Video: Chris Hedges Warns Against Trump Fascism in Vancouver Talk from March 2017

'Warning sighs on road to tyranny'

Six weeks into the Trump administration last year, Chris Hedges spoke at an anti-Trump event in Vancouver, British Columbia, March 3, 2017.

Hedges warned about the prospect of militarized federal and local police "terrorizing and deporting" immigrants living in the United States, waging a "race war" against black and brown folks, more racial profiling, random police stops, wanton human rights violations and abandoning the common good.

All of which existed and have been accelerated by Trump in a broad project to make America white.

Said Hedges:

White Europeans who are undocumented are not being targeted. The executive orders of Trump are directed against people of color. They begin from the premise that white Americans are the true victims of neo-liberalism, deindustrialization, and falling living standards. The Trump orders are written not to make America great again. But to make America white.

They are an updated version of the NAZI's Nuremberg laws, the Jim Crow laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Naturalization Act of 1870. They are intended to institutionalize an overt racial hierarchy in the United States, one already far advanced in the miniature police states where people of color live in marginal communities.

In these impoverished enclaves there is no right to trial or due process. Militarized police kill with impunity, and the courts lock people away often for life. Rights are treated as privileges that can instantly be revoked. The poor, especially poor people of color, are exempted from moral consideration. They are attacked as impediments to social cohesion. And these impediments must be eliminated.

Hedges warned about the cruel consequences of insane social movements finding an oasis in the Trump adminstration, welcoming the dispirited and politically alienated.

Sane Americans saw this coming, but too many did nothing.

From March 2017:

American Prison Camps Are Built to Last, Evangelicals See Hand of God

"If you're at lunch, or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio for I propose to tell you about Buchenwald."

It is on a small hill about four miles outside Weimar and it was one of the largest  concentration camps in Germany and it was built to last."
— Edward R. Murrow, April 11, 1945 broadcast from Buchenwald

For black and brown folk in the United States, child cages and concentration-camp complexes are an inviolate part of America, seemingly impervious to the political system.

It's part of who we are and democracy means no questions about who we are: a prison state erected by whites, for blacks and browns.

Whites are justified in calling down an armed police response to kill, imprison or fine you. And whites are feeling emboldened now-a-days.

See today for example, an eight-year-old, black girl sells water in early Summer in San Francisco. So, a resentful white phones the police hoping the cops come and arrest or kill someone. This idiot white has committed the moral equivalent of attempted homicide.

Not sure how Ginger Thompson and ProPublica managed to pierce the white American soul with their recordings of Trump abusing children at the internment camps, but ProPublica did just that.

Children getting abused and families being destroyed are acceptable outcomes of American society, favored outcomes in the white Evangelical mind because, you know, the authorities have deemed brutal treatment as just and necessary and we must obey as the Bible instructs.

The United States has a sordid history. This history should be understood as Trump expands the scope of the project of hurting people. [Read Amanda Schaffer's infuriating piece in The New Yorker about another eight-year-old, and then have a glass of wine and smoke-up, if you have it. (Great work, Ms. Schaffer.]

This expansion of cruelty is alarming as Evangelicals have already used the War on Drugs and post-911 police mania to inflict trauma and imprison black and brown folk, held in increasing disfavor.

Gov. Scott Walker (R) is the worst among a rouges' gallery of Republican offenders, but he had help.

Writes Savion Castro in the Capital Times this weekend:

Gov. Scott Walker offered something worse than deafening silence on Donald Trump’s unconscionable policy of tearing infants, toddlers, and children from their parents and placing them in 21st-century internment camps when he said he wouldn’t comment on a 'federal; issue.

Forty-eight hours later, when the governor traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with Donald Trump, he still felt no obligation to speak out against the human rights violation occurring on our border against children. Instead, he has been fundraising off of Facebook ads on the need to build the border wall and sending Wisconsin National Guard troops to the border.

