Leaks are illegal and hated by those in power (and their followers) precisely because political officials want to hide evidence of their own wrongdoing, and want to be able to lie to the public with impunity and without detection. That's the same reason the rest of us should celebrate such illegal leaks and protect those who undertake them, often at great risk to their own interests, so that we can be informed about the real actions of those who wield the greatest power. That principle does not change based upon which political party controls the White House.

The four-decade-long assault on our democratic institutions by corporations has left them weak and largely dysfunctional. These institutions, which surrendered their efficacy and credibility to serve corporate interests, should have been our firewall. Instead, they are tottering under the onslaught.

Labor unions are a spent force. The press is corporatized and distrusted. Universities have been purged of dissidents and independent scholars who criticize neoliberalism and decry the decay of democratic institutions and political parties. Public broadcasting and the arts have been defunded and left on life support. The courts have been stacked with judges whose legal careers were spent serving corporate power, a trend in appointments that continued under Barack Obama. Money has replaced the vote, which is how someone as unqualified as Betsy DeVos can buy herself a Cabinet seat. And the Democratic Party, rather than sever its ties to Wall Street and corporations, is naively waiting in the wings to profit from a Trump debacle.

"The biggest asset Trump has is the decadent, clueless, narcissistic, corporate-indentured, war-mongering Democratic Party," Ralph Nader said when I reached him by phone in Washington. "If the Democratic strategy is waiting for Godot, waiting for Trump to implode, we are in trouble. And just about everything you say about the Democrats you can say about the AFL-CIO. They don't control the train."

The loss of credibility by democratic institutions has thrust the country into an existential as well as economic crisis. The courts, universities and press are no longer trusted by tens of millions of Americans who correctly see them as organs of the corporate elites. These institutions are traditionally the mechanisms by which a society is able to unmask the lies of the powerful, critique ruling ideologies and promote justice. Because Americans have been bitterly betrayed by their institutions, the Trump regime can attack the press as the "opposition party," threaten to cut off university funding, taunt a federal jurist as a "so-called judge" and denounce a court order as "outrageous."

The decay of democratic institutions is the prerequisite for the rise of authoritarian or fascist regimes. This decay has given credibility to a pathological liar. The Trump administration, according to an Emerson College poll, is considered by 49 percent of registered voters to be truthful while the media are considered truthful by only 39 percent of registered voters. Once American democratic institutions no longer function, reality becomes whatever absurdity the White House issues.

Most of the rules of democracy are unwritten. These rules determine public comportment and ensure respect for democratic norms, procedures and institutions. President Trump has, to the delight of his supporters, rejected this political and cultural etiquette.

Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" noted that when democratic institutions collapse it is "easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which have become pious banalities." The chatter of the liberal ruling elites about our democracy is itself an absurdity. "Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories," she wrote, infects political discourse. This vulgarity is "mistaken for courage and a new style of life."

"He is destroying one code of behavior after another," Nader said of Trump. "He is so far getting away with it and not paying a price. He is breaking standards of behavior-what he says about women, commercializing the White House, I am the law."

Nader said he does not think the Republican Party will turn against Trump or consider impeachment unless his presidency appears to threaten its chances to retain power in the 2018 elections. Nader sees the Democratic Party as too "decadent and incompetent" to mount a serious challenge to Trump. Hope, he said, comes from the numerous protests that have been mounted in the streets, at town halls held by members of Congress and at flash points such as Standing Rock. It may also come from the 2.5 million civil servants within the federal government if a significant number refuse to cooperate with Trump's authoritarianism.

"The new president is clearly aware of the power wielded by civil servants, who swear an oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, not to any president or administration," Maria J. Stephan, the author of "Why Civil Resistance Works," writes in The Washington Post. "One of Trump's first acts as president was a sweeping federal hiring freeze affecting all new and existing positions except those related to the military, national security and public safety. Even before Trump's inauguration, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives reinstated an obscure 1876 rule that would allow Congress to slash the salaries of individual federal workers. This was a clear warning to those serving in government to keep their heads down. Trump's high-profile firing of acting attorney general Sally Yates, who refused to follow the president's immigration ban, sent shock waves through the bureaucracy."

A sustained, nationwide popular uprising of nonviolent obstruction and noncooperation is the only weapon left to save the republic. The elites will respond once they become afraid. If we do not make them afraid we will fail.

"The resiliency of democratic institutions has been encouraging-the courts, the protests," Nader said. "Trump boomerangs himself. He personally outrages people around the country based on race, gender, class, geography, his lies, his false statements, his narcissism, his lack of knowledge, his flippancy and his morbid desire to respond to slurs with tweets. He is not a smart autocrat. He weakens himself daily. He allows the opposition to have more effect than it ordinarily would."

