Contrary to what Puzder and other corporate leaders at the National Restaurant Association say about good working conditions in the restaurant sector, the majority of restaurant workers are women and people of color, making as little as $2.13 per hour and rely on tips to survive. These workers face disproportionate rates of poverty, discrimination, and sexual harassment and deserve a Labor Secretary who believes that, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "All labor has dignity." Instead, with the National Restaurant Association's champion heading the Department of Labor, workers will have to rely on vocal opponents of labor regulations to protect their basic workplace rights.

The more Americans learn about Andy Puzder, the more they are opposed to his nomination. And that opposition could well block this nominee. Rallies and marches are being organized, calls to senators are being made. The volume is rising as Americans recognize that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is right about Puzder's vulnerability.

Donald Trump's regime is rapidly reconfiguring the United States into an authoritarian state. All forms of dissent will soon be criminalized. Civil liberties will no longer exist. Corporate exploitation, through the abolition of regulations and laws, will be unimpeded. Global warming will accelerate. A repugnant nationalism, amplified by government propaganda, will promote bigotry and racism. Hate crimes will explode. New wars will be launched or expanded.

And, as this happens, those Americans who remain passive will be complicit.

"We don't have much time," Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation Jackson and an organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, told me when I reached him by phone in Jackson, Miss. "We are talking two to three months before this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that's with massive resistance."

Flurries of executive orders and memorandums are being issued to demolish the anemic remnants of our bankrupt democracy. Those being placed in power-such as Betsy DeVos, who if confirmed as secretary of education will defund our system of public education and expand schools run by the Christian right, and Scott Pruitt, who if confirmed as head of the Environmental Protection Agency will dismantle it-are agents of destruction. In the eyes of the Christian fascists, generals, billionaires and conspiracy theorists around Trump, the laws, the courts and legislative bodies exist only to silence opponents and swell corporate profits. It is impossible to know how long this transformation will take-it may be longer than the two or three months Akuno fears-but unless we mobilize quickly to stop the Trump regime the end result is certain.

"The forces around Trump have a plan to roll this [attack on democracy] out," said Akuno, who was the coordinator of special projects and external funding for the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson. "They have a strategy. They have a timeline. They know whom they need to divide and whom they need to recruit. They are consolidating their base. Those who try and chalk this up to Trump's pathology miss the intentionality, the strategic aims and the objectives. We will do ourselves a great disservice if we underestimate this regime and where it is going."

Stephen Bannon, the president's chief counselor, was behind the ban on Muslims entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries-a ban you can expect to see extended if the Trump administration is successful in removing a stay issued by a district court. He was behind the order to the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim organizations and individuals in the United States that, in the language of the executive action, have been "radicalized" and have "provided material support to terrorism-related organizations in countries that pose a threat to the United States." Such lists will be used to criminalize Muslim leaders and the institutions and organizations they built. Then, once the Muslims are dealt with domestically, there will be new Homeland Security lists that will allow the government to target the press, activists, labor leaders, dissident intellectuals and the left. It is the beginning of a fascist version of Leon Trotsky's "permanent revolution."

"Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too," Bannon told writer Ronald Radosh in 2013. "I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment."

The Trump regime's demented project of social engineering, which will come wrapped in a Christianized fascism, can be implemented only if it quickly seizes control of the bureaucratic mechanisms, an action that Max Weber pointed out is the prerequisite for exercising power in industrial and technocratic societies. Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero calls the "silken threads" of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the "iron chains" of dictatorship will impose social cohesion.

"This problem is not going to be solved in the 2018 elections," warned Akuno, the author of the organizing handbook "Let Your Motto Be Resistance" and the former executive director of the New Orleans-based People's Hurricane Relief Fund. "That hope is an illusion. The democratic apparatus will be completely gutted by then. We have to look beyond Trump. We have to look at the consolidation on the state level of these reactionary forces. They are near the threshold of being able to call for a constitutional convention because of the number of governorships and state legislatures where they hold both chambers. They can totally reorder the Constitution, if they even continue to abide by it, which they may not. We are facing a serious crisis. I don't think people grasp the depth of this because they are focused on the president and not the broader strategy of these reactionary forces."