Make no mistake, Walker’s cruel, political calculus on 'baby jails' is the culmination of a 25-year pattern of indifference and hostility to children of color that he has displayed during his lifetime in elected office.

Walker was an early backer of the private-prison industry, now enjoying boom times building new detention camps.

In 2013, Wisconsin led the nation in concentrating black men behind bars as Walker and Clinton's racial politics bore its rotten fruit, (Corley, NPR) (O'Hear, Marquette Law School).

From 2015:

It isn't just divide-and-conquer poor people-bashing that led the Clintons, Tommy Thompson [1987-2001], Walker and Paul Ryan to rise to positions of political power.

Clinton, as Bill Clinton has admitted, used 'anti-crime' legislation to create the largest population behind bars in world history, (Cohen, Brennen Center; Loury, Boston Review).

Clinton's federal drive to imprison minorities was matched by ALEC legislation on the state level, and in Wisconsin led by then State Rep. Scott Walker (R-Wauwatosa, (1993-2002)) and Gov. Tommy Thompson (1987-2001) to make Wisconsin into a state 'leviathan,' as Glenn Loury terms mass incarceration, stocking prisons (private and public), making the imprisoned' lives a 'living hell,' as Thompson campaigned in an infamous political TV spot. (Mal Contends) (Mal Contends) (Adelman, Valparaiso University Law Review) and (ALEC Exposed, PRWatch).

'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.
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Scott Walker is the classic 'double high authoritarian' who takes pleasure in deceiving and hurting perceived incarnations of the wrong [black] type of people, while also marked by the inclination and "willingness to submit to established authority, (and) their aggressiveness on behalf of that authority," (Dean, part one, CounterPunch and Dean, part two CounterPunch). Walker is obsequies to Donald Trump.

It's no great leap to imagine Walker, Trump and white Evangelicals accelerate the prison state, and if Americans are not already rereading Milton Mayer and Norman Cohn to understand the totalitarian mind, they should be.

Hillary Clinton's History with Black Folks: Lock 'Em Up

Clinton-Thompson-Walker Bond or Black Lives Matter more than Hillary Clinton's Career

Updated - Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of where the Democratic Party went wrong, the abandonment of human rights and decency replaced by passive complacency and careerism.

I wasn't shocked when Clinton defended her mentoring and advice from the war criminal, Henry Kissinger. It was convenient.

This is the same Hillary Clinton who made common cause with former Gov. Tommy Thompson (R-Wisconsin) and an obscure State Rep. Scott Walker (R-White People) in demonizing black folks in the 1990s—capitulating "entirely to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights movement and (embracing) former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare, and taxes—ultimately doing more harm to black communities than Reagan ever did," as noted in an important piece by Michelle Alexander in The Nation.

Notes Alexander: "In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals. 'They are not just gangs of kids anymore,' she said. 'They are often the kinds of kids that are called "super-predators." No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.'

One hopes the inducements of a public salary, health care and pension are worth the deals some black members of Congress have made in their endorsement of Clinton.

But to these members of Congress, I say you know damn well you're selling out the future of a people who still matter, even if they're inconvenient to your political careers.

Bernie in Milwaukee with Irish-Latina

Consider private, for-profit prisons. "[T]here are now about 130 private prisons in the country with about 157,000 beds," notes Michael Cohen in the Washington Post on April 28, 2015, a couple of weeks after Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy for the presidency, (Chozick, NYT).

Six months later, it dawned on Clinton that she should cut her ties with the for-profit prison industry and stop taking money from private prison lobbyists, (Rivas, Fusion).

As for Bernie Sanders, he called for-profit prisons "morally repugnant and a national tragedy," and introduced bills to ban this disgrace, (Gaudiano, USA Today).

Hillary would have no moral high ground against a Marco Rubio or other Republican in the general election in this morally repugnant practice.

Bernie Sanders would and does now.

