Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 27,307]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-blackwater-pardon-sends-a-clear-message-shut-the-fuck-up-and-obey?ref=home?ref=home

Iraqis, of course, recognized President Trump’s clemency for the four Blackwater contractors who murdered 17 men, women and children at Baghdad’s Nisour Square for what it is. It is the latest reminder that they possess no rights, no matter how basic, the ascendant global superpower is bound to respect.

The Iraqi Foreign Ministry, reacting to Trump’s Tuesday night pardons of four convicted mercenaries, expressed its outrage on Wednesday. “The ministry believes that this decision did not take into account the seriousness of the crime committed and was inconsistent with the U.S. administration’s declared commitment to the values of human rights, justice and the rule of law, and regrettably ignores the dignity of the victims and the feelings and rights of their relatives,” it said. The ministry said it would urge the U.S. to “reconsider this decision.”

That’s unlikely. Nicholas Slatten, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty and Paul Slough are now free men, as Trump long forecasted. But no clemency can ever erase what they and their Blackwater colleagues did on September 16, 2007. Blackwater, possessing a lucrative contract to protect State Department personnel in Iraq, guarded a USAID official at a compound in Baghdad when a car bomb exploded two football fields away. A convoy of mercenaries responded to a call for backup when they encountered a traffic jam at a roundabout called Nisour Square. Inconvenienced, the Blackwater convoy sprayed machine gun fire into the cars.

One of Blackwater’s bullets sheared through the head of medical student Ahmed Hathem al-Rubaie. His 46-year mother, Mahasin, a passenger in their car, watched him die in an instant. Ahmed’s car, unable to stop with a dead man at the wheel, lurched toward the circle. Blackwater responded with more fire. Many were shot trying to flee. Iraqis, including children like nine-year old Ali Kinani, died because a private army of foreigners couldn’t get where it wanted fast enough.

A State Department assessment initially and falsely claimed that Blackwater came under attack. Reporter Steve Fainaru wrote in his book Big Boy Rules that the report was drafted by a Blackwater employee. That employee wrote what mattered to him, and to the State Department: “There were no injuries to [U.S. diplomatic] personnel.” Fainaru judged, “the episode almost certainly would have been buried but for the sheer number of people whom Blackwater killed and the volcanic anger that had built up inside the Iraqi government.”

It suited the Bush administration and the U.S. military to treat Blackwater, which operated outside the military chain of command, as distinct from the Iraq occupation. Blackwater, as Nisour Square made plain, certainly operated egregiously. Its guards snorted cocaine and shot themselves full of steroids, according to a deposition from one of their dealers. The year before Nisour Square, one Blackwater contractor, Andrew Moonen, drunkenly shot dead a bodyguard for the Iraqi vice president, whom over a decade later the U.S. would help install as prime minister. While Moonen never faced charges, federal prosecutors made the Nisour Square four a rare example of American wartime accountability.

But Blackwater and their fellow military contractors were at the heart of the occupation, not the periphery. Blackwater fed from the same American logic of occupation—the same impunity—that turned even those Iraqis willing to work for the U.S. into “local nationals” who had to enter dining halls on U.S. military bases through separate doorways. Iraqis had had reason to fear the Americans at checkpoints who didn’t speak their language and possessed life-or-death power over them, and it was academic whether those Americans wore U.S. military uniforms or the short sleeves of mercenaries. It made little difference to Iraqis if the helicopters over Baghdad were Blackwater’s Little Birds or the Army’s Apaches and Chinooks. The four Blackwater guards were prosecuted; an Army officer who had his men torture an Iraqi policeman and then fired his service pistol near the man became a Republican congressman and now, as chairman of the Texas Republican Party, promotes secession. A Marine in 2007 marvelled about Blackwater, “You can't help but feel like you are in a really good action movie every time you see these guys. ... How could you lose when you have guys and toys as cool as these on your team?”

