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‘Three Stages To Genocide’
(24 Jan 2020)
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Crooked Drumpf is copying Hitler’s ‘Three Stages to Genocide’:
– You have no Rights
– You have no Rights to live among us
– You have no Rights to live.
Revoking our Passport is an act of both Stage 1 and Stage 2 – by denying our Constitutional Rights and by excluding us from the comforts of our citizenship and our freedom of movement to where we choose to live amongst our fellow residents:
– Hitler seized identification papers from the targets of his Genocide – that prevented them from travelling anywhere within Germany, within German occupation territory, and from fleeing Germany. Unable to travel and move, Hitler rounded up all people whom he targeted and either surrounded their neighbourhoods with armed SS, SA, and Gestapo or arrested them and sent them to extermination death camps.
It’s not long til Crooked Drumpf declares his own Stage 3:
– Many of us can’t travel, can’t flee this nation when we lack our identity papers – our Passport. Federal and state police will stop citizens, check our Passport and other identification, arrest us for completely frivolous charges, imprison us at private prisons that Crooked Drumpf has already established, allow us to die by starvation, disease, and neglect. It would not be long til Crooked Drumpf lessens the population of his over-crowded private prison camps by shipping occupants to death camps.
Totally Hitlerian!
Something to think about as we commemorate this day in history when Allies freed the prisoners of Auschwitz.
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From:
Why Stripping U.S. Citizens of Their Passports Is a Precursor to Genocide
It’s what happened to Jews in Germany in 1938 when their passports were declared invalid.
BY JENNIFER WRIGHT
SEP 7 2018, 12:07 PM EDT
Taking away people’s passports and citizenship is a precursor to genocide.
It’s what happened to Jews in Germany in 1938 when their passports were declared invalid. That is what is beginning to happen here, now, to Hispanic citizens along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Oh, is it bad to compare the GOP to Nazis? Well, if members of the GOP do not like being compared to Nazis, they should consider not behaving exactly like Nazis.
Hispanic U.S. citizens, some of whom were in the U.S. military, are not being allowed to renew their passports. This is reportedly happening to “hundreds, even thousands” of Latinos, according to a report in the Washington Post. They’re getting letters from the State Department saying it does not believe they are citizens. The government claims their citizenships are fraudulent. “I’ve had probably 20 people who have been sent to the detention center—U.S. citizens,” Jaime Diez, an attorney in Brownsville, told The Washington Post.
The Washington Post also reports on ICE officials coming to citizens’ homes and taking their passports away. This is an escalation from a few months ago, when Americans were detained by ICE officials just for speaking Spanish to one another.
The administration is currently launching an effort to take citizenship from people who they suspect of fraud in obtaining it. Fraud in these cases is exceedingly rare. The last time the government tried to strip people of their citizenship was, according to Columbia Professor Mae Ngai, during The Red Scare of the 1950s. As Ngai remarks, McCarthyism is not typically remembered as a good period in American history.
There is good reason to believe that this could portend still worse things to come for the U.S. Hispanic population, unless people begin to speak out loudly, and fast.
There will be those who can say that anything too terrible could not happen here. As journalists like Sarah Kendzior, who has been charting this administration’s erosion of democratic values, points out, “This country has a history of genocide and autocratic policies: slaughter of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, etc.”
So, there is no need to say “it couldn’t happen here.” It has happened here, and plenty. Right now, 528 children are still waiting to be reunited with their families after being separated from them by the government.
Stripping these men and women of their citizenship is not about immigration or jobs. It is about Hispanic people. It is about race. I can assure you of that, because my parents are also immigrants. I am a first generation American. Since we are white, the extent of any persecution I ever endured was being asked to pronounce “aluminum” in middle school and being told my accent was cute. No one has denied my parents their citizenship, or, I think, will be denying Melania or Ivanka Trump their citizenship.
And we can be grateful for that, because the alternative is terrifying.
Denying people their citizenship is a clear way to indicate that they should no longer expect to receive the rights of citizens. The right to a fair trial? They shouldn’t expect that. Not being investigated without just cause? Forget about it.
