Yesterday Mike put up the ominous news that BoJob has confirmed in parliament that he would break the Benn Act in order to bring about a no-deal Brexit. Mike comments that this seems to confirm that he is indeed in the pocket of financial speculators, who stand to make billions from the economic and social chaos and misery that would result. Jeremy Corbyn and the SNP have also made it clear that they will not support Johnson’s new attempt at a deal with the EU. It appears that they only course left open is a vote of No Confidence, followed by a caretaker government led by Corbyn. If that fails, Mike speculates that John Bercow may seek to delay Brexit again in preparation for a general election. Mike goes on to wonder if Johnson actually wants that, as well as the Lib Dems, who seem to be ready to support the Tories back into power once again. He concludes
Perhaps he thinks the Brexit-supporting public will put him back into Number 10 with a majority.
But after a series of failed attempts at Brexit, is anybody really stupid enough to think he has anything to offer us?
By stating plainly that he is prepared to break the law to get the Brexit he and his backers want, Johnson has made it blatantly clear that he is not fit to be prime minister. While I’ve no doubt his toadies and lackeys in the right-wing press would try to claim that this would be the action of a strong prime minister against a weak, divided and traitorous parliament – and where would we have heard that kind of rhetoric before? Oh yes, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy – it’s the actions of an autocrat. We have such laws binding the powers of prime ministers and the head of state because we have constitutional government. It’s evolved over centuries through turmoil and revolution to protect British people, their liberty and property, from arbitrary, tyrannical government. That’s it’s point. Johnson and his supporters are willing to break that. It puts the lie to the old Tory claim that they represent democracy and the British constitution. In reality, as this shows abundantly, they are increasingly keen on autocratic one-man rule, with BoJob as the new Duce or Fuhrer.
If BoJob does violate the Benn Act, then I believe that he should be arrested and impeached as a clear and present threat to democracy. Perhaps we could put him and his supporters in the internment camp the right-wing forces plotting a coup in the 1970s wanted to put Harold Wilson, trade unionists and left-wing activists and journalists.
This is a very angry little snippet from Kevin Logan, where he tears into Donald Trump, and asks Americans to keep their ‘monkey boy’ on a leash because of Trump’s infamous retweets of the Britain First Islamophobic videos. He starts by hoping that one day, Trump will be in a different kind of institution than the one he’s occupying now. He states that it’s disturbing that Trump has the same thoughts and opinions as Britain First He points out that Britain First aren’t any kind of genuinely constructive, respectable group, but a race-hate group with a list of convictions as long as your arm. He states that the videos and retweets have been condemned by politicos across the spectrum, from both Left and Right. He states that if Americans want to f*ck up their own country, they can do it. Looking forward to 2020, he predicts a joint ticked by Richard Spencer, the head of the Alt-Right and David Duke, the notorious anti-Semite and head of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. It’s the direction America’s been travelling down for a very long time, so they may as well do it. But just don’t f*ck up ours.
I’m posting this as Logan speaks for most people in England, and their anger at the Orange Nazi deciding to promote these racist videos. Britain First are a Nazi grouplet, who’ve specialised in invading mosques to harangue the worshippers there. Which is very definitely not a way to bring anyone to Christ. Fransen herself is a devout Roman Catholic, which is kind of odd as I think the group also has links to Protestant terror gangs in Northern Ireland.
There’s an article on here and the retweets at Hope Not Hate at https://hopenothate.com/2017/11/29/trump-retweets-uk-far-right-extremist/
Since their article was posted, a bit more information has come forward about some of the videos. One of them, which purports to show a Muslim attacking a boy on crutches in the Netherlands, has been investigate by Holland’s finest. They state that the attacker was not a Muslim, and not a migrant either.
Yesterday one of the foreign correspondents for the I talked about his investigation of one of the videos, of youths in Egypt throwing another gang off a roof to their deaths. This came from the Egyptian uprising in 2012, and neither of the gangs were Islamists. It was simply one political faction attacking another. He also states that the violence wasn’t all one way, as on the same day that occurred the army had shot 51 members of the Muslim brotherhood.
Even if the videos were all true and accurate, and did show genuine Muslim violence, this still wouldn’t reflect the reality of Islam in Britain. Of course you can find Muslim criminality, violence and bigotry. Just as you can amongst every other religious, ethnic or political group in the world. All it means is that Muslims aren’t saints, but human beings like the rest of us. And the people carrying out the attacks would be carrying them out because they’re thugs, who happen to be Muslims, not necessarily because of some deep reason within the religion itself.
I do have reservations about Logan holding the whole of America collectively responsible for Donald Trump. I think that, looking at the number of votes, neither he nor Killary actually had any kind of mandate to govern. It wasn’t the case the of the most popular winning, but of the least unpopular.
And by rights, it should have gone to Killary. But she won because of that terribly undemocratic American institution, the Electoral College. Which was set up in the 19th century to give the southern, slave-holding states a big enough population for them to affect presidential elections, without having to emancipate their Black slaves and give them the vote.