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, understood with a malevolent subtlety that however angry congressional liberals were about Nisour Square, in a fundamental sense Iraqi lives did not matter to Americans. Prince played the defiant villain at an October 2007 congressional hearing, all through articulating the hypocrisy that sought to hold Blackwater accountable without condemning the rest of the occupation. “Any incident where Americans are attacked serves as a reminder of the hostile environment in which our professionals work to keep American officials and dignitaries safe, including visiting members of Congress,” Prince testified. His cynicism was vindicated three years later, when Hillary Clinton’s State Department awarded Blackwater yet another diplomatic-security contract, even after Clinton proposed to ban mercenaries.

Prince understood that it was acceptable, even respectable, to blame Iraqis for the horrors of the occupation—either their incompetent security forces or their quarrelsome politicians—rather than blame the Americans who destroyed Iraq on deceitful grounds and then claimed to have liberated Iraqis. That was how war enthusiasts like TV pundit Tucker Carlson could absolve themselves of blame. After pimping the war, Carlson found that Iraqis were no more than “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” he said in 2008—about a people who maintain one of the most vibrant literary traditions on earth—who should “just shut the fuck up and obey us.”

That was the subtext of the Iraq war, the one Donald Trump identified from the start, and it is why Fox News crusaded for the Blackwater pardons. While his positions on the war shifted in line with mainstream American opinion—for, then against, then also against a pullout when Barack Obama proposed it—Trump never lost sight of the psychological importance of ensuring that Americans no longer felt the humiliation of the futile wars they launched. He knew that the most satisfying balm for anyone feeling such humiliation would be to promise the most unspeakable forms of brutality.

That was what Trump spoke to when he talked about killing the relatives of suspected “terrorists,” about “bombing the shit” of them, about seizing their oil as imperial tribute and about banning them from entering America. The reward received by Iraqis who had helped the American military was to be stranded at airports in January 2017 holding useless plane tickets for America. Their U.S.-client government learned a similar lesson when Trump threatened to sanction it after it objected to the assassination of a senior Iranian official on its territory. Trump followed up by refusing to withdraw U.S. troops—allegedly an objective of his—because it was an Iraqi demand.

The president has not been shy about informing Iraqis—and Afghans, and Somalis, and Yemenis, and so many others—that they do not matter. The Blackwater four are hardly the only men he has given clemency for killing innocents at war. America may not be able to win its wars, but Trump’s consolation prize is to reassure Americans that they were not wrong to kill foreign unpersons; such brutality, to him, is valor. “I stuck up for three great warriors against the Deep State,” he said after last year’s wave of war crimes pardons.

It is common, after Trump commits such an outrage, to hear shocked centrist types insist that this isn’t America. Reclaiming the “soul of America” was the 2020 election message chosen by President-elect Joe Biden, who was one of the most important supporters of the Iraq war. But the soul of America is the occupation of Iraq. The occupation of Iraq was deeply American. It was the same historical force at work in the extermination of native nations; the enslavement of Africans and their descendants and then their seemingly permanent second-class citizenship; the occupations of the Philippines, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam; the destabilization, subversion and overthrow of Latin American democratic movements that challenged or posed a challenge to capitalist interests like the United Fruit Company; the economic strangulation of Cuba for its anticapitalist defiance; the death squads that America left as “partnership” in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and Afghanistan. Telling Iraqis to shut the fuck up and obey, or to make them to accept the pardons of the butchers of Nisour Square, is the geopolitical equivalent of the police officer who opens fire on his Black target knowing he will never face indictment. The soul of America is a forever war.

Paul Dickinson, a North Carolina attorney, represented four Iraqis killed at Nisour Square, including 9-year old Ali Kinani, and two who survived being shot there, in a civil suit. He said his clients had told him that they believed in the U.S. legal system to get them a measure of justice, in the form of compensation.

“Now they’ve been abandoned. I think that the pardons are a slap in the face to them and a failure to acknowledge and appreciate their immense loss,” Dickinson told The Daily Beast.