Bernie Sanders: Remember Eric Garner:

Prosecutors Getting Away with Disgrace, Insult to Humanity

The Divine Right of Kings

Update: When prosecutors do their job and hold corrupt public officials accountable, like the detestable Kelly Rindfleisch, Scott Walker trusted aide and felon, we ought consider giving prosecutors kudos. Hey, Kelly, are you saying you're innocent now?
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JUDGE HAYWOOD: Herr Janning, it 'came to that' the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.
- Judgment at Nuremberg (Kramer. 1961)

A telling glimpse at the American political culture is seen in the reaction to the January 2014 legal opinion of Richard Posner, judge on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

The case, Fields v. Wharrie and Kelley (No. 13-1195) (740 F.3d 1107; 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 1333), drew a few notices in legal journals and blogs, even though Posner blasted corrupt prosecutors for their mendacious, "breathtaking injustice" that landed an innocent man in prison for 17 years.

Beyond that, the silence out was deafening.

"If the old Lord Acton axiom is true — that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely — enormous power with no accountability can be enormously destructive," opines Radley Balko on the case. (Washington Post)

This is precisely what happened, as Posner notes of Mr. Fields who "until he was acquitted in a retrial; he later received a certificate of innocence from the court in which he had been tried," was the victim of "coerced witnesses to give testimony that the defendants (prosecutors) as well as the witnesses) knew to be false."

Much good may come from Posner's decision demanding accountability, affirming the right of the innocent and wrongfully convicted to sue for damages against deceitful prosecutors.

Absolute immunity for prosecutors, what former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell correctly notes is prosecutors' License to Lie, may go the way of the divine right of kings.

What I can guarantee you is that the speeches of Robert Jackson will not populate the campaign webpages of most candidate for District Attorney and Attorneys General across the nation. Jackson's words should. Said Jackson in a famous address in 1940:

Any prosecutor who risks his day-to-day professional name for fair dealing to build up statistics of success has a perverted sense of practical values, as well as defects of character. Whether one seeks promotion to a judgeship, as many prosecutors rightly do, or whether he returns to private practice, he can have no better asset than to have his profession recognize that his attitude toward those who feel his power has been dispassionate, reasonable and just.

Today, police, prosecutors and judges all too often engage in careerism and are laden with defects of character, imprisoning millions of Americans in creating what Glenn C. Loury in the Boston Review terms "a leviathan unmatched in human history." I know of Dane County (Wisconsin) police who have intentionally corrupted the judicial process for civil traffic violations.

This must change.

Face it. We live in a society so putative that innocents are routinely sent to prison, and killed.

You may see a case covered in the 'news' once every three or four years like Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas, but innocents suffering in the American leviathan face perpetrators and bystanders.

The words of Posner in Fields do bring some comfort:

A prosecutor cannot retroactively immunize himself from conduct by perfecting his wrongdoing through introducing the fabricated evidence at trial and arguing that the tort was not completed until a time at which he had acquired absolute immunity. That would create a 'license to lawless conduct,' which the Supreme Court has said that qualified immunity is not to do. Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 819, 102 S. Ct. 2727, 73 L. Ed. 2d 396 (1982). [Prosecutor] Wharrie's interpretation of our decision in Buckley would place that decision in conflict with the Supreme Court's Buckley decision, by giving absolute immunity to prosecutor-investigators who having fabricated evidence make sure that the evidence is used to convict the innocent victim of the fabrication. (emphasis mine)

The criminal justice system is a horror show and prosecutors are a big part of the problem.

Here's Sidney Powell's latest commentary, and as Powell knows the ethical violations by prosecutors are committed by local district attorneys' offices as often as by the federal DoJ:

By Sidney Powell

The Project On Government Oversight published an extensive report yesterday revealing that Department of Justice has been concealing hundreds of ethical violations by its prosecutors.  Adding to this injustice, the Department refuses to identify the offending prosecutors or to inform defendants who have been affected by their misconduct.

