A blog about a criminal enterprise
By Dave Lindorff
Watch out! Uncle Donald is coming for your and all your relatives’ Social Security and your Medicare!
The all-out attack on Social Security and Medicare, those two remaining standing edifices of the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s New Society, has begun in earnest with President Trump’s latest executive order calling for the postponement, until year’s end, of the payroll taxes by employees and employers that finance those critically important
Covid-19, you have done a number on me as a poet!
For that I am cautiously grateful.
I don’t think I can ever get back to
My old pre-Covid relationship to poetry
Even if I wanted to,
Which I’m not sure I do.
The pandemic hasn’t made me a better poet,
However that might be defined.
I’m starting from scratch.
I’m like someone who was laid off
From a twenty-year stint as a machine operator.
I used to turn out poems that meant
Dave Lindorff
It hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for the supposed “Land of the Free” these days, though a lot of brave protesters across the country have continued to stand up to a lot of cowardly militarized police and American soldiers who have been using weaponized military helicopters, M-16 automatic assault rifles and other military gear to threaten and intimidate them, as well as grotesque crowd-control weapons from flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets
By Linn Washington, Jr.
A presidential candidate, nakedly pandering prejudice to win votes, holds a pivotal campaign rally in a locale infamous for a bloody incident of white racist violence.
Sounds like President Donald J. Trump’s decision to schedule a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of one of the worst incidents of mass racist violence in American history.
However, decades before Trump’s Tulsa ‘Dog Whistle’ to bigots in his base, the icon of the
By Dave Lindorff
My wife Joyce and I visited the front in the war zone yesterday.
I’m talking about the “war” on the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
We registered for COVID-19 testing on Tuesday when Joyce, usually highly energetic, started feeling physically drained for no reason and began running a low-grade elevated temperature of 98.9 all day. We decided that our both getting tested was a wise idea, particularly
By Dave Lindorff
The new call to “defund the police departments” is a brilliant idea whose time has come.
As an activist eloquently put the case in a hearing before the Minneapolis City Council, “The police are a 19th-century creation that is inappropriate for a 21st-century society.”
Absolutely correct. As we have written on this site earlier, police forces in the US were actually created for chasing down, capturing and returning escaping slaves. Their role
|
By Dave Lindorff President Trump really went a bridge too far with his bizarre Bible photo op and his order for federal troops to attack peaceful White House protesters to allow him to exit his white house bunker and walk unimpeded across the street to a church to have his photo taken holding it up (after having it pointed out that he was holding the sacred book, hasily borrowed from the church behind him, upside down!). In separate letters to all US troops, both Defense (sic) Secretary Mark Esper and Four-Star Gen. Mark Milley, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top general, told all people in uniform that their loyalty is to the US Constitution, not to any political leader. Milley, in his memo, added an additional note jotted in pen to stress his point further writing: We all committed our lives to the idea that is America — We will stay true to that oath and the American People.” Here are the two letters, both well worth reading in full. Both make it clear that the obligation of federal troops is to defend the right to free speech and peaceful assembly — a direct rebuke of President Trump’s call for violent attacks on protester and for “dominating the streets” of the nation’s cities… For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF, and copies of the two remarkable memos to US troops by the military’s two top leaders, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/in-astonishing-move-both-defense-secretary-esper-and-joint-chiefs-chair-milley-tell-troops-to-defend-constitution-not-president/ |
Fascism on the march: Is Trump Using the Nation’s Capital as a Test Site for Scrapping Constitutional Government and Establishing Martial Law?By Dave Lindorff It’s been less than two weeks since the murder by cop of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and in that short time, an astonishing rebellion has sprung up from the angry grass roots. It began among a black population for whom this vicious videotaped slow and casual killing of a non-violent black suspect of a minor alleged crime by a calm and clearly unthreatened white police officer was the last straw. In no time, the protests spread across the country We are all George Floyd in police-state America: Cop Pushes Old White Man Over Backwards, Leaves Victim Bleeding and Unconscious After Head Hits Sidewalk HardBy Dave Lindorff Watching the police response to the nationwide uprising against police brutality is by turns infuriating and depressing. It hardly matters whether or not it’s a minority of police officer who are behaving as the “pigs” we used to call them back in the 1960s and ‘70s, because if they can do the kinds Calling Trump ‘Brave’ for Ordering Soldiers to Attack Peaceful Protesters so he Can Do a Photo Op is PatheticBy Dave Lindorff The wretched and ignorant former governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, has praised President Trump for his “courage” in supposedly “braving” protesters in the nation’s capital to walk across Lafayette Park from the White House and stand, Bible in hand, in front of a small chapel. The sycophantic Walker, who never graduated college and so might be excused for lacking awareness of things that happened before he was |