THE LAST JULY 4th: Mourning A Lost & Crumbling Nation
Enjoy this last July 4th before the storm of what is coming.
Photo illustrations, photo and cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
We Americans are now in the same oven of fascism we have imposed upon millions of innocents around the world.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (7/4/24)
Enjoy this last July 4th before the storm of what is coming.
Imperfect and hypocritical as the founding of the United States by a bunch of privileged white, capitalist slaveholders could be, the idea of three “separate but equal branches” of government to balance and hold each other accountable with a free press to keep the public informed as a de facto fourth, the establishment of this nation was a truly revolutionary development for mankind. It was a radical inspirational model for sharing of power among the governed.
All of that is gone now with the Supreme Court Trump v. The United States decision several days ago granting the president “absolute immunity” for any acts taken as president, granting truly dictatorial powers. It’s a decision that would have pleased the nemesis of the American Revolution, King George III. Having it announced in the week we celebrate July 4th is bitterly ironic. (See analysis below.)
Mockery of democracy
But in a way, the Supreme Court — which is mired in big money conflicts of interest and cozy corruption with billionaires — did the nation a great service. They have formally made clear the obvious corruption that long ago rotted out the government since the very same court put the nation on the auction block for corporations and billionaires in the 2010 Citizens United Decision. As the 2014 Princeton Study found, the United States is not a democracy, it is an oligarchy where the wishes — and needs — of the great majority play virtually no effective role in national policy.
The Supreme Court has made it official: There is no more pretense about our mockery of democracy.
So quick, elect Biden! Right?
Any study of history — or indeed the people in your personal or work life — confirms, power does corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Biden and his enthusiastic gaggle of Congressional Dems have proven themselves as evil as Trump. You laugh? Just ask the families of the half-million — and counting — dead in the completely preventable Ukraine war and the obscene ongoing US/Israel genocide in Gaza. Ask the children who have lost their parents, siblings and limbs.
Then there was that largest act of eco-terrorism with the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
Think there’s a difference between the two parties or Joe Biden and Donald Trump? Wake the hell up.
If not “Baked Brain” Biden, does anyone really think a Kamala “Cackle” Harris or Gavin “Great Hair” Newsom would wield absolute dictatorial power with wisdom, restraint and compassion? And for anyone who thinks liberal Democrats can turn the party back to its namesake, Chris Hedges dispels that delusion in one minute.
Republican or Democrat, if you think you’d be safe with your dope in charge, just know that you can start out in the in-group and quickly find yourself on the enemy list for some minor or inadvertent hic-up from official orthodoxy. Remember, that’s one of the first social lessons you learned in grade school.
The Supreme Court this week changed the nation by formalizing what informally was obvious to anyone with their eyes open. Politics in this country is dead. Any pantomime of democracy has collapsed. The election is irrelevant. The Supreme Court has put tyranny in the White House in 2024, no matter which “side” of the ‘R&D’ corporate uniparty wins.
It’s time to learn about resistance
We need to learn from the heroic freedom fighters who opposed the coups and wars the United States ginned up in Iran, Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine and other nations around the world. The cruel anti-democratic, inhumane campaigns we have waged for corporate profits have now — as happens in all crumbling empires — come home.
We Americans are now in the same oven of fascism we have imposed upon millions of innocents around the world.
The first step of saving ourselves is ‘radical acceptance’ — seeing clearly the situation we are in. Until we reach that understanding, we have no hope.
Enjoy the July 4th beer and brats today. It’s the last normal July 4th we’ll see.
The US Supreme Court Has Opened The Door For A Fascist American King
The Court has exposed itself as a nakedly political—and reactionary—institution, and the existential dangers it poses must be met by mass mobilization and fierce resistance.
By Vince Warren
Common Dreams (7/3/24)
"The president is not above the law,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts before ruling that President Trump is above the law.
In a Monday decision both shocking and unsurprising, the Supreme Court’s reactionary six-member majority ruled that the president of the United States has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for acts relating to “core constitutional duties.” An elementary school civics student taught that ours, supposedly, is a “government of laws and not of men,” would recognize the dangers of this ruling.
Theft, plunder, embezzlement, extortion, abduction, assassination, or, to state the obvious—attempted election interference or a coup: presidents could now be shielded from criminal prosecution for these acts and, for the first time in history, may feel empowered to commit them without fear of legal consequences, confident they can claim they are “core” duties and even basic “official” acts.
At every turn, this Court defers to power, Trumpian or corporate, at the expense of pluralism, individual freedom, and democracy.
The dangers are not hypothetical. This ruling ensures that President Trump will not stand trial for his involvement in the January 6 attack on the Capitol before the election. And if he wins election in November, acting on his pledge to become a “dictator for one day,” he will have at his disposal this authoritarian decision by the authoritarian court majority he created. With this ruling, we can see how the mechanisms of dictatorship merge into something realistic and profoundly dangerous.
In process for decades
The rise of presidential impunity, however, predates Trump. After 9/11, when the Bush administration launched an illegal invasion of Iraq and systematically committed war crimes, including torture, the courts barely pushed back, and, later, President Obama chose to “look forward, not backward,” further cementing that impunity.
When Center for Constitutional Rights, the organization I lead, sought to impose civil liability against high level executive branch officials, days from Trump’s inauguration, the Court gave officials carte blanche to violate the Constitution as long as they claimed their violations were undertaken pursuant to a policy. An expanded, overly powerful, unaccountable presidency was waiting for Trump in 2016—and now a cravenly political Supreme Court has affirmed it.