“The message that this sends to them,” he continued, “and to countries around the world is that if wrongs are committed by US citizens abroad, whether it be paramilitary or military actions, that other countries may lose faith in the pillars of the U.S. justice system that is recognized around the world as being fair as unreliable even when it does the right thing, as it had done in this case.”

[Vesper 27,307]

Trump Is Guilty of Sedition and Must Be Brought to Justice

He’s violating his oath to protect the Constitution, and every day that he’s allowed to remain in power, the threat to our democracy grows.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-sedition-coup-elections/

The Signal: Trump is now talking the sedition talk on a daily basis, and, one has to assume, actively planning ways to walk the sedition walk over the next month. He is meeting regularly with Sidney Powell, Steve Bannon and other plotters, and daily he is being fed a diet of ever more extreme scenarios for overturning the election results. This is no idle chatter, and even if we had once been inclined to dismiss it with words to the effect of “Oh, it’s only the crazy old guy blowing off steam,” we no longer have that luxury. In increasingly specific language, Trump and his band of traitors are advocating some combination of martial law, national emergency, and paramilitarism as a way to cling to power.

Witness: On Friday, Trump reportedly argued, to the dismay of many of his top officials, that he should appoint Sidney Powell (of “Hugo Chávez stole the US election” fame) as a special counsel to investigate election fraud. That was, apparently, too nuts an idea even for Rudy Giuliani to stomach; it was also a distraction from Giuliani’s own unfathomably outlandish plan to have the Department of Homeland Security step in and seize voting machines from the states, in a giant fishing expedition searching for fraud.

Meanwhile, Giuliani’s plan, despite being denounced as unconstitutional or unhinged or some combination of both by everyone from White House counsel Pat Cipollone to ex–national security adviser John Bolton, was apparently too moderate for another ex–national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Flynn was also at the Friday White House meeting, arguing in favor of declaring some form of martial law, which would involve sending the military into swing states Trump lost, forcing new elections, and, presumably, not resting until those new elections generated the “correct” result, one that ended up with Trump the winner.

And if anyone was tempted to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here—to argue that Trump himself wasn’t advocating martial law but was just giving an 11th-hour platform to an eccentric old friend—the president himself put that line of reasoning to rest on Saturday. Egged on by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, who published a lengthy report on alleged fraud in the November 3 election, No. 45 went full-on paramilitarist. In a tweet that seemed half-fascist, half–teenager having just discovered a secret new house party, he informed his followers that “Peter Navarro releases 36-page report alleging election fraud ‘more than sufficient’ to swing victory to Trump. A great report by Peter. Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election.” Trump continued, inviting his followers to descend on the nation’s capital to interrupt Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote early in the new year. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

“Wild!” indeed. A sitting president encouraging his violence-prone followers, including groups like the Proud Boys and conspiracists such as Alex Jones, who have pledged to keep Trump in office by whatever means necessary, to rise up against the constitutional process and the peaceful transfer of power.

At the same time, despite the Supreme Court’s latest decision on the election, and the fact that the Electoral College has already met and confirmed Biden’s win, the Trump campaign is, once again, appealing lower-court decisions on the election back up to the Supreme Court. On Sunday, the Trumpists filed yet another appeal, this time attempting to get Pennsylvania’s results overturned.

If I were a lawyer, I’d say that Trump is building a pretty good sedition case against himself, urging war against the institutions of American democracy and substituting loyalty to the person of Trump for loyalty to the country, the Constitution, and the institutions that he, and all of his government colleagues, have sworn an oath to protect.

But I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll just call it as I see it. Having lost the popular vote by 7 million, having lost the Electoral College vote too, and having failed at every level of the court system to get judges to intervene to squeeze a victory out of the bitter lemons of defeat, Trump is now grasping not only at one frivolous lawsuit after the other but at the straws of violence: specifically, military and paramilitary violence.

The people he is looking to for support in this attempted coup are, not surprisingly, the sewage of humanity—Powell, Flynn, Giuliani, the Proud Boys, Alex Jones. These are shameless con artists and thugs; people who lack any sense of morality or humility in the face of the popular will. They are, temperamentally, fascists, and like all fascists, they are entirely comfortable embracing the notion that the ends justify the means.