Large sections of the American population very definitely didn’t vote for Trump. Blacks didn’t, on the whole. Neither did the Asian community. Working class Whites didn’t either. The people, who did vote for Trump tended to be whatever remains of the affluent middle class, who feel threatened by organised labour and immigration. And even then, their reasons for voting for the monster may have been much more complex than simple racism. Trump threw out all kinds of policies during his election campaign, basically saying anything on the spur of the moment that sounded good. Thus, at one point he was anti-interventionist, and wanted to pull the country out of the foreign wars. He also briefly appeared to back single-payer healthcare.
So in some ways, and some points, he actually appeared more left-wing than Killary.
And Killary is as monstrous as he is. She is a vicious warmonger, who backs Fascist dictators and goes on holiday with Henry Kissinger, a man responsible for atrocities around the world of which the Nazis would have been both ashamed and proud. I’ve no doubt that Sarah Sarandon was right, and that had Killary won, we would be at war by now. Probably against Russia and China, as she has a bitter hatred of these nations.
And despite her protestations of multicultural warm fuzziness, Killary has shown throughout her career just how little respect she has for the Black folks, who actually vote Republican. She was responsible for framing the drugs legislation that sent a disproportionately high number of Black men to jail. She referred to ‘superpredators’ at a time when that phrase was only used of young Black men. And when they overthrew Gaddafi, she giggled about it, and was proudly seen with the Islamists responsible waving their guns. The same Islamists responsible for enslaving Black migrants and Libyans. When they aren’t massacring them.
But, unlike Trump, she is marginally better at simulating being a civilised, urbane human being. Unlike the expensively educated savage now sitting in the Oval Office. What she couldn’t hide was her greed, her arrogance, her overwhelming sense of entitlement and her sheer lack of sympathy for ordinary Americans. She was the wrong candidate, but she had clout and the backing of the corporations.
It isn’t America that’s responsible for Trump. It’s the corrupt American military-industrial complex and the corporatist system it’s spawned.
And millions of severely normal Americans aren’t happy. Trump’s had city after city defy his Muslim ban, which has been rejected by one governor and attorney general after another as unconstitutional, including bright red Republicans. It’s why there are moves to have him impeached.
Trump is the creation of a corrupt American political system. But it’s one that an increasing number of Americans are mobilising against, as well as fighting to bring down the president, who’s destroying their country.
Here’s news of yet another petition against the Orange Fuhrer that’s being set up. In this short video – about four minutes long – Democracy Now’s anchor, Amy Goodson, talks to John Bonifaz, an attorney and political activist, about an anti-Trump petition his group has launched. It asks for Congress to impeach Trump because of his massive business interests. These place Trump in a conflict of interest, as he stands to profit personally from occupying the role of President, in violation of the law. There are two acts, which forbid the president from receiving any monies from foreign governments and from domestic organisations or individuals, which Trump has broken. He has been asked to divest himself of his companies, and refused. In fact, Mr Bonifaz states at one point that Trump is so massively corrupt, he’s actually worse than Nixon. Which is clearly going some, in stakes of Most Corrupt President Ever. Since the petition has been launched, it’s garnered nearly a quarter of a million signatures.
There’s a petition over here to stop the Orange Generalissimo coming to Britain on state visit because of his racist ban on Muslims entering the US. There are demonstrations against that law in airports across the US, and a Federal judge has ruled in unconstitutional. The Governor of Washington state has also denounced it as cruel, racist and economically damaging, and described the efforts his administration is making to ending it.
All around the world, people are coming together to force this malignant buffoon out of office. The people of America are showing that they’re not going to stand idly by while he tramples on the rights of fellow US citizens.
In this video from The Young Turks, The Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins reports that three professors of psychiatry, one from Harvard, the other two from the University of California San Francisco, have written a letter to Barack Obama requesting that he step in and force Trump to take a psychiatric examination. They are concerned that he suffers from psychological defects that render him not just unsuitable, but actually too dangerous to be given the job of president. They believe that Trump’s grandiosity, his impetuousness, the way he takes offence and responds aggressive at even the mildest criticism point to mental illness. He may just suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, perhaps something rather more serious than that, or perhaps even be a full-blown sociopath. Cousins states that it could just be affluenza. Trump comes from an extremely wealthy background, and has been given everything he wanted, including now the presidency. But it looks more serious than this.
This makes Trump extremely dangerous. He cannot be trusted with the nuclear codes, nor control of the drone programme, which he could use to strike down his opponents. Cousins states that the US constitution provides for presidents to be removed or impeached if they are unfit for their office. And mental illness would certainly come under those conditions disqualifying a president from taking office on fitness grounds. Cousins believes it is unfortunately too early at this stage to use this to prevent Trump gaining office. But he recommends that letter should be saved and stored, and that once Trump is in the White House, it should be taken out and acted upon.
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