"We have to encourage a broad noncompliance strategy of ungovernablity," Akuno said. "Not complying. Not consenting. We have to struggle on every front. We have to expect that the courts will not protect us. We are going to get less and less protection from the police. The slightest act of civil disobedience will mean jail. We have to mentally prepare for that. We have to build serious organizations, drawing upon the examples of forces that fought authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Europe. Either we submit to not having any protection as workers, women, queers, blacks, Latinos or indigenous or we fight back. These forces [arrayed against us] are not willing to compromise. I hope it does not come to violence, but we know the proclivities of the society and the forces that run it."

If nonviolent protest is met with violence, we must never respond with violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting the police are gifts to the security and surveillance state. It allows the state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state understands and welcomes the language of force. This is a game the government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be easily crushed.

We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and ultimately many of those within the structures of power, including the police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic forms of justice it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern Europe, paralyze and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held marches in Birmingham, Ala., rather than Albany, Ga., because he knew Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner "Bull" Connor would overreact and discredit the city's racist structures.

The Trump regime is populated with blind fanatics. They believe in one truth, which is whatever they proclaim at the moment (any such declaration may contradict what they said a few hours before). They are possessed with one idea-conflict. They venerate a demented hypermasculinity that includes a sacralization of violence, misogyny, a disdain for empathy, and the self-appointed right to engage in bouts of frenzied rage. These characteristics, they believe, are a sign of masculinity. The highest aesthetic is militarism, violence and war. Without conflict, without enemies real or imagined, their ideological structures and racism collapse into a heap of contradictions and absurdities. They will attempt to thwart nonviolent, nationwide resistance with force. And they will attempt to stoke counterviolence, including through the use of agents provocateurs, as a response. If we speak back to them in the language of violence, we will fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat.

Bannon and his followers on the "alt-right," self-declared intellectuals, ferret out facts and formulas that buttress their peculiar worldview and discard truths that contradict their messianic delusions. They mouth a few cliches and quote a few philosophers to justify bigotry, chauvinism and governmental repression. It is propaganda masquerading as ideology. These pseudo-intellectuals are singularly incurious. They are linguistically, culturally and historically illiterate about the Muslim world, and about most other foreign cultures, yet blithely write off one-fifth of the world's population-Muslims-as irredeemable.

The inability of white supremacists like Trump and Bannon to recognize the humanity of others springs from their spiritual impoverishment. They mistake bigotry for honesty and ignorance for innocence. They cannot separate fantasy from reality. Such people are, as author James Baldwin said, "moral monsters."

Evil, for them, is embodied in the dehumanized other. Once the human personification of evil is eradicated, evil itself is supposed to disappear. Except, of course, that as soon as one group of human beings is annihilated, another human embodiment of evil rises to take its place. The Nazis began with Jews. Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims. History has shown where they will go from here.

"The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus," the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis said. "Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that's to say national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell-it's other people (other nations, another tribe). They don't even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images-as nationalists."

Like all utopian dreamers they believe their authoritarianism is being implemented for our benefit. They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno at the stake and who argued that eradicating heretics does them a favor because it saves them from their own damnation. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with people who view reality through the binary lens of black and white-us and them. They do not recognize the right of dissent. Dissent is at best obstruction and probably treason. Fanatics, in power, always become inquisitors.

The acts of resistance-including the massive street protests the day after the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the ban on Muslims, the Department of Energy's refusal to give the Trump administration a list of employees that worked on climate change, acting Attorney General Sally Yates' refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State Department staff members' signing of a memo opposing the immigration restrictions-terrify those around Trump. These reactionaries do not trust the old elites and their bureaucrats and courtiers, including the press, which Bannon has called "the opposition party."