In response to the holocaust, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared that, “Everyone has a right to a nationality.” In cases in America, the importance of being entitled to citizenship was made clear in a 1967 Supreme court ruling, which declared that “Under the citizenship clause of the fourteenth amendment, A U.S. citizen cannot lose his or her citizenship unless he or she willingly surrenders it.”
Trump does not seem to understand the value of citizenship—in 2016, he proposed that it might be revoked for burning an American flag.
Flag burning is a constitutionally protected part of free speech, and stripping anyone of their citizenship as a form of criminal punishment was a practice, again, rejected by the Supreme court in 1967.
What Trump does understand is his base. Many members of Trump’s working class base do have real concerns—it is true that wages aren’t growing in America and that manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared. These people might rightly note that their lives look harder than their parents. They’re angry and want someone to blame—but not people who look like them, as those people are beacons of hope that their lives might improve. In Hispanic immigrants, Trump gave them a scapegoat.
Steve Bannon remarked in an interview with Michael Lewis that they won on “Pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.” It’s not a coincidence that Trump is once again whipping up fears—and by stripping people of their citizenship implying to his base that these people should not be here, and they are right to be concerned about immigration fraud—when an upcoming election in Texas, a border state, looks increasingly heated.
Trump won on anger? Fine. You should be angry too. At what he’s doing, and what it might lead to.
Fans of Trump will claim these measures are just about sending people back to their homelands, and therefore, getting people who did not belong in America out. Well, what do you think the holocaust was about? Jews were not considered citizens.
It would be delusional to think that Trump, a man who has an ongoing feud with Mexico, who reportedly regrets ever even implying that he did not think white nationalists were “very fine people”, and who refers to illegal immigrants as people who “infest our country”, would not continue to persecute Hispanic people.
If you think it can’t get worse, remember that we’re already at a place where we’re drugging children.
Protesting in the face of such outrageous abuses of power, of such true horrors, can feel overwhelming. Marching is joyless. Calling your representatives on the phone is annoying. Doing pretty much anything else is more fun. No part of these protests are fun for the vast majority of people. So, it might feel easy to turn away from this horrifying moment in our history and watch some nice videos of cats acting like people.
All I can say to this it to imagine how you might have felt if you were to find out that your grandparents lived in Germany during the rise of Nazism and did nothing. Imagine finding this out as a child. Imagine your parents perhaps explaining that it didn’t mean your grandparents were bad people. They might say that they were afraid of authorities. They might say that they had a lot of other life events going on. They might say that they simply didn’t know how bad Germany was going to get. They might say they weren’t political.
These are the defenses people always use. And still, I can’t imagine you would hear about their inaction and not love your grandparents a little bit less. Every time you saw them, at vacations, at holiday dinners, and otherwise pleasant events, you would wonder, a tiny bit disgusted, how they did nothing. You would wonder how such nice people could let something so atrocious come to pass.
This is where we’re at. This is where you are at.
I can’t tell you what actions you should take, because I don’t know what talents you have at your disposal. Do you have legal skills to help people who may be threatened by these new changes? Use them. Can you write about what’s going on? Write about it. Do you have a church or place or worship to help organize refuge for the persecuted? Do so. Do you have time to call your senators and congressmen? Call. Keep calling. Make them hear you.
And if you’re in politics, well, I hope every single Democratic politician reads this. Your complicity in anything that stems from this administration will not be forgiven in the future.
Do something today to make your descendants proud.
Jennifer Wright is BAZAAR.com’s Political Editor at Large.
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From:
Tuesday, November 05, 2019
byRobertReich.org
Case Closed. There’s No Question the Founding Fathers Would Impeach Trump
If a president can invite a foreign power to influence the outcome of an election, there’s no limit to how far foreign powers might go to curry favor with a president by helping to take down his rivals.
You don’t have to be a so-called “originalist,” interpreting the Constitution according to what the founders were trying to do at the time, in order to see how dangerous it is to allow a president to seek help in an election from a foreign power.
You don’t have to be a so-called “originalist,” interpreting the Constitution according to what the founders were trying to do at the time, in order to see how dangerous it is to allow a president to seek help in an election from a foreign power.
Trump has asked a foreign power to dig up dirt on a major political rival. This is an impeachable offense.
