Trump Declares Himself A National Emergency
By David Swanson

War is the most underrated danger, crisis, and moral outrage to be dealt with.

Trump is the most antiwar president the United States has seen in decades.

As a dedicated peace activist, I believe Trump needs to be removed from office immediately.

How can this be so?

First, becoming a relatively antiwar U.S. president is an extremely low bar to clear. Trump has increased weapons sales, demanded that NATO members increase weapons spending, increased U.S. military spending, increased base construction, increased drone murders, increased nuclear weapons construction, threatened nuclear weapons use, fueled hostility with Iran and China and (with a big push from Democrats) with Russia, armed Ukraine, sabotaged longstanding disarmament treaties, exacerbated the worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen, surrounded himself with hardcore warmongers, celebrated warrior culture, built up the racism and xenophobia and blind subservience that can make wars easier to start, bombed nine nations, not actually ended any wars anywhere, and scared the living hell out of half the globe with his unpredictability.

But, but, but, then how can he be the most antiwar president of the United States in decades? Well, most previous presidents did most of those things too, most of what Trump has done has been to simply continue what was in the works, and for whatever combination of corrupt, incoherent, bigoted, or sensible reasons, he's actually proposed to end and taken steps toward ending U.S. wars in Syria and Afghanistan. He's not yet started any major new wars (that alone makes him unique, until it changes). He's taken steps part-way in the direction of peace in Korea, despite the clamoring of the U.S. media. He's partially resisted an all-out media and Democratic campaign to demonize Russia. The ridiculous lies about Cuban microwave-sound-weapon-brain attacks have come from some of the same sources as Russiagate, not from Trump, and he hasn't attacked Cuba even to the extent that Kennedy did.

Wait, wait, if that's enough for him to hold the title (until he loses it) of most antiwar president in decades, shouldn't some of his predecessors have been impeached, too? Of course, every damn one of them, as you can read about at ridiculous length from the time of their presidencies on my website. Do try to keep up.

OK, whatever, but if you were to get rid of the most antiwar president you'd have more wars, and the nuclear doomsday clock is almost at midnight, and we could all die, and there goes that $1 trillion per year and here comes all the environmental destruction and political corruption and cultural corrosion and all the effects of war that you're going on and on about every damn day with nobody listening except me, a fictional devil's-advocate interlocutor.

Most antiwar is not good enough. We're all going to die from nuclear or climate disaster if Trump remains. We're all going to die from climate disaster whether or not he remains. The problem is not that lesser-evil arguments don't maintain a certain internal logic. The problem is that something non-evil is required and possible. "Don't change Trump, change the system" is a fun strawman chant, but in the absence of anyone who actually thinks the system is working it's not particularly helpful. We need to change the system by, among other things, compelling Congress to end the war on Yemen and then another and then another. Without a Congress, we'll never end all the wars that need to be ended through presidents, no matter what party or group or gender a president may symbolize. We need to change the system by, among other things, creating the real credible threat of impeachment and removal from office, for legitimate popular reasons - a threat that will not be believed until it is acted upon, at least once, possibly more than once. That change over the presidency will matter far more than what individual occupies that office.

We need not only a Congress but also a public, a public that does not cheer for or oppose wars based on the perceived positions of a politician or party, but based on an actual - I know this is insane - an actual preference for peace.

Trump wants to declare a national emergency, to unconstitutionally spend money contrary to the will of Congress, to unconstitutionally use military force domestically, to once and for all abandon the pretense that there is anything left of Congress beyond a gaggle of court jesters - and all to build an actual monument to absurd and hateful campaign propaganda. That, and not anything south of Texas, is a national, and global, emergency. Once Trump has seized that power, it will belong to him and be cheered by his devotees, and to the next president if we make it that far, at which point it will be cheered by that person's devotees.

When Bush was president I said we needed to impeach him or the abuses of power would grow.

When Obama was president I said we needed to impeach him or the abuses of power would grow.

When Trump was president I said we needed to impeach him or the abuses of power would grow.

And pundits say predicting the future is difficult!

(c) 2019 David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.

Bill Kraus Beat Back Extremism
By John Nichols

More than 50 years ago, at a point when the Republican Party of Wisconsin had taken a turn toward extremism that threatened to divide the state along the ugliest and most destructive lines, Bill Kraus and a brave band of political visionaries saved their party and their state.