Akuno, who supports the appeal for nationwide general strikes, cautioned that such a call might be premature "because unions don't know if a general strike is called how many members would comply, given how many voted for Trump." He also noted that because the Trump regime is carrying out assaults on so many fronts, resistance will tax the resources of the left.

"This shotgun assault effectively divides the left," he said. "Do I defend Chicago if, as Trump says, he puts tanks in the streets or do I go to Standing Rock if I am black? These are the kinds of choices we will be forced to make."

"We are going to have to bring this society to a standstill," he said. "We are going to have to disrupt the flow of commerce. We are going to have to disrupt the nodal points of distribution. We will not only have to figure out how to get on the highways, but disrupt Amazon.com and UPS. We have to get workers there, even though they are not unionized, to see these acts as in their long-term interests. And we have to build strong, fortified bases locally and link them together."

Trump loyalists are counting on enough support from the police, the military, private contractors and the organs of internal security such as Homeland Security and the FBI, along with newly empowered white vigilante groups, to physically crush those who defy them. They will attempt to use fear and even terror to paralyze the population into acquiescence.

"It is not accidental that the Trump regime immediately went after the water protectors at Standing Rock," Akuno said. "Standing Rock forced the wider society to look at itself, its history and its origins. It raised serious questions. Do we want human civilization to survive? Are we willing to destroy ourselves for short-term profit? Standing Rock exposed the U.S. colonial project and challenged capitalist logic. It showed us that we have to make a choice between oil and water. It asked us which will take priority for human beings."

We have the power to make the country ungovernable. But we do not have much time. The regime will make it harder and harder to organize, get into the streets and carry out the nationwide strikes, including within the federal bureaucracy. Resistance alone, however, is not enough. It must be accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist society. It must reject the Democratic Party's attempt to ride anti-Trump sentiment back into power. The enemy is, in the end, not Trump or Bannon, but the corporate state. If we do not dismantle corporate power we will never stop fascism's seduction of the white working class and unemployed.

"The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do," Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his play "Egmont."

Much of the public is eager for the impeachment of President Trump. A poll last week found that 40 percent of Americans already "support" impeaching him, and the same survey - by highly regarded Public Policy Polling - found that another 12 percent are "not sure."

From the outset of his presidency, Trump has been violating the U.S. Constitution in a way that we have not seen before and should not tolerate. It's time for members of Congress to get the impeachment process underway.

The Constitution states that to start impeachment proceedings, a document or "resolution calling for a committee investigation of charges against the officer in question" must be introduced in the House of Representatives. Such a move would have been appropriate from the moment that Trump became president.

As documented in depth on the ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org website - where more than 600,000 people have already signed a petition for impeachment - the president continues to violate two "emoluments" clauses in the Constitution. One prohibits any gifts or benefits from foreign governments, and the other prohibits the same from the U.S. government or any U.S. state.

To uphold the bedrock principle that no one should be above the supreme law of the land, a resolute member of the House must now take the lead in introducing a resolution to get impeachment rolling. That process is necessarily difficult - and essential.

Former White House counsel John Dean, who served President Nixon from 1970 to 1973, told The Atlantic magazine: "I don't think Richard Nixon even comes close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump."

Since that interview with Dean three weeks ago, we've been learning more about Trump's unconstitutional corruption as president. The case that Trump is in flagrant violation of the Constitution gained added strength over the weekend when The Associated Press reported: "New documents confirm that President Donald Trump retains a direct tie to his business interests through a revocable trust now being overseen by one of his adult sons and a longtime executive of the Trump Organization."

What's more, AP reported, "Trump is the sole beneficiary of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which is tied to his Social Security number as the taxpayer identification number, according to documents published online by the investigative nonprofit ProPublica. And Trump can revoke the trust, which was amended three days before his inauguration, at any time."

Members of Congress should initiate an impeachment process because of two clear provisions in the Constitution.