Under this Court's cruel and retrograde jurisprudence, a president cannot regulate carbon emissions or forgive student loans but might face no consequences for politically motivated killings or mass murder.
Yet this Court limits executive power when it suits its political ends, as it just did when it undercut the ability of federal agencies to enact environmental regulations, or earlier, to forgive student loans. The common baseline of these decisions is hostility to democracy and its aspiration for the collective good.
Okaying crimes of self-interest
Under this Court's cruel and retrograde jurisprudence, a president cannot regulate carbon emissions or forgive student loans but might face no consequences for politically motivated killings or mass murder. The president is free to commit crimes to protect his craven self-interest, but women cannot protect their own bodies; indeed the president has immunity for bona fide crimes against the republic, while women can be criminalized for their personal choices. It is a jurisprudence that elevates wanton machine gun killings as a legal right over voting, equality, and public health.
At every turn, this Court defers to power, Trumpian or corporate, at the expense of pluralism, individual freedom, and democracy. It has exposed itself as a nakedly political—and reactionary—institution, and the existential dangers it poses must be met by political limitations on its recklessness and continued mass mobilization that resists fascism in every corridor of power.
Common Dreams work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Ralph Nader: “A dictatorial, judicial putsch against the American Republic.”
"The six Supreme Court dictators have issued an opinion that 'the king can do no wrong. They have given absolute immunity to presidents to use the Insurrection Act and the vague national emergency and national security declarations to suppress citizen protests and their political opponents.
"Today will live in infamy as a dictatorial, judicial putsch against the American Republic. Our founders, led by Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and George Washington would have been stunned."
— Ralph Nader, “Prison Time For Trump ‘More Imperative Than Ever”
Rule Of The Greedy Few Over The Many
“One thing is clear after this epochal supreme court decision: the fate of the country is in the hands of its people. Or rather two things are clear: the rightwing pursuit of increasingly outrageous minority rule is because they are increasingly a minority; the will of the people and the majority of votes are not on their side when it comes to everything from reproductive rights to climate action. Which is why they have to suppress votes, gerrymander districts, try to steal elections and now torch the constitution. In one way, this demonstrates their strength. In another, their weakness. It’s up to us to make that weakness matter more than that strength.”
— Rebecca Solnit, The US Supreme Court Just Completed Trump’s January 6 Coup Attempt.
CALL TO VIOLENCE: Project 2025 Architect Signals Bloodshed If Left Opposes Trump-Led 'Revolution'
The "second American Revolution" now underway will "remain bloodless," said the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, "if the left allows it to be."
By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams (7/3/24)
The president of the right-wing group spearheading Project 2025 raised the specter of violence Tuesday against those who refuse to capitulate to what he characterized as "the second American Revolution" ushered in by presumptive GOP nominee and would-be authoritarian Donald Trump.
Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, said in an appearance on "Real America's Voice" that the coming "revolution" will "remain bloodless if the left allows it to be"—a thinly veiled threat against those who resist the far-right's efforts to seize power.
Trump said in April that whether there is violence surrounding the 2024 presidential election "depends" on the "fairness" of the contest and the outcome.
Watch Roberts' remarks: [Link below.]
"We are going to win. We're in the process of taking this country back," declared Roberts, who has said Project 2025 is "institutionalizing Trumpism" in preparation for a possible victory in November.
Supreme Court license to tyranny
The Heritage Foundation president also hailed as "vital" the U.S. Supreme Court's decision earlier this week bestowing what analysts and critics described as king-like powers on the presidency—powers that Trump is already planning to exploit.
Project 2025, a sweeping 922-page document, provides Trump with a detailed blueprint to advance his far-right agenda, including by purging career federal civil servants and replacing them with loyalists and centralizing power in the executive branch.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, has called Project 2025 "a blueprint for autocracy," characterizing it as "a direct copy of the plan that Viktor Orban used to take over the Hungarian government in 2010."
"If it is carried out, Project 2025 will concentrate huge power in the hands of the president, giving him the power to control the whole federal government at his whim," Scheppele added.
Targeting the vulnerable
Scheppele's assessment echoed that of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which warned in an analysis published late last year that "the entire project is devoted to aggrandizing executive power by centralizing authority in the presidency, and a key aspect of democratic backsliding is viewing opposition elements as attempting to destroy the 'real' community, an essential aspect to quashing dissent."
"Project 2025 paints progressives and liberals as outside acceptable politics, and not just ideological opponents, but inherently anti-American and 'replacing American values,'" the analysis said. "Targeting vulnerable communities is a core tenet of Project 2025. Project 2025 is very clearly on a path to Christian nationalism as well as authoritarianism."
Common Dreams is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
The 2025 Project is not new. ALEC has been implementing these policies in state houses nationwide. The Dems have stood mostly mute, while promoting the CIC, foisting a deadhead* (not even close to Grateful) for the Oval, and pretending to be the loyal opposition. We're truly and royally screwed. I'm astonished people aren't in the streets. I predict there will be some disaster, resulting in a declaration of martial law, canceling the elections and then....let the wild rumpus begin. Surely a recipe for chaos. I weep for my grandchildren.
I can't get too upset about this Supreme Court decision for the simple reason that the President has had de facto immunity from criminal prosecution since at least the time of Woodrow Wilson. Sure, the decision makes it de jure, but doesn't really change anything except how many Americans are now aware of the fact.