The political history of Wisconsin is poorly recalled by those who fail to recognize the great ideological battles that have played out in both major parties. But Bill remembered. And that is one of the many reasons why his death last month at the age of 92 was such a loss for a state that can ill afford to be without his strategic good sense and humane vision for what is possible in politics.

Kraus, whose legacy will be honored today at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union, is well recalled as the Common Cause board member who refused to surrender the old-school Wisconsin faith that politics should be about ideas rather than money.

Yet the image of Kraus as a genteel commentator on electoral misdeeds and possibilities fails to capture the whole of the man. He understood politics as "the only game for adults," and he practiced it with a rare combination of strategic savvy and common decency - a fact confirmed by the essential role he played in securing the enactment of the first-in-the-nation gay rights legislation that his boss, Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus, signed in 1982. But Kraus was also a scrappy ideological battler who, for many years, was in the forefront of the fight to prevent the Republican Party from going to extremes.

That was no small battle in the early 1960s, when Kraus helped organize the historic 1964 gubernatorial campaign of Warren Knowles. A moderate former state legislator and lieutenant governor, Knowles had been thwarted in his efforts to win higher office by a far-right party machine made up of Joe McCarthy dead-enders and wink-and-nod fellow travelers with the Appleton-based John Birch Society. In 1960 and 1962, the party's losing gubernatorial nominee was Milwaukee businessman Philip Kuehn, who campaigned as "Barry Goldwater Jr." and said it would be "un-American" for him to renounce the support he got from the Birchers.

Moderate Republican leader Wilbur Renk warned that "right-wing extremism" was coming to dominate the GOP and Wisconsin, while Democratic Gov. John Reynolds dismissed his Republican opposition as "the most reactionary state political organization in the nation... a group of fanatical right wingers."

Even as Goldwater's "extremism in the defense of liberty" campaign was taking over the national party and setting it on course for disastrous defeat in 1964, Knowles, Ody Fish and Kraus grabbed the Wisconsin GOP back from the right and waged a campaign that drew national notice as it first secured the gubernatorial nod for Knowles and then - against all odds - secured a Republican governorship in one of the party's few wins in a year of Democratic landslides.

It frustrated Kraus in later years as the state GOP veered back toward the right because he knew, from experience, the power of a moderate Republican appeal to the state where the party of Lincoln was founded.

(c) 2019 John Nichols John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times. Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, is published by Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.

Do We Reincarnate From Past Lives?
By James Donahue

Over the years I have entertained strange dreams that were so vivid that I had the distinct impression that I was living in two different planes of existence. I don't smoke, but I had a series of dreams in which I was trying to break a smoking habit, but secretly carrying a pack of cigarettes in my pocket.

In yet another vivid dream I boarded a vintage single-engine bi-plane. Once someone turned the propeller to get the motor running, I flew the plane, surprised that I knew what I was doing. I have never flown an aircraft and never had a flying lesson.

Where did these memories come from?

I have always loved the water and in my youth gave careful consideration to spending a life as a ship's master. I even went so far as to join the Merchant Marine and try to get a job on a Great Lakes freighter. There was a recession that year and after spending a few weeks sitting among veteran sailors in a Detroit union hall, I gave up, took a land job and went back to college in the fall. I never lost my interest in ships, I have written extensively about them, and was always the reporter that was an invited guest aboard the Coast Guard vessels operating on the Great Lakes. I have always felt at home when at sea. It struck me that I might have been a sailor in a past life.

A nephew on my wife's side sat down at a piano as a young lad and began playing as if he were an accomplished musician. Yet he never had a music lesson. Where did he acquire this skill. He has been playing music by ear in his home ever since.

There is a well-documented story about a Louisiana boy, James Leininger, who has had dreams and vivid memories of dying in a burning Corsair fighter after being shot down by a Japanese zero during World War II. He even remembered his name, James Houston and the name of his carrier, the Natoma. A pilot by that name was killed when his Corsair was shot down in 1945. He flew from a carrier named the Natoma Bay.

These are but a few of the things we have noticed over the years that seem to support the belief by some in the reincarnation of souls from lifetime to lifetime. There appears to be some fragment of memory of former lives that attaches itself to newborn babies, giving them memory of lives lived in the past.

Now new research with mice at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta has shown that information appears to be inherited biologically in the DNA passed from the mother to the newborn. For instance, the mice pass on learned information about fearful and stressful situations that were endured by the parent.

If the same memories are linked to human DNA, it might explain why some children grow up with a fear of heights, of flying, water or being in confined rooms. In most cases this is not behavior learned by personal experiences confronting the child.