The Foreign Emoluments Clause says: "[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."

And the Constitution's Domestic Emoluments Clause (also known as the Presidential Compensation Clause), which cannot be waived by Congress, says: "The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them."

In addition, a House committee's impeachment probe should also investigate whether President Trump is violating the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 (STOCK Act). One of the few federal ethics statutes that specifically include the president, the STOCK Act - among other provisions - prohibits the president from (1) using nonpublic information for private profit, and from (2) intentionally influencing an employment decision or practice of a private entity solely on the basis of partisan political affiliation.

A crucial test for democracy is whether people in high places can violate the law with impunity. For democracy in the United States, the biggest danger is unchecked presidential ability to violate the Constitution.

In a speech on the House floor last Thursday that spelled out some of Trump's extreme conflicts-of-interest, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) closed with a cogent reference to the fact that Congress can "even explore the power of impeachment."

Unfortunately, that old TV hype isn't true. What goes on in Vegas does not stay in Vegas after all.

For years now we all had assumed that the capital of America was in Washington DC. We were wrong. It turns out that the capital of America might actually be Las Vegas. Ha! You thought I would say Moscow? Wrong again.

So now I intend to put on my big-girl political-blogger hat and to go visit the real seat of power in America -- which turns out to be, of all places, the Venetian casino. And while I'll only be staying at CircusCircus because it's cheaper and more fun, the Venetian will be right down the street. And the Venetian is owned by Sheldon Adelson, the man who donated approximately 75 million dollars to the Trump campaign.

According to Casino.org, "Las Vegas Sands billionaire Sheldon Adelson dumped millions into super PACs supporting the Trump movement. The Venetian and Palazzo owner spent $25 million on Trump ads in the final week alone, following the FBI's announcement that it was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, and is rumored to have poured upwards of $75 million in total into Trump's GOP campaign."

And Adelson allegedly also spends billions of dollars supporting Israeli neo-colonialists in the Middle East, trying to convince everyone here that Israel is just a sweet little democracy and not the war-monger/Gestapo/Mafioso that it actually is -- as well as the being the main force in the first place, along with AIPAC, the CIA, Bush, Clinton and Obama, behind creating all those desperate refugees that Trump is now banning.

For instance, in "The Devil's Chessboard," (which should be required reading in every single high school history class in America), David Talbot states that many prominent Nazi war criminals ended up working in Allen Dulles' CIA. Some of these Nazi creeps were highly active in creating and carrying out the Final Solution -- and yet where was the Mossad to bring them to justice? Hand in glove with Dulles, the devil himself. These Nazi war criminals not only never paid for their ghastly misdeeds but also ended up working in Washington, side by side with the Mossad.

So. What self-respecting freelance journalist/war correspondent/political blogger wouldn't want to go to Las Vegas to write about all this crap? And especially on Valentine's Day -- because it appears that our nation's heart is there already.

PS: Another reason I want to go to Las Vegas is that it may be the last time I have any cash. Lean green. Moola. Any of that stuff. And not just me personally either -- all of us. Under marching orders from America, India has just become an almost-cashless society. Most of its small-denomination folding moola is now worth crap. Millions are effected, mainly the poor, because none of the large denominations have been recalled.

Without money or access to ATMs or debit cards or even to banks, India's poor are now expected to just quietly go away and die of starvation. The dice were definitely loaded on this one. Genocide by "war" isn't fast enough? Now they gots financial genocide on the table too?

And odds are that America will soon go the way of India and we too won't be saving our ten-spots, twins or Benjamins under the mattress any more -- so why not take them to Las Vegas while they're still worth the paper they're printed on. PPS: I got a really good deal on my trip to Vegas at Cheap Tickets Just $175 plus tax for airfare from Oakland and four nights at CircusCircus. Except that Spirit Airlines only lets you take one item on board, 16x14x12 inches, without paying an additional fee. So it's not gonna be okay if I lose my shirt in Vegas -- because I won't have packed any extras.
(c) 2017 Jane Stillwater. Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books!

