#USA Political System

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 30, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

The New York grand jury investigating Trump’s 2016 hush-money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels has voted to indict the former president. While we don’t know the full range of charges, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office confirmed that they were forthcoming tonight when it released a statement saying, “This evening we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal.”

This is the first time in history a former United States president has been indicted, although it is worth remembering that it is not new for our justice system to hold elected officials accountable. Mayors have been indicted and convicted. So have governors: in fact, four of the past ten Illinois governors have gone to prison. Vice presidents, too, have been charged with crimes: Aaron Burr was indicted on two counts of murder in 1804 while still in office and was tried for treason afterward. And in 1973, Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to tax evasion to avoid prison time. That Trump’s indictment is happening in New York has likely made it harder for Trump to drum up the mobs he has been inciting to defend him. New York City notoriously dislikes the former real estate man. Voters of Tomorrow official Victor Shi was at the Manhattan district attorney’s office this evening and found no one protesting. When people did show up, he tweeted, they were not Trump supporters. They were women carrying signs that said, “‘Trump is guilty’ and ‘The Time Is Now,’” he wrote. “People in the background are chanting, ‘Way to go, ladies!’ NYC is rejoicing.” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, to whom Trump people feel comfortable talking, said that the Trump camp at Mar-a-Lago is “in…shock” at the news. They thought yesterday’s announcement that the grand jury will go on a break in early April indicated that nothing would happen before the jury reconvened. As Haberman points out, Trump has been afraid of indictments for many years, and while some speculate this indictment might help his political profile (I disagree with that, by the way), he is unhappy to see it finally arrive. He did, though, immediately start fundraising off it. Trump also released quite a long, antisemitic statement blaming “Radical Left Democrats” for a “Witch-Hunt” and saying this is “blatant Election interference.” House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) also quickly reinforced Trump's argument, saying that Bragg had “irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election,” and a number of other Republican officials reinforced that sentiment. That is quite a position to take. The vote to indict came not from Bragg himself, but from a grand jury made up of ordinary Americans, and none of us knows what’s in the indictment, so one can hardly object to it in good faith. CNN reporter Melanie Zanona reports that Trump has been working the phones tonight, reaching out to Republican allies to shore up support. Some of them, of course, are trying to discredit Bragg’s work by investigating him. Trump is at his company’s property in Florida, Mar-a-Lago. Florida governor Ron DeSantis echoed Trump’s antisemitism and accusations, tweeting that Florida would “not assist in an extradition request.” But Article IV, Section 2, of the United States Constitution says, “A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.” So either DeSantis is planning to violate the Constitution, or he recognizes that Trump will probably return to New York voluntarily, or—and this is the most likely—he is posturing to pick up Trump voters while secretly rejoicing that this will likely make it harder for Trump to win the Republican presidential nomination. While all eyes were on Trump this evening, paperwork was filed in the Florida Senate to begin the process of revising election laws, possibly so that DeSantis can run for president without resigning as governor, as under current Florida law he must. But there was something striking about Trump’s statement. In blaming the “Radical Left Democrats” for their “Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement,” he wrote, “You remember it just like I do: Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.” It's not a list to be proud of, but that wording—“you remember it just like I do”—jumped out. Trump always goes back to what he calls the Russia hoax, his second attempt to rewrite the way people thought about his presidency (the first was the size of the crowd at his inauguration). From the very start of his presidency, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation caught Trump's then–national security advisor Michael Flynn lying about his contact with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, more and more information has come out tying the Trump campaign to Russian operatives. As it did, Trump insisted that his followers must believe that all that information was a lie. If they believed his lies rather than the truth over the Russia scandal, they would trust him rather than believe the truth about everything. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has given a new frame to Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election. A piece by Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times Magazine in November 2022 pulled together testimony given both to the Mueller investigation and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs. Rutenberg showed that in 2016, Russian operatives had presented to Trump advisor and later campaign manager Paul Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded, and -directed “separatists” were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead.” In exchange for weakening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to put their finger on the scale to help Trump win the White House. Rutenberg notes that Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine looks a lot like a way to achieve the plan it suggested in 2016 but, thanks to a different president in the U.S., that invasion did not yield the results Russian president Vladimir Putin expected. The Russian economy is crumbling, and Tuesday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia's Wagner group of mercenaries is "suffering an enormous amount of casualties in the Bakhmut area.” He called it a “slaughter-fest" for the Russians. Today, Putin issued an order to conscript another 147,000 soldiers by July 15. Pressure on Putin continues to mount. The International Criminal Court’s March 17 arrest warrant against him and his children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for war crimes apparently caught Russian leadership by surprise. It isolates Russia and worries other Russian lawmakers that they will be charged as well, weakening their support for Putin. “Now proximity to the president isn’t just talk,” one political strategist said, “it’s a real step towards being prosecuted by international law enforcement.” And President of the European Commission (which is the executive of the European Union) Ursula von der Leyen today warned that as the European Union rethinks its trade policies, China could find itself isolated as well if it continues to support Russia. “How China continues to interact with Putin’s war will be a determining factor for EU-China relations going forward,” she said. Meanwhile, Turkey today dropped its opposition to Finland’s membership in NATO, a membership Finland has pursued in the wake of Russia’s recent aggression. Finland shares an 830-mile border with Russia, and now it will be part of NATO. Under such pressure, Russia today took the extraordinary step of detaining American journalist Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, accusing him of spying. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed deep concern and urged U.S. citizens living or traveling in Russia to “leave immediately.” Yesterday, another study of the Russian invasion of Ukraine invited us to look backward as well as forward. Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a government-affiliated think tank, released a report on Russia’s “covert and clandestine operations, psychological operations, subversion, sabotage, special operations and intelligence and counterintelligence activities” designed to destabilize Ukraine and take it over. The report’s focus was on the current war in Ukraine, but as Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo notes, it establishes that some of the same people behind the destabilization of Ukrainian politics were part of Trump’s world. Notably, Russian operative Andrii Derkach not only worked to grab Ukraine for Russia, but also escorted Trump ally Rudy Giuliani around Ukraine in 2019 to dig up dirt on Biden. In the end, as legal dominoes begin to fall, it might be that Americans do not, in fact, remember the history of his presidency from “Russia, Russia, Russia” forward the same way Trump does.

—LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sophies-junkyard]

I love this website

[davidson-eric]

The dollar collapse is happening NOW!"

The Storm is coming sooner than expected. All financial systems controlled by the corrupt government will collapse.

This crash will be felt on a global level, and many currencies, especially the USD, will be worthless.

Fiat accounts, savings and retirement accounts, mortgage, e.t.c will crash down and wipe off from the system once this event happens, Quantum Financial System is the savior.!!!

Convert every money in your possession to digital gold & silver backed coins and move them into the QFS ledger for safety . There will be a Global Reset. All banks and fiat exchanges will be closed, and there will be a lot of uncertainty & confusion. Cash will be worthless and outdated, and all bank accounts will be closed and crash to zero .

All cabal public banks will be confiscated, and foreclosures will be frozen, as will all public and private dept(mortgage,loans, credit, and debit cards).

[anti-zionist-jew]

Perfectly said. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are not the sole problem. They are a symptom of the problems

[nando161mando]

When you realize who the baddies are…

[post-futurism]

Tired of seeing North American election politics on my dash and the only thing I'll say about it is that it was a seriously bad move to not have compulsory voting for all citizens. Part of being an adult is making hard decisions and getting to opt out of that by legally not voting is not the gotcha that a lot of people think it is.

[typhlonectes]

[fluffitanuki]

BITE THE HAND THAT CAGES YOU ! ! !

[bebryzy]

The fact he has only 4 million more votes as of right now (which doubt he’ll hold that lead) and twice as many electoral college votes pisses me off in so so many ways

[a-very-tired-jew]

Not voting is an issue

For those of us old enough to remember the 2016 presidential election and the race leading up to it, you will remember the very vocal and prevalent rhetoric of "Bernie or Bust". While I myself was a Bernie supporter, I was in the minority of people who did not hold this position of "or Bust" it seems. I'm from Philly, I knew who Trump was and what he represented. We then got the Trump administration through various shenanigans and the not so inconsequential impact of the "or Bust" crowd. This resulted in a lot of damage to the USA that we are still recovering from, have not addressed, and the very real possibility of even more irreparable damage in the future if he is elected again. What myself and others have seen from young Western Activists is similar rhetoric to the "or Bust" crowd regarding the Israel/Hamas War and Joe Biden. Saying they won't vote for "Genocide Joe" if he is the candidate harkens back to the "not voting for Clinton" statements that resulted in disaster. They want to abstain from participating in a system they view as corrupt, the problem is that you can't abstain from a system that you are inherently part of. By abstaining you have actually participated and likely helped harken in a worse outcome. The trolley moves regardless of you pulling the lever because the lever is on a timer that you do not control.