Researchers have recently been studying a strange memory-type of phenomenon that occurs among people who have received heart, liver, kidney or other type of organ transplant. Recipients of transplanted organs sometimes report personality changes, changes in musical preference, and even changes in the foods they like. The DNA of the new body part appears to sometimes introduce these changes.

In my own case, the vivid dreams of flying and failing to give up a smoking habit came upon me shortly after I received several pints of blood when suffering a bleeding ulcer.

The question then: are these strange memories being brought to us from someone else's DNA after it joins with our own, or is It proof of reincarnation from a previous life?

What frightens me now is that our overpopulated and polluted planet is heating up and researchers believe it is only a matter of time, if we don't take drastic steps to make changes, all life on Earth will go extinct. If reincarnation is real . . . what will be our future in the next life?

(c) 2019 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles.

Poor Mick. So Soon???

(c) 2019 Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Pompeo's US Jingoism And Anti-Iran Warmongering Rejected By Mideast Public

(c) 2019 Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel widely there. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.

The Quotable Quote-

Why Doesn't Donald Trump's Cozy Relationship With Vladimir Putin Worry His Supporters?

(c) 2019 James Risen is an American journalist for The Intercept. He previously worked for The New York Times and before that for Los Angeles Times.

Madam Jane Predicts

(c) 2019 Jane Stillwater. Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books!

The Dead Letter Office-

Steve gives the corporate salute

Heil Trump

The Trump Dictatorship
By Robert Reich

The only redeeming aspect to Trump's presidency is he brings us back to basics. And what could be more basic than the difference between democracy and dictatorship?

Democracy is about means, not ends. If we all agreed on the ends (such as whether to build a wall along the Mexican border) there'd be no need for democracy.

But of course we don't agree, which is why the means by which we resolve our differences are so important. Those means include a Constitution, a system of government based on the rule of law, and an independent judiciary.

A dictatorship, by contrast, is only about ends. Those ends are the goals of the dictator - preserving and accumulating personal power. To achieve those ends, a dictator will use any means necessary.

Which brings us back to Trump.

The conventional criticism of Trump is that he's unfit to be president because he continuously breaks the norms of how a president should behave.

Trump's norm-breaking is unsettling, to be sure, but Trump's more fundamental offense is he continuously sacrifices means in order to preserve and accumulate personal power.

He thereby violates a president's core responsibility to protect American democracy.

A president who shuts down government in order to get his way on a controversial issue, such as building a wall along the border with Mexico, and offering to reopen it as a concession when his opponents give in, is not protecting democracy.

He is treating the government of the United States as a bargaining chip. He is asserting power by any means possible. This is the method of a dictator.

A president who claims he has an absolute right to declare a national emergency and spend government funds that Congress has explicitly refused to appropriate for the ends he seeks, is also assuming the role of a dictator.

A president who spouts lies during a prime-time national television address over what he terms an "undeniable crisis" at the southern U.S. border, which is in fact no crisis at all, is using whatever means available to him to preserve and build his base of power.

The real international threat to America is not coming from Latin America. It is coming from a foreign government intent on undermining our democracy by propagating lies, turning Americans against each other, and electing a puppet president.

We do not know yet whether Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election. What we do know so far is that Trump's aides and campaign manager worked with Putin's emissaries during the 2016 election, and that Putin sought to swing the election in favor of Trump.

We also know that since he was elected, Trump has done little or nothing to stop Putin from continuing to try to undermine our democracy. To the contrary, Trump has obstructed inquiries into Russian meddling, and gone out of his way to keep his communications with Putin secret, even from his own White House.

The overall pattern is clear to anyone who cares to see it. Trump's entire presidency to date has sacrificed the means of democracy to the end of his personal power.

He has lied about the results of votes, and established a commission to investigate bogus claims of fraudulent voting. He has attacked judges who have ruled against him, with the goal of stirring up the public against them.

He has encouraged followers to believe that his opponent in the 2016 election should be imprisoned; and condemned as "enemies of the people" journalists who report unfavorably about him, in an effort to fuel public resentment - perhaps even violence - against them.

To argue, as some Trump apologists do, that whatever Trump does is justified because voters put Trump in power, is to claim that voters can decide to elect a dictator.

They cannot. Even if a majority of Americans were to attempt such thing (and, remember, Trump received three million fewer votes than his opponent in 2016), the Constitution prohibits it.

The choice could not be clearer. Democracy is about means, while dictatorship is about ends. Trump uses any means available to achieve his own ends.