It was bound to be the case that if a U.S. president ever admitted that the United States murdered people and did so on a scale at least as significant as other countries, he would be defending the practice, not denouncing it.

It is not a secret in much of the world that the United States is (as that Putin stooge Martin Luther King Jr. put it) the greatest purveyor of violence on earth. The United States is the top weapons dealer, the top weapons buyer, the biggest military spender, the most widespread imperial presence, the most frequent war maker, the most prolific overthrower of governments, and from 1945 to 2017 the killer of the most people through war.

During this past U.S. election, a debate moderator asked if a candidate would be willing to kill thousands of innocent children as part of basic presidential duties. One can find many faults in Russia and other countries, but in none could one find such an occurrence.

I ask people at public events where I speak to name eight countries bombed under president Barack Obama, and most cannot come close. Nowhere else on earth can people not keep track of their wars.

During this last presidency, the United States developed a new policy of murdering people with missiles from drones. Other nations do not yet have anything to match it.

Hillary Clinton told Goldman Sachs bankers that a no-fly zone in Syria would require killing lots of Syrians, but told the public that a no-fly zone should be created.

For all its evils at home and abroad, Russia -- over the years -- has proposed complete nuclear disarmament, significant overall disarmament, a ban on weapons in space, and a peace settlement in Syria. The United States has broken promises, laws, and morality to expand NATO and its troops to Russia's border.

Since the election last November, I've been searching for the right words to convey my concerns. It's not primarily about who won and who lost, although clearly the outcome does have serious implications not only in terms of policies and principles, but also for the cultural messages it sends about acceptable behaviors and ideologies. And it's not about political parties -- assuming that construct can be pluralized anymore, with the power of the corporate purse strings tethered to those equivalently across the aisle.

No, it's beyond the surface of this particular elephant-and-donkey show. This is different, requiring a language that hasn't been invented yet to fully unpack the implications. What do I tell my children when they ask if things are going to be okay? What do I say to the young adults for whom this moment feels like a generational betrayal of the social progress they've made and where they thought the future was heading? What do I focus on to stay motivated and find the positive amidst the growing sense of doom?

"Pervasive protests and strong solidarity are a great start, and help provide an opening response to the question of what to do. Yet they likely won't be enough in themselves, especially if the sense of acute crisis passes and more people are invited back into their zones of comfort."

Every time I try to write it down, it comes out either hopelessly maudlin or analytically detached. Yes, this is different, representing an existential threat to our way of life, thus triggering both an emotional response and one of disbelief. And part of the struggle is precisely about the merits of that way of life, resting as it does on ostensible pillars of justice and peace that are scarcely available to the majority of people on this planet -- or even the majority of those across town, barely miles or just blocks away.

Without projecting too far afield, it's fair to say that there's a good deal of complacency about the lack of said justice and peace and its highly unequal distribution. The general public seems to possess an incredible capacity to normalize around spectacular violence and everyday insufficiencies alike, often drawing upon master narratives such as "equal opportunity" and "checks and balances" to hold the cognitive architecture in place. And for any slippage beyond this, there are plenty of available palliatives.

This is very convenient, and begins moving the needle from mere complacency toward active complicity. But the recent "shock and awe" of rights being eroded, established processes being ignored, invidious -isms being condoned and even encouraged -- this is only shocking to those for whom this pattern hasn't been a regular feature of life for the duration. In this sense, any resistance built upon a return to sacred American ideals and liberties isn't likely to resonate for those who never enjoyed them in the first place.

Indeed, the level of violence in many communities, as a direct force and a set of structural conditions, is staggering. It's the violence of both deprivation and despair, of "justice" being done to people rather than for them, of failing schools and filling prisons, of a culture saturated in deadly weapons and toxic substances. It's the violence of diminished upward mobility, the sense of being forgotten before anyone knew you existed, the feeling of walking around with a target on your back wherever you go.