Come back in time with me. In late May 1787, when 55 delegates gathered in Philadelphia to begin debate over a new Constitution, everyone knew the first person to be president would be the man who presided over that gathering: George Washington. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “The first man put at the helm will be a good one,” but “Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.”
Initially, some of the delegates didn’t want to include impeachment in the Constitution, arguing that if a president was bad he’d be voted out at the next election. But what if the president was so bad that the country couldn’t wait until the next election? Which is why Franklin half-joked that anyone who wished to be president should support an impeachment clause because the alternative was assassination.
So they agreed that Congress should have the power to impeach a president—but on what grounds? The initial impeachment clause borrowed from established concepts in English law and state constitutions, allowing impeachment for “maladministration”—basically incompetence, akin to a vote of no confidence.
That would be the end of democracy as we know it.James Madison and others argued this was too vague a standard. They changed it to “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
But what did this mean?
One of the biggest fears of the founding fathers was that the new nation might fall under the sway of foreign powers. That’s what had happened in Europe over the years, where one nation or another had fallen prey to bribes, treaties and ill-advised royal marriages from other nations.
So those who gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution included a number of provisions to guard against foreign intrusion in American democracy. One was the emoluments clause, barring international payments or gifts to a president or other federal elected official. The framers of the Constitution worried that without this provision, a president might be bribed by a foreign power to betray America.
The delegates to the Convention were also concerned that a foreign power might influence the outcome of an election.
They wanted to protect the new United States from what Alexander Hamilton called the “desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.“ Or as James Madison put it, protect the new country from a president who’d “betray his trust to foreign powers.” Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, who initially had opposed including an impeachment clause, agreed to include it in order to avoid “the danger of seeing the first Magistrate in foreign pay.”
During the Virginia ratifying convention, Edmund Randolph explicitly connected impeachment to foreign money, saying that a president “may be impeached” if discovered “receiving emoluments [help] from foreign powers.” George Washington, in his farewell address, warned of “the insidious wiles of foreign influence.”
You don’t have to be a so-called “originalist,” interpreting the Constitution according to what the founders were trying to do at the time, in order to see how dangerous it is to allow a president to seek help in an election from a foreign power.
If a president can invite a foreign power to influence the outcome of an election, there’s no limit to how far foreign powers might go to curry favor with a president by helping to take down his rivals. That would be the end of democracy as we know it.
Now, fast forward 232 years from that Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to Donald Trump.
It’s not just the official summary of Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian president Zelensky in which after telling Zelensky how good America has been to Ukraine, Trump asks for “a favor, though” and then explicitly asks Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, one of Trump’s most likely opponents in the 2020 election.
Trump’s entire presidency has been shadowed by questions of foreign interference favoring him. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation documented extensive contacts between Trump’s associates and Russian figures—concluding that the Kremlin sought specifically to help Trump get elected, and that Trump’s campaign welcomed Russia’s help.
Trump at one point in the 2016 election campaign even publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, and within hours Russian agents sought to do just that by trying to break into her computer servers.
More recently, he openly called on China’s help, saying before cameras “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.”
This is an impeachable offense, according to the framers of the Constitution. Trump did it.
Case closed.
Robert Reich, is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the the twentieth century. He has written fiften books, including the best-sellers Aftershock, The Work of Nations, Beyond Outrage and, Saving Capitalism. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, “Inequality For All.” Reich’s newest book is “The Common Good.” He’s co-creator of the Netflix original documentary “Saving Capitalism,” which is streaming now.
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From:
Fascism Expert: Trump Has Laid the Groundwork for “Full-On Authoritarian Rule”
White House on January 9, 2020, in Washington, D.C. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism, says that if Trump is re-elected, the U.S. will tilt even further in the direction of authoritarianism.
Chauncey DeVega, Salon
January 13, 2020
Martin Luther King Jr. Warned That the Poor Pay for War With Their Lives
In Anti-Communist Fervor, FBI Built a 500-Page File on Coretta Scott King
Trump Wants to Funnel More Income Upward Through His China Trade Deal
DoorDash Drivers Make an Average of $1.45 an Hour, Analysis Finds
Democrats Respond to Trump’s Official Statement on Impeachment Charges
10 Ways Trump’s Aggression Against Iran Hurts Americans and the Region
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Congress will soon send its articles of impeachment for Donald Trump to the Senate, where Republicans are determined to acquit him on all charges, including abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, and encouraging foreign powers to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.