It is tempting to write them all off as a clown show, people too clumsy to even tie the laces of their jackboots correctly. And it’s true, there is more than an element of the comical to them. But even while we mock them and laugh, it is also important to keep in mind just how immensely dangerous these plotters are.

The United States is adrift. Its government has been reduced to puffery and fantasy to sustain the unstable ego of Donald J. Trump. There is no coordinated response to the massive computer hack of official agencies that was revealed last week. There is no sense of empathy from the administration for the thousands of people dying of Covid-19 on a daily basis.

That, this week of all weeks, the president’s inner circle was so distracted  by Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of a national election that it didn’t have the intellectual firepower left over to work on these problems says all that needs to be said about this administration’s priorities.

Remember the old saying: If it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s almost certainly a duck. In this case, Trump is walking and talking like a fascist, and doing so while the country slides ever further into crisis. He’s gone beyond being a clear and present danger to the Constitution, and every day he’s allowed to remain in power, that danger grows.

There are constitutional provisions to remove such a person from power: He could be re-impeached by the House for his efforts to subvert the Constitution and immediately convicted by Mitch McConnell’s Senate; or he could be removed via the 25th Amendment. Both scenarios would be extraordinary with only four weeks to go until the inauguration; but as the Trump drumbeat to not abide by the peaceful transfer of power gets louder, so too does the need become ever more immediate to find ways to neuter Trump politically before he can do even worse, even more irreparable damage to American democracy.

Since McConnell and the rest of the GOP Senate leadership have finally admitted that Biden is the president-elect, it’s unconscionable that they are, at the same time, still standing silently by while Trump and his henchmen plot to unleash violence and mayhem against fellow Americans in their increasingly frantic efforts to keep The Donald in power.

 

[Vesper 27,307]

Analysis: UK-EU trade deal is done but divisive politics of Brexit rumbles on...to 2021 Holyrood campaign

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18969927.analysis-uk-eu-trade-deal-done-divisive-politics-brexit-rumbles-2021-holyrood-campaign/

MICHEL Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, relief etched across his face, declared: “The clock is no longer ticking.”

After nine months of pizza-fuelled negotiations, often full of exasperation and sometimes rancour, with sleep-deprived officials flitting between London and Brussels, the historic trade and security deal has finally been done; effectively, just minutes before midnight. It is by any standards quite an achievement as such agreements normally take years to wrap up.

The “jumbo” Canada-style deal, as Boris Johnson put it, with no tariffs or quotas, is worth £670 billion, making it the biggest bilateral agreement signed by the UK and the EU.

The Prime Minister, who got Brexit done in January, has now got the trade deal done just days after he himself made clear, as the talks missed deadlines and dragged on, that leaving the EU without one was the likeliest outcome.

Brinkmanship, it seems, has succeeded with just a week to go to the end of the transition period. It is, of course, a Brussels dictum that any deal the EU is involved with invariably goes right down to the wire.

Mr Johnson referred to the “European question,” which had for decades divided and “bedevilled” the country but which, after the 2016 and the successful UK-EU negotiations, was now behind it.

“Most people I talk to, whichever way they were inclined to vote back then, just want it settled and want us to move on,” he declared.

However, politically, the psychodrama of Britain’s relationship with the EU will not be over. In the short term, there is, after all, the little matter of ratification. MPs will reconvene at Westminster next Wednesday to vote on the deal.

Labour made clear it would not oppose it; Keir Starmer said the country wanted to “move on” from Brexit. While the SNP is certain to. Nicola Sturgeon said: “Scotland did not vote for any of this,” adding the new trade deal showed it was time for Scotland to “chart our own future as an independent, European nation”.

Brexiteer Tories will be poring over the details in the 2,000 pages outlining the deal and some might not be happy with what they find; who, for example, blinked first on some of the key issues like fishing quotas. But, given Labour’s position, the PM will be confident the parliamentary numbers are with him.

