In the August 2016 issue of Harper's Magazine, Martin Amis wrote: 'In recent years the G.O.P. has more or less adopted the quasi-slogan "There is no downside to lying".' (Don the Realtor:The rise of Trump) https://harpers.org/archive/2016/08/don-the-realtor/
The Oval Office in the White House it seems has been re-purposed as a television set for a bizarre reality show. If the protagonists were not motivated by cruelty and the promotion of ignorance the absurd dialogues would be something to laugh at. Unfortunately, instead, what goes on there is extremely disturbing. All the more so, because the chief amongst them has repeatedly shown that he has no intention of heeding judgements of law, and is an inveterate liar, who switches the narrative whenever it suits.
When there is no regard for due process there is dictatorship. His best friends are dictators.
His underlings have imbibed of the same mad-making elixir of having power over others. It is reported that when another ten people were expelled to the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (Cecot) in El Salvador a few days ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that 'the alliance' between President Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador had 'become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.' Such a strange statement in view of the reality. More like an example of barbarism and state violence brought on by desperation.
Profound social inequality and decades of repressive, military-dominated rule caused unrest that culminated in a civil war in El Salvador during the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The left-wing insurgency was militarily and politically capable but the United States backed the Salvadoran Armed Forces.
There were United Nations-mediated peace accords in 1992 providing a path for democratisation and removal of the military from the political sphere. Natural disasters hampered efforts and with poor economic growth and social inequality persisting, crime became the flourishing element.
More than one million Salvadorans left the country for the United States. Since the civil war remittances from those working there played an important role in the Salvadoran economy.
El Salvador under the authoritarian rule of Bukele now has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
More than 70,000 people have been detained under the 'state of exception', an emergency measure granting draconian powers to the police and military that has been in force for more than three years.
Local and international human rights groups warn that thousands of those detained under the state of exception have no discernible links to gang crime.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68244963
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man from Maryland whose deportation to El Salvador last month was at first said to be an administrative error. But as with everything in this error-prone administration, in the face of continued non-compliance with court orders for his return, the story is undergoing renovation. Now despite there being no real evidence, he is a gang member.
Bukele is very popular because people no longer live in fear of gang violence. A lot has been invested in this prison of last resort. But what is the human cost? What do we become when we fail again and again to invest in people and allow them to have their own power in their own lives?
Trump wants his attorney-general to find if it can be considered lawful to send American convicted criminals to Cecot.
The Trump administration has used the 1978 Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members. Regarding the use of that law the Supreme Court justices have said that deportees must be given the chance to challenge their removal. An unsigned decision states: 'the notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.'
The Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan law and policy institution has stated regarding the use of that law: 'It is an overbroad authority that may violate constitutional rights in wartime and is subject to abuse in peacetime.'
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by Trump during his first term, agreed with the liberal justices who wrote that the administration’s 'conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law.'
To disappear: (of a person) to go missing, especially as a consequence of abduction or arrest for political reasons, followed by secret imprisonment or murder.
The bilateral meeting with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was a farce enacted in the Oval Office. The self-proclaimed 'world's coolest dictator' apparently cannot expedite the return of a man to the United States who since 2019 has had protected immigration status whose deportation was claimed to be an administrative error. He treated the matter as a joke asking the reporters present how he could be expected to smuggle a terrorist into the United States. Trump sat beside him smiling complicitly.
These are men who have no regard for anything that normal people care about. They turn that care around into a weakness. They are the so-called 'strongmen'. They lie and cheat their way to power and lie and cheat and bully to maintain that power.
During that same meeting Trump again turned a true story into a false account regarding Putin's missile attack on Ukrainian citizens celebrating Palm Sunday, claiming that it was a mistake that wouldn't have happened if Zelensky hadn't started the war.
Humans have always throughout history searched for and loved, truth and justice. And will continue to do so.
In spite of their efficiency and dedication to order they were unable to keep up with the clean disposal of the bodies. When I was a child I saw in a documentary what remained to be taken care of by the liberating forces. Bulldozers had to be employed to move the haphazard piles of stiffened, shrunken corpses. The horror of those images would henceforth be with me, asking, if this is man? (Primo Levi). As W. G. Sebald (German author and academic) wrote, 'no serious person ever thinks about anything else.' Sebald was shown images of the Holocaust while at school in Obertsdorf and recalled that no one knew how to explain what they had just seen.
To allow the darkness, that is within each of us, to be off leash. To elect a leader who believes in his own hero fantasy, himself the crusader who liberates those who are willing and able from the restraints put upon them by those who believe that the means matters just as much the ends. This can lead only to utter destruction.