No evidence or witnesses will persuade the Senate majority to reach a conclusion consistent with the obvious facts that Donald Trump should be impeached, convicted and removed from office. The Constitution’s mandate that a impeachment should involve an impartial trial and a fair hearing of evidence and witnesses has no meaning in TrumpWorld.
The Republican Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump’s regime and an expression of his personal will and power. To that end, Trump has promised financial support to the Republican senators who will soon be voting at his trial. It has also been reported that Trump ordered the execution of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in order to ensure that Republican senators would support his acquittal.
In essence, Donald Trump pays political blood money to his supporters. This is more evidence of Trump’s political thuggery and mobster-style behavior that is unbefitting an American president.
Like other dictators, authoritarians, autocrats and political thugs, Donald Trump believes he is above the law. With the support of Attorney General William Barr, this appears increasingly true.
The obscenities continue.
Donald Trump has suggested he is “the chosen one” and God’s messenger on earth. White Christian evangelicals believe this to be true and have pledged themselves to his cult.
Writing at USA Today, historian John Fea described the first event of Trump’s “Evangelicals for Trump” campaign, which occurred in Florida two weeks ago:
– His evangelical supporters loved every minute of it. That night, Christians who claim to be citizens of the Kingdom of God went to church, cheered the depraved words of a president and warmly embraced his offer of political power. Such a display by evangelicals is unprecedented in American history.
– I usually get angry when members of my tribe worship at the feet of Trump. This time, I just felt sad.
Trump and his allies label Democrats, liberals, progressives and anyone else opposing him as traitors and enemies of the United States. The most recent example: at a rally last Thursday in Toledo, Trump said that Democrats were “vicious horrible people.”
None of this should be surprising. Trump is following the authoritarian’s playbook almost to the letter in his assault on American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. The question is not whether Donald Trump is an authoritarian and would-be dictator but rather whether anything or anyone is capable of stopping him.
I recently spoke with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat in an effort to better understand where America is on its road to fascism and authoritarianism in this fourth year of Trump’s regime.
Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert in fascism and authoritarianism. She is the author of Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema and other books. Her opinion essays and other writing have been featured by CNN, the Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Atlantic.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. You can also listen to my full conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat through the player embedded below
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Looks like guilt from both their psychological Projection and their Fascist Scapegoating. Crooked Drumpf has his ‘White Power’ hand signals, his Amerikan NAZIs, his Biker Boys who proudly sport their SS tattoos, NAZI flags, swastikas, but he’ll blame the Democrats:
‘Anti-Semitism is alive and well in the Halls of Congress. Bible-believing Christians strongly support Israel and the Jewish people. The rise of hate is very much in the present, referring to Omar and Talib and people like that.’
– Gordon Robertson, R-CBN (his CBN ‘700 Club’ TV show, 24 Jan 2020)
‘There’s a rising tide of vile anti-Semitism. We see it result in violence at synagogues at Pittsburgh and Los Angeles and loss of life. We see it in rhetoric. Even in the Halls of Congress we’ve heard anti-Semitic rhetoric that has not been roundly and universally condemned. People and slurs, not being held to account for that.’
– Pence, R-Drumpf (CBN ‘700 Club’ TV show, 24 Jan 2020)
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Thank you to the Resources who contribute to this page.
Additional Resources:
‘But honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material.’ is Crooked Drumpf’s own admission to the charges of Obstruction of Justice and Obstruction of Congress:
America’s Founding Fathers would Impeach and Convict Crooked Drumpf:
(https://youtu.be/rY10nWdhGaw)
Missouri Republi-cons would jail Librarians:
Alabama obstructs citizens seeking their Constitutional Right to Vote:
(https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/alabama-drivers-licenses-voter-id)
McConnell is hooked by Russian mob money:
West, a Black man, campaigns against Equal Rights:
(https://www.pride.com/news/2020/1/16/kanye-west-set-speak-anti-lgbtq-evangelical-summit)
Amerikan NAZIs protest for 2nd Amendment Rights that don’t exist:
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Slim and Me 