Relief was not just expressed by leaders in London and Brussels but across the UK and the continent, not least by businesses, some of which can now avoid the prospect of eye-watering tariffs.

Both Mr Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission President, spoke warmly and graciously about relations between the UK and EU going forward as the deal will not only cover trade but also issues like energy, climate change, transport and security.

The PM told the EU27: “We will be your friend, your ally, your supporter and indeed – never let it be forgotten – your number one market. Because although we have left the EU this country will remain culturally, emotionally, historically, strategically and geologically attached to Europe.”

Ms von der Leyen went poetic, saying: “To our friends in the UK, I want to say: parting is such sweet sorrow,” noting: “The UK remains a trusted partner...The EU and UK will stand shoulder to shoulder to deliver our common global goals.”

On the key issue of fishing quotas, the share of fish in British waters that UK fishermen can catch will rise from around half at present to some two-thirds by the end of a five-and-a-half year transition period.

But this has not gone down well with the fishing industry with one of its leaders claiming the PM had “sacrificed” fishing to secure a trade deal. The First Minister was also unimpressed, referring to “broken promises”.

And on the so-called “level playing field” as regards competition, any future claims of unfairness will be judged by an independent third-party arbitration panel with the possibility of a “proportionate” response ie tariffs.

And yet, despite all the promised co-operation, come January 1, things will be very different as Britain “takes back control of our destiny,” as the PM put it during his Downing St press conference.

The safety harness of the transition period will be lifted and the UK will be operating as an independent player on the global stage.

While there will be no taxes or limits on the goods firms can sell, there will be new red tape; most notably in Northern Ireland.

Indeed, the deal does not directly cover services, which make up some 80 per cent of the UK economy; firms in this sector will no longer enjoy automatic access to the EU as they have in the past.

On financial services, a vitally important sector to the UK, Mr Johnson conceded he had not got all he wanted, saying: “There is some good language about equivalence for financial services, perhaps not as much as we would have liked, but it is nonetheless going to enable our dynamic City of London to get on and prosper as never before.”

Indeed, the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK Government’s independent economic forecaster, have both made clear Britain’s economy will grow more slowly outside the EU than when the UK was part of the European single market and customs union.

Strong criticism has been made of Britain leaving the Erasmus scheme, which enables UK students to study and work across Europe; it will be replaced by a new scheme, named after the Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing, which aims to help students study and work in and beyond the EU. Ms Sturgeon branded the move “cultural vandalism”.

And on security co-operation, Brussels made clear the UK would not enjoy the same level of “facilities” as before. An EU briefing note said the UK would no longer have “direct, real-time access” to sensitive databases covering freedom, security and justice.

While Mr Barnier might be right that one clock has stopped ticking, another could well have just started.

The issue of Brexit will doubtless feature prominently in next year’s Holyrood campaign. It feeds in strongly to the Nationalist narrative about Scotland taking a different political path from England; in 2016 six out of 10 Scottish voters voted for Remain.

It has always been interesting to observe how Brexiteers have used the same language of “self-determination” and “independence” about Britain leaving the EU as the SNP has about Scotland leaving the UK.

Indeed, it was interesting to hear the remarks of Ms von der Leyen, who questioned what “sovereignty” – a subject that lay at the heart of the negotiations - actually meant in the 21st century.

She said: “It is about pooling our strength and speaking together in a world full of great powers. In a time of crisis, it is about pulling each other up instead of trying to get back to your feet alone.” The sentiment has a ring of familiarity.

Of course, the two issues of being a member of the UK and the EU are not exactly the same but as the campaign for the Holyrood elections in May begins in earnest next month, the issue of Brexit and its consequences will loom large.

Indeed, if there were to be any second independence referendum in the next Holyrood parliamentary term, a fundamental argument will be about Scotland being a member of the Union of the United Kingdom versus Scotland becoming a member of the Union of Europe.