The absolutist rhetoric of having a perfect ideal candidate is fantasy. Even if we had gotten Bernie back in 2016 there sure as shit would have been people among his most extreme supporters who would have been complaining. Because a candidate/president/politician/etc... cannot fit the fantasy ideal. It won't happen nor can it happen. To err is human as they say, and no one is perfect. Especially politicians. But to throw a tantrum and say you're going to take your ball home and not play? That's not an option. To hold childlike absolutist ideals of a fantasy that won't occur, and then get mad when it doesn't? Well, you can act that way all you want. Just remember that people will judge you for your actions, and getting upset when you're judged the way you don't want is the find out portion.

[davidson-eric]

Donald Trump, Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson are trying to warn the American people of what's to come but unfortunately they are being silenced.

The dollar is crashing and so are the banks. In the past 2 months, America has experienced the 2nd, 3rd and 4th largest bank collapses in America history..... And it's only getting started.

Before leaving Fox, Tucker Carlson warned of the impending U.S . dollar collapse as the banking crisis. Your hard-earned wealth is at risk as financial institutions crumble and the value of the dollar plummet.

[brick-van-dyke]

So, I've been doing some thinking. This could either be a meaningless little ramble that no one will care about, or something seen as really dangerous and putting a target on my back.

So, what if we, those most weary of the far right created an international group of activists in light of the US election? See, the thing is that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are very dangerous, but they are also very incompetent and could lead the government down a path that weakens it. It could create a very unique opportunity to address the far right problem and the US Imperialist system itself in one go. Or maybe I'm being overly ambitious.

This group I have in mind would have several purposes, such as keeping communities safe and protecting people from the harm the far right would do in the name of winning the election. Or, most importantly of all, connecting activists from all over the world and allowing us to dismantle the system as a concrete and united movement. Maybe it's just me being naive and hopeful, but maybe it's also something we've all wanted deep down but been too afraid to initialise? If so, maybe this is a sign to really stand up and start trying to make those connections.

[detroitpedxing]

Alito Set to Destroy Republicans’ Trump-Packed Supreme Court Dreams

Justice Samuel Alito has slammed the door on overeager Republicans’ hopes for a Trump-packed Supreme Court. 

With Republicans inching toward trifecta control of the House, Senate, and White House after their sweeping victory last week, the party has now turned its attention to the nation’s highest court. Republicans will have at least two years of uninhibited ability to mold the Supreme Court in their image, especially if conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Alito—76 and 74, respectively—get the message and step down. 

But Alito quickly shut down rumors of his retirement. 

“Despite what some people may think, this is a man who has never thought about this job from a political perspective,” a friend of Alito told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “The idea that he’s going to retire for political considerations is not consistent with who he is.”

Alito was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006 and has been a bastion of conservative originalism ever since. He penned the opinion on the devastating overturning of Roe v. Wade, something that was made possible in part thanks to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing away in 2020, after stubbornly refusing calls to step down during President Barack Obama’s term—giving President Donald Trump the conservative majority needed to overturn the crucial reproductive rights law.  

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, 70, has also faced calls for her to step down, but she has no plans to retire either.

[creelarke]

Probably gonna get backlashes for this but I’ll speak my mind anyway: I hate Trump as much as you do, but I will never ever tell his supporters to kill themselves. Ever. Because while some (if not most) of them are scums who want people like you and me dead, there are also some of his supporters who genuinely are uneducated/misinformed/easy to be manipulated/lied to. There are people who voted for Trump not knowing about what they’ve done. There are people who voted for him without being educated enough. There are people who voted for him because that’s just what their parents/communities/the environments they grew up in manipulated them to do.

Trump purposefully keeps these people uneducated. Instead of telling them to kill themselves, educate them. And if you say it’s not your job to educate anyone and that they need to educate themselves, that is completely valid too. However I’d like to also point out that some of these people literally cannot have access to proper education because what’s what Trump does, he makes sure they stay uneducated so they can keep voting him.

This is why they ban books at schools, why they made proper education so hard to access. Yeah it fucking sucks. But like. Despite everything I still want to believe there are good in (some) people.

Just. If you can, try educating them (if you are certain you’re not putting yourself or your life in danger). Just. I just want to fucking believe there are still good in this world.

But telling a person to kill themself, whether or not you mean it as a joke, whether or not you actually want them to do it, costs a lot more than you think it does. It’s okay to be angry. But like… you don’t have to be as low as those scums who support Trump knowing exactly what their votes can do to you and me.

[headspace-hotel]

I recently learned about plans to build a new federal prison on formerly strip-mined land in Letcher County, Kentucky, and it's so fucking chilling how all information about it focuses entirely on how the prison will "create jobs" for the area and somehow lead to economic prosperity

Mass incarceration in this state is such a horrible problem and it's sickening how there's no attempt to hide that it's for economic, not social, reasons