We can preserve our democracy and force Trump out of office. Or we can continue to struggle against someone who strives to thwart democracy for his own benefit.

In the months ahead, that choice will be made, one way or the other.

(c) 2019 Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His latest book is "Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few." His web site is www.robertreich.org.

The 'Private Governments' That Subjugate U.S. Workers
By Chris Hedges

Corporate dictatorships-which strip employees of fundamental constitutional rights, including free speech, and which increasingly rely on temp or contract employees who receive no benefits and have no job security-rule the lives of perhaps 80 percent of working Americans. These corporations, with little or no oversight, surveil and monitor their workforces. They conduct random drug testing, impose punishing quotas and targets, routinely engage in wage theft, injure workers and then refuse to make compensation, and ignore reports of sexual harassment, assault and rape. They use managerial harassment, psychological manipulation-including the pseudo-science of positive psychology-and intimidation to ensure obedience. They fire workers for expressing leftist political opinions on social media or at public events during their off-hours. They terminate those who file complaints or publicly voice criticism about working conditions. They thwart attempts to organize unions, callously dismiss older workers and impose "non-compete" contract clauses, meaning that if workers leave they are unable to use their skills and human capital to work for other employers in the same industry. Nearly half of all technical professions now require workers to sign non-compete clauses, and this practice has spread to low-wage jobs including those in hair salons and restaurants.

The lower the wages the more abusive the conditions. Workers in the food and hotel industries, agriculture, construction, domestic service, call centers, the garment industry, warehouses, retail sales, lawn service, prisons, and health and elder care suffer the most. Walmart, for example, which employs nearly 1 percent of the U.S. labor force (1.4 million workers), prohibits casual conversation, which it describes as "time theft." The food industry giant Tyson prevents its workers from taking toilet breaks, causing many to urinate on themselves; as a result, some workers must wear diapers. The older, itinerant workers that Amazon often employs are subjected to grueling 12-hour shifts in which the company electronically monitors every action to make sure hourly quotas are met. Some Amazon workers walk for miles on concrete floors each shift and repeatedly get down on their hands and knees to perform their jobs. They frequently suffer crippling injuries. The company makes injured employees, whom it fires, sign releases saying the injuries are not work-related. Two-thirds of workers in low-wage industries are victims of wage theft, losing an amount estimated to be as high as $50 billion a year. From 4 million to 14 million American workers, under threat of wage cuts, plant shutdowns or dismissal, have been pressured by their employers to support pro-corporate political candidates and causes.

The corporations that in effect rule the lives of American workers constitute what University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson refers to as "private governments." These "workplace governments," she writes, are "dictatorships, in which bosses govern in ways that are largely unaccountable to those who are governed. They don't merely govern workers: they dominate them." These corporations have the legal authority, she writes, "to regulate workers' off-hour lives as well-their political activities, speech, choice of sexual partner, use of recreational drugs, alcohol, smoking, and exercise. Because most employers exercise this off-hours authority irregularly, and without warning, most workers are unaware of how sweeping it is."

"If the U.S. government imposed such regulations on us, we would rightly protest that our constitutional rights were being violated," Anderson writes in her book "Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk About It)." "But American workers have no such rights against their bosses. Even speaking out against such constraints can get them fired. So most keep silent."

Once workers sign contracts they essentially cede their rights as citizens to the corporations, except the few rights guaranteed by law, for the duration of the contracts. "Employers' authority over workers," Anderson writes, "outside of collective bargaining and a few other contexts, such as university professors' tenure, is sweeping, arbitrary, and unaccountable-not subject to notice, process, or appeal. The state has established the constitution of the government of the workplace; it is a form of private government." These corporations, by law, can "impose a far more minute, exacting, and sweeping regulation of employees than democratic states do in any domain outside of prisons and the military."

These myriad corporate dictatorships, or private governments, ensure American workers are docile and compliant as the superstructure of the corporate state cements into place a species of corporate totalitarianism. The ruling ideology of neoliberalism and libertarianism, used to justify the corporate domination and social inequality that afflict us, sells itself as the protector of freedom and liberty. It does this by subterfuge. It claims workers have the freedom to enter into employment contracts and terminate them, while ignoring the near-total suspension of rights during the period of employment. It pretends that workers and corporations function as independent and autonomous sellers and buyers, with workers selling their labor freely and corporate owners buying this labor.