And what, once the dust settles, does securing the trade deal mean for Mr Johnson’s own political future?

The Covid crisis still hangs menacingly over the country and many Tories privately whisper that they have not been greatly impressed by their leader’s performance marked, as it has been, by a forest of U-turns.

It may well be that the PM – who was flanked by Union flags at his press conference - muddles through and brighter days lie ahead, meaning that he will lead his party boldly into the 2024 General Election.

But it might also turn out that his performance under pressure has illustrated to his Conservative colleagues that, as the public regarded his hero Winston Churchill in 1945, he was the right man for one job but not the right man for another.

[Vesper 27,307]

Police state

 

[lucio 5,390]

Shame the erasmus scheme isn’t being continued , I found it very helpful during my study exchange 

[Vesper 27,307]

1 minute ago, lucio said:

Shame the erasmus scheme isn’t being continued , I found it very helpful during my study exchange 

UK students lose Erasmus membership in Brexit deal

Europe-wide scheme will be replaced with UK scheme named after computing pioneer Alan Turing

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/dec/24/uk-students-lose-erasmus-membership-in-brexit-deal

[Vesper 27,307]

another unarmed black man murdered by fucking yank coopers

 

[DANILA 290]

Shows how brainwashed you liberals are. Conservatism is the only way forward; if globalist trust fund baby idiot Trudeau gets elected again I'm leaving Canada for sure

[Atomiswave 6,072]

21 hours ago, Vesper said:

another unarmed black man murdered by fucking yank coopers

 

Look how nervous that copper is holding the gun.....how the fuck did he get this job ffs. You are here to protect and serve....not to slaughter you bent good for nothing illiterate cunts.

8 hours ago, DANILA said:

Shows how brainwashed you liberals are. Conservatism is the only way forward; if globalist trust fund baby idiot Trudeau gets elected again I'm leaving Canada for sure

That cunt trudeau is just another actor put in place

[Vesper 27,307]

8 hours ago, DANILA said:

Shows how brainwashed you liberals are. Conservatism is the only way forward; if globalist trust fund baby idiot Trudeau gets elected again I'm leaving Canada for sure

number one, I am not a liberal

number two you do not even know what the fuck liberal means

I am anti-fascist, anti-oligarch, anti-white nationalist, anti banker systemic control, anti war, anti bigotry of any kind

[Vesper 27,307]

 

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[MoroccanBlue 5,195]

I don't think the Senate can afford to veto the new Stimulus package of $2,000 vs $600 with seat elections just next month in the state of GA. They veto it, you'd expect a massive surge of those voting Democrat for those final seats in the Senate. 

[Vesper 27,307]

38 minutes ago, MoroccanBlue said:

I don't think the Senate can afford to veto the new Stimulus package of $2,000 vs $600 with seat elections just next month in the state of GA. They veto it, you'd expect a massive surge of those voting Democrat for those final seats in the Senate. 

the Senate doesn't veto things, that is only the President.

They can override the Trump veto by a 2/3rds majority (67 votes)

also, the veto was not for the 2000 USD  amendments

Trump vetoed the COVID-19 Aid Bill and the Defence Bill

the first veto was already overridden (with 600 USD cheques)

the Defence Bill veto is not yet overridden

the 2000 USD cheque bill is a stand alone amendment

IF Moscow Mitch allows a simple vote, it will pass, but he is not going to even allow a vote I think

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[MoroccanBlue 5,195]

Did Hugo Boss design it?

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Brexit SIGNED! Von Der Leyen & Charles Michel sign deal before RAF jets fly deal to Boris

https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1377954/brexit-news-eu-news-ursula-von-der-leyen-charles-michel-eu-uk-trade-deal-latest

[kellzfresh 7,226]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

Brexit SIGNED! Von Der Leyen & Charles Michel sign deal before RAF jets fly deal to Boris

https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1377954/brexit-news-eu-news-ursula-von-der-leyen-charles-michel-eu-uk-trade-deal-latest

What are the implications of this deal for UK citizens?