In the majority of the matters—more than 400—OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) categorized the violations as being at the more severe end of the scale: recklessness or intentional misconduct, as distinct from error or poor judgment.
The information the Justice Department has disclosed is only part of the story. No less significant is what as a matter of policy it keeps from the public.
As a general practice, the Justice Department does not make public the names of attorneys who acted improperly or the defendants whose cases were affected. The result: the Department, its lawyers, and the internal watchdog office itself are insulated from meaningful public scrutiny and accountability.

We can say from our own experiences with the Department’s “Office of Professional Responsibility” that it is ineffective if not complicit. Legitimate grievances go ignored. Their primary expertise lies in circling the wagons and protecting the offenders. This report makes it all the more clear. There is no transparency, and consequently, the Department of Justice can be given no credibility. It is way overdue for a  major clean-up, and as Judge Kozinski, and the Washington Post and others have said recently, it is time for a national discussion of these issues crucial to the administration of justice–if there is to be any justice at all.
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For my part, I know of a district attorney in northern Wisconsin who should he attempt to maliciously prosecute an innocent again, I will dedicate myself to making him the most famous DA in Wisconsin history.

Harry Belafonte: We Must Stop Throwing People Away

In Wisconsin, Scott Walker drew derision when he declared he couldn't pardon a Marine.

Eric Pizer was convicted on a trumped-up charge and wants become a police officer to continue serving his country. Scott Walker won't pardon Pizer because in Walker's words, "if you pick one [to be pardoned] there's thousands of other examples out there of people who may not have the media or other outlets behind them, who would be in an equal position who probably have a compelling case to be made that we don't yet know about."

There are 1,000s in Wisconsin prisons, innocent and with compelling cases to be freed, even if Walker doesn't "pick one." Walker is a moron, lightweight human garbage.

Mr. Belafonte is not.

Here's Belafonte sounding the alarm, Scott Walker should listen to his betters.

By Harry Belafonte

There is a crisis that demands our urgent attention. For the last four decades, this country has been obsessed with expanding the number of people we throw behind bars and the length of time we hold them there. Crime rates have been falling for the last 20 years, but still we have a massive and unsustainable prison population, particularly targeting the poor and powerless. We're not strengthening communities, we're using our criminal justice system to throw away certain people's lives – disproportionately the lives of Black and brown men, women, and children. This has decimated communities around the nation and it's gone on for far too long.

But we're not stuck with a criminal justice system that is hurting us. Solutions exist, and the ACLU's Smart Justice Fair Justice Campaign is already working to put them into practice. Bad laws and policies are created by the politicians who are supposed to represent us. Police departments choose how to enforce these bad laws.  Bad policies are made, and bad policies can be changed.

Here's what we can do. Over a million people are sitting in a cell for a non-violent offense. These people pose no threat to public safety, but many will be locked away for years because of extreme sentencing laws and selective prosecution. We can get rid of mandatory minimums and extreme sentencing laws.

We can end the War on Drugs, which has really been a war on communities of color. This is one of the main ways we can cut down the unbridled racial bias in our criminal justice system.

We can remake our policies so that they're smart. Studies have shown that prison does not deter crime. In a lot of cases, it creates many more problems than it solves. Locking up huge swathes of our population makes communities less safe by because huge numbers of people are torn away from their families and from the ability to hold down a job, because we're warehousing people in overcrowded jails and prisons, and because having a record can cut away at someone's ability to vote or seek employment after they get out. We must do better.

We spend $80 billion dollars a year incarcerating people, which is 400% more than we spent twenty years ago. Some of the money could be better spent on raising healthy kids, not feeding a morally corrupt network that connects our children in their classrooms to the prison industrial complex.

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We do not have the luxury of waiting decades to undo the failed policies that have caused so much damage. It's time for Smart Justice. It's time for Fair Justice.  And we need your help.

Please visit www.aclu.org/smartandfair to learn more about solutions to mass incarceration and how you can get involved.

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