This neoliberal economic model, however, is defective. The relationship between the corporation and the worker is not the same as the relationship between a self-employed baker, for example, and his customers. The self-employed baker and those who buy the bread appeal to mutual self-interest in the exchange. "The buyer is not an inferior, begging for a favor," Anderson writes. "Equally importantly, the buyer is not a superior who is entitled to order the butcher, the brewer, or the baker to hand over the fruits of his labor. Buyers must address themselves to the other's interests. The parties each undertake the exchange with their dignity, their standing, and their personal independence affirmed by the other. This is a model of social relations between free and equal persons." (Emphasis by the author.)

Once a worker is bonded to a corporation, however, he or she instantly loses this dignity, standing and personal independence, especially if the job is temporary, entry-level or menial. Relations are no longer free and equal.

"When workers sell their labor to an employer, they have to hand themselves over to their boss, who then gets to order them around," Anderson writes. "The labor contract, instead of leaving the seller free as before, puts the seller under the authority of their boss." The worker either fulfills the demands of management, which he or she has little ability to question or formulate, or is reprimanded, demoted, sanctioned or fired. The corporate manager wields total authority over the worker. "The performance of the contract embodies a profound asymmetry in whose interests count," Anderson writes, "henceforth, the worker will be required to toil under conditions that pay no regard to his interests, and every regard for the capitalist's profits."

Neoliberalism posits that the choice is between a free market and state control, whereas, as Anderson writes, "most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government." Neoliberalism argues that the essence of freedom is free enterprise, while never addressing workers' surrender of basic freedoms. Neoliberalism holds out the promise, which has not been true since before the Industrial Revolution, that workers can become self-employed if they are hardworking and innovative. We all have the ability to achieve economic independence or become industry leaders if we draw on our inner resources, according to the neoliberal mantra, one popularized by mass culture. The neoliberal ideologues' solution to the cannibalization of the economy is to call for fostering a nation of entrepreneurs. This is a con. Corporations and their lobbyists write the laws and the legislation, creating a two-tiered legal system in which poverty is criminalized and we are controlled, taxed and punished. The corporate oligarchs, however, live in a world where monopoly, fraud and other financial wrongdoing are legal or rarely punished and taxes are minimal or nonexistent. Among the population, only a tiny percentage-most of whom come from inherited wealth and have been groomed in elitist, plutocratic universities and institutions-dominate the corporate hierarchy. Public discourse, controlled by corporate power, ignores this one-sided power arrangement. It cannot address a problem it refuses to acknowledge. Subjugation is freedom.

Anderson calls this corporate economic system communist-that's communist with a small "c"-because these private governments "own all the nonlabor means of production in the society it governs. It organizes production by means of central planning. The form of the government is a dictatorship. In some cases, the dictator is appointed by an oligarchy. In other cases, the dictator is self-appointed." Private governments, their sanctioning powers lacking the state's ability to imprison or execute (although they often have internal security forces with the power to arrest), ensure compliance by using wholesale surveillance and the threats of demotion and exile, plus the potential rewards of salary raises and promotions. Also, there usually is a steady barrage of company propaganda.

"We have the language of fairness and distributive justice to talk about low wages and inadequate benefits, we know how to talk about the Fight for $15, whatever side of this issue you are on," Anderson writes. "But we don't have good ways to talk about the way bosses rule workers' lives."

American workers have never achieved the array of rights won by workers in other industrialized countries. At the height of union representation in 1954, only 28.3 percent of American workers were union members. This number has fallen to 11.1 percent, with only 6.6 percent of private-sector workers belonging to unions. Wages have for decades declined or been stagnant. Half of all U.S. workers make less than $29,000 a year, effectively putting their families in poverty.

Workers, lacking unions and the ability to pressure management through collective bargaining, have no say in their working conditions. If they choose to leave abusive employment, where do they go? The inequalities and the workers' loss of liberty and agency are embedded within the corporate structure. It is impossible, as Anderson warns, to build a free, democratic society dominated by private governments. As these private governments merge into the superstructure of the corporate state we are cementing into place an unassailable corporate tyranny. It is a race against time. Our remaining freedoms are being rapidly extinguished. These omnipotent dictatorships must be destroyed, and they will only be destroyed by sustained popular protest such as we see in the streets of Paris. Otherwise, we will be shackled in 21st-century chains.

(c) 2019 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. Keep up with Chris Hedges' latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges.

The Cartoon Corner-

This edition we're proud to showcase the cartoons of
~~~ Nate Beeler ~~~