cease immediately.

Perhaps Scott Walker and Paul Ryan could begin the cease fire; I wouldn't count on it.

Calls Get Louder for Declassification of 9/11 Files RE Hijacker Links to Saudi Gov

Update: Even Murdoch’s NYPost Today Backs Michael Moore Bush-Saudi Claims from Fahrenheit 911

What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me. I cannot go into it any more than that. I had to sign an oath that what I read had to remain confidential. But the information I read disappointed me greatly

Declassifying the redacted 28 pages of the 9/11 report would be embarrassing to Saudi Arabia. So what?

The Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 2001 should be public in our democracy. Full disclosure and truth ... just for the hell of it.

Writes Jamie Reno:

Since terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, victims’ loved ones, injured survivors, and members of the media have all tried without much success to discover the true nature of the relationship between the 19 hijackers — 15 of them Saudi nationals — and the Saudi Arabian government.

Many news organizations reported that some of the terrorists were linked to the Saudi royals and that they even may have received financial support from them as well as from several mysterious, moneyed Saudi men living in San Diego.

Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any connection, and neither President George W. Bush nor President Obama has been forthcoming on this issue.

But earlier this year, Reps. Walter B. Jones, R-N.C., and Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., were given access to the 28 redacted pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) of 9/11 issued in late 2002, which have been thought to hold some answers about the Saudi connection to the attack.

"I was absolutely shocked by what I read," Jones told International Business Times. "What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me. I cannot go into it any more than that. I had to sign an oath that what I read had to remain confidential. But the information I read disappointed me greatly."

The public may soon also get to see these secret documents. Last week, Jones and Lynch introduced a resolution that urges President Obama to declassify the 28 pages, which were originally classified by President George W. Bush.

Ignoring 'Why' Again

Update: Glenn Greenwald: Cause and effect in our ever-expanding "war"

Thomas H. Kean and John Farmer Jr, co-chair and senior counsel of the 9/11 commission explain broadly how a disaffected Muslim almost carried out a terrorist attack on Christmas Day, "an eerie echo of the failures that led to 9/11 ." But don’t look for the why any time soon from a large corporate media outlet, despite the fact the why is the most critical question that has a clear explanation. Degenerate, oppressive and brutal Arab regimes propped up by the U.S. combined with U.S.-supported Israeli crimes, and insidious U.S. interventions in the Near-East (Middle-East) region practically guarantee resentment by the Arab ‘street’ and the rise of fanatical, savage resistance—terrorism.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) (Sept. 14, 2001) [practically alone] ran an important piece after 9/11 sampling the opinion of wealthy Muslims friendly to the U.S. offering why murdering thugs executed what Noam Chomsky called the "most devastating instant toll in history outside of war." The WSJ piece concludes Arab and Israeli state brutality motivated the 9/11 (and by logic) the would-be Christmas Day terrorists.

This is a truth not often told in the corporate media, or acknowledged by President Obama outlining what "his Administration is doing to keep America safe", despite the fact that the fundamental geo-political situation has not changed in over 60 years.

Writes Chomsky a year after 9/11 (don't look for him on CNN anytime soon) in a sensible explanation of why they do it:

[F]or those who hope to reduce the likelihood of further crimes of a similar nature, are the background conditions from which the terrorist organisations arose, and that provide a mass reservoir of sympathetic understanding for at least parts of their message, even among those who despise and fear them.

In George Bush's plaintive words, ‘Why do they hate us?’ The question is not new, and answers are not hard to find. Forty-five years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff discussed what he called the ‘campaign of hatred against us’ in the Arab world, ‘not by the governments but by the people’. The basic reason, the National Security Council advised, is the recognition that the US supports corrupt and brutal governments that block democracy and development, and does so because of its concern ‘to protect its interest in Near East oil’. The Wall Street Journal found much the same when it investigated attitudes of wealthy westernised Muslims after 9/11, feelings now exacerbated by specific US policies with regard to Israel-Palestine and Iraq.

Commentators generally prefer a more comforting answer: their anger is rooted in resentment of our freedom and love of democracy, their cultural failings tracing back many centuries, their inability to take part in the form of ‘globalisation’ (in which they happily participate), and other such deficiencies. More comforting, perhaps, but not wise.

We read the why more often through the Net now-a-days. Consider William Pfaff in TruthDig:

It is not widely understood that the policy objective of al-Qaida is not to attack the Western countries, an objective that would accomplish nothing for the cause. Bringing down a Western airliner or blowing up a building in the United States or Britain is of no interest in itself to the terrorists, since the Islamic radical does no good by simply killing unbelievers. The ultimate purpose of al-Qaida is to bring about an upheaval in the Islamic world in which Islam can be rescued from corrupted governments and degenerate practices. ... [T]he Taliban and al-Qaida are not fighting against corrupt governments in order to reform them. They want to destabilize and eventually destroy all of them so as to clear a political space in which 40 million Pashtuns and their fellow Sunni Arabs can create a new political dispensation of true believers, while the West declines. That is fantasy, but it is a fantasy in which the United States and NATO are unwittingly playing leading roles.

They don't "hate us for our freedom." They love us for denying their freedom—as we and our allies of a sort are then the supposed monolithic bogeyman without which murdering and relatively small-numbered movements of little resources hold little appeal.

To ask why is to think, an activity not acclaimed in American political culture.