Many of those aghast at the outcome of the election and the machinations of this administration may be feeling some of these sensations in a direct way for the first time. Suddenly it seems as if the country has been taken over by a hostile force, shredding the rules as they see fit, giving license to their cadre of haters to spew vehemence on nonconforming individuals and communities. The dystopian trappings of blatant lies and draconian policies is indeed terrifying, but mostly if you thought it couldn't happen here.

For a lot of people, it has always been there. And for a lot of others, that's been cognitively understood yet conveniently ignored. Now that it's finding its way into the wider cultural consciousness, what will ensue? Will it be "divide and conquer" as one group tries to claw its way into relative safety and power at the expense of others? The election itself seemed to be partly informed by this way of thinking, convincing working people that the "enemy" was each other rather than the bosses and their ilk.

So now what do we do? I keep starting discussions with this, hoping that an answer comes by the time we get to the end. History helps a bit, but not entirely. Certainly people have contested systems (and still do) of authoritarianism and fascism through creative and effective means. The annals of nonviolence are replete with examples and teachings, from Gene Sharp's landmark compendium and Erica Chenoweth's empirical assessments to George Lakey's activist pedagogy and Kathy Kelly's inspiring interventions.

The civil rights movement is an archetypal case, although it's more complex than is often remembered. Obviously Martin Luther King Jr. was a central figure, and so too was Malcolm X, with each representing ideas that were integral to the movement. Martin could appeal to the primacy of cherished American values, while Malcolm would observe that those were never meant to apply to him in the first place, and both were right. This tension between ideals and actions was part of the movement's motivating energy.

Compellingly, Malcolm was actually evolving in a more pacific manner while Martin was becoming more militant in his rhetoric. The latter never abandoned his stance on the ethics and efficacy of nonviolence, yet his public pronouncements grew more and more pointed with invocations of "the fierce urgency of now" and "why we can't wait." By the time he gets to the Beyond Vietnam speech on April 4, 1967, King refers to the US as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" -- and is killed exactly one year later.

America has always navigated this reality, domestically and globally. We've been at war somewhere almost perpetually since the nation's founding. The genocidal practices of colonization and "manifest destiny" remain unremediated, as does the legacy of slavery and exploitation. As H. Rap Brown once said, violence is "as American as cherry pie." The shockwaves being felt by many today over rights being trampled and animosity rearing its head may be reverberations from centuries of lingering divisiveness.

Bringing this all to light certainly isn't the "silver lining" we'd like to see, yet here it is. People are more cognizant now of the slippery slope represented by the mantra "first they came for...." Expressions of solidarity and outpourings of engagement are increasing as more people recognize the basic fact that their own access to justice is implicated by the denial of it to others. Some of those walls of convenient compartmentalization are beginning to fall, ironically as physical walls are planned to be constructed.

Pervasive protests and strong solidarity are a great start, and help provide an opening response to the question of what to do. Yet they likely won't be enough in themselves, especially if the sense of acute crisis passes and more people are invited back into their zones of comfort. Recognizing this, King spent his last months planning a Poor People's March on Washington, hoping to bring millions not only into the streets but into the larger discussion of how rampant inequality was a direct threat to all people.

He never got to do that work, nor would he see the "promised land" before exiting this world. And here we are today, faced with our own "injustice anywhere" moment. I still don't have the right words, nor an easy answer to the central question, but this much is eminently clear right now: whatever gains have been made to this point in terms of social progress have not been sufficient, nor are they guaranteed. As many have intimated, the principal factor in the advancement of justice and peace is our eternal vigilance.

What is to be done? Perhaps the best answer to this urgent question is continually being willing to ask it.
(c) 2017 Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., is Director of the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University. Among his most recent books are Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012) and the co-edited volume "Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

Dear Vice Fuhrer Pence,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your total sellout to your 1% brothers, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 03-15-2017. We salute you Herr Pence, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Der Fuhrer Donald Trump