Those who are like weathervanes and turn with whatever is current are spruiking this sickness as a new world order. But it isn't new. History is full of men becoming carried away with themselves and upsetting the orderly lives of the subjugated. Perhaps they call themselves pragmatists. Like those who are deeply embedded in the capitalism that largely succeeded in infiltrating the tenets of corporatism into everyday life and culture. So that now it seems that everything needs to be handed over to those who already have. Everything must become exclusive. Excluding as many people as possible so that the few can have more.
Hegel (German philosopher and theologian (1770–1831)) had argued that history has a telos or goal – an end point – equivalent to the emergence of a perfectly rational and just state. That state would guarantee the liberty necessary for the full development of all human capacities. At the same time, it would exist in a state of perpetual peace with other – similarly configured – states.
In February 2022 Russia's invasion of Ukraine plummeted humanity back into a dark age. In November 2024 Americans voted to make Donald Trump president deepening the rift with destiny.
Some say that President Trump does not have an ideology. He does — Might is Right — or Trumpism.
Some men get this thing happening to them; they crave absolute power. Some have to limit their foray to tyranny within the domestic sphere. Others are given licence to enact it in the workplace or they create a business empire. A few get to land a Presidency and with no respect for law or constitution or national borders seek to make the whole world over into their own image. That is Trumpism.
It takes whatever it wants, regardless of others. If there is resistance, it threatens and bullies. It lies about everything. It is constantly engaged in self-promotion. It does not tolerate anything that is not to its own liking.
Some scramble to position themselves to take advantage of this disordered situation; others spruik it as a new world order and try to go with the flow. Others are outraged and keep pointing out every wrongdoing, to no avail. Because 'Might is Right' doesn't listen and doesn't care.
The power was handed over. Can wait for it to self-destruct but there will be a lot of casualties. Can ignore it and try to get on with life. But it will reach out and smother everything that is good. Can divert attention to creating and living within the world that is untouched by venality, in which the quest for truth is honoured and the guiding principle is to revere life in all its forms, living in peace and freedom.
Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1918, 'Charles Birch started out as an agricultural scientist, switched to biology and ecology and soon confronted questions that were to occupy him for the rest of his life: where humankind was really going, preoccupied as it was with its its eternal conflicts and relentless pursuit of wealth. The world could not sustain this forever and he believed progress could only be made when spiritual values were married to the empirical world he probed as a scientist.' The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December, 2009.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-man-of-science-and-religion-20091222-lbpx.html
In 1976, Charles Birch said, 'Lip service is given to noble ideals, but in fact what is mainly served is mammon.' So it is in America, where the words 'In God We Trust' inscribed on the coinage struck President Teddy Roosevelt as a vulgar mingling of God and Mammon. (Mammon derives from the Aramaic for riches and is a personification of riches as an evil spirit or deity.) Roosevelt 'ordered the phrase removed from newly designed gold coins in 1907. A public outcry forced Congress to backtrack.'
While there have been numerous concerns that the reference to God should be removed in the interest of preserving the separation between church and state, in 1983 retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, wrote that 'slogans such as "In God We Trust" have "lost any true religious significance." '
And besides, it is very clear that the God that America trusts in is Money.
TIME, How 'In God We Trust' Got on the Currency in the First Place
https://time.com/4179685/in-god-we-trust-currency-history/
Donald Trump Jr signed on at the investment firm, 1789 Capital in November 2024. The idea for 1789 (named after the year the Bill of Rights was introduced) came from a 2022 Palm Beach gathering of the Rockbridge Network, the secretive group of wealthy technology executives and allies that has become a major force within the Republican Party's donor class. They were discussing government overreach and how to use the financial industry to 'preserve freedom' — certain that they represented the silent majority.
Trump Jr's role in 1789 has been as a MAGA magnet sourcing deals and investments for the firm from among America First bona fides.
One recent investment being in the Enhanced Games, a start-up looking to host an Olympic-style competition in which athletes are allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs.
Trump Jr says that the firm 'genuinely believe(s) in the parallel economy.' Omeed Malik, one of the founders, happy to invest in weapons, e.g. GrabAGun, an online firearms dealer, and fossil fuel-related companies, likens the potential of MAGA-style investing to the boom in environmental, social and governance of the 'woke' liberal agenda, derided as threatening to American capitalism.
There are other firms also engaged in getting into MAGA business, backing companies that 'support the national interest'. 8VC, the firm of Joe Lonsdale, Silicon Valley investor, Trump supporter and friend of Musk, states on its website that American ideals 'are worth striving for'.
But do ideals exist anymore in America?
Trump Jr's plan to monetise MAGA, Gillian Tan, Katherine Burton, Bloomberg.