"Most dictatorial heads of state deal with abstract ideologies-the fatherland and so forth," Nader went on. "He doesn't do much of that. He attacks personally, low on the sensuality ladder. You are a fake. You are a loser. You are a crook. You are a liar. This arouses people more, especially when he does this based on gender, race and religion. The best thing going for the democratic awakening is Donald Trump."

Nader said that Trump will, however, be able to consolidate power if we suffer another catastrophic terrorist attack or there is a financial meltdown. Dictatorial regimes need a crisis, either real or manufactured, to justify total suspension of civil liberties and assuming uncontested control.

"If there is a stateless terrorist attack on the U.S. he is capable of concentrating a lot of power in the White House against the courts and against Congress," Nader warned. "He will scapegoat the people opposed to him. ... This will weaken any resistance and opposition."

The tension between the Trump White House and segments of the establishment, including the courts, the intelligence community and the State Department, has been misconstrued as evidence that the elites will remove Trump from power. If the elites can work out a relationship with the Trump regime to maximize profits and protect their personal and class interests they will endure the embarrassment of having a demagogue in the Oval Office.

The corporate state, or deep state, also has no commitment to democracy. Its forces hollowed out democratic institutions to render them impotent. The difference between corporate power and the Trump regime is that corporate power sought to maintain the fiction of democracy, including the polite, public deference paid to bankrupt democratic institutions. Trump has obliterated this deference. He has plunged political discourse into the gutter. Trump is not destroying democratic institutions. They were destroyed before he took office.

Even the most virulent fascist regimes built shaky alliances with traditional conservative and business elites, who often considered the fascists gauche and crude.

"We have never known an ideologically pure fascist regime," writes Robert O. Paxton in "The Anatomy of Fascism." "Indeed, the thing hardly seems possible. Each generation of scholars of fascism has noted that the regimes rested upon some kind of pact or alliance between the fascist party and powerful conservative forces. In the early 1940s the social democratic refugee Franz Neumann argued in his classic Behemoth that a 'cartel' of party, industry, army, and bureaucracy ruled Nazi Germany, held together only by 'profit, power, prestige, and especially fear.' "

Fascist and authoritarian regimes are ruled by multiple centers of power that are often in competition with each other and openly antagonistic. These regimes, as Paxton writes, replicate the "leadership principle" so that it "cascades down through the social and political pyramid, creating a host of petty Fuhrers and Duces in a state of Hobbesian war of all against all."

The little fuhrers and duces are always buffoonish. Such strutting demagogues appalled liberal elites in the 1930s. The German novelist Thomas Mann wrote in his diary two months after the Nazis came to power that he had witnessed a revolution "without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice." He lamented that the "common scum" had taken power "accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses." The business elites in Germany may not have liked this "scum," but they were willing to work with them. And our business elites will work with their modern counterparts now.

Trump, a product of the billionaire class, will accommodate these corporate interests, along with the war machine, to build a mutually acceptable alliance. The lackeys in Congress and the courts, puppets of corporations, will, I expect, mostly be submissive. And if Trump is impeached, the reactionary forces that are cementing into place authoritarianism will find a champion in Vice President Mike Pence, who is feverishly placing members of the Christian right throughout the federal government.

The momentum to impeach President Trump is accelerating.

On Thursday, Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) filed a "resolution of inquiry" that amounts to the first legislative step toward impeachment.

A new poll shows that registered voters are evenly split, at 46-to-46 percent, on whether they "support" or "oppose" impeaching Trump. Just two weeks ago, the pro-impeachment figure was 35 percent.

Since inauguration, more than 800,000 people have signed a petition in the first stage of the Impeach Donald Trump Campaign, which will soon involve grassroots organizing in congressional districts around the country.

Under the Trump presidency, defending a wide range of past gains is both necessary and insufficient. Fighting for impeachment is a way to go on the offensive, directly challenging the huge corruption that Trump has brought to the White House.

From the outset, President Trump has been violating two provisions of the U.S. Constitution-its foreign and domestic "emoluments" clauses. In a nutshell, both clauses forbid personally profiting from presidential service beyond receiving a government salary.

Some believe that the Republican-controlled Congress is incapable of impeaching Trump, but history tells us what's possible when a president falls into wide disrepute. On July 27, 1974, seven GOP representatives on the 38-member House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach a fellow Republican, President Richard Nixon.

As for objections that impeaching and removing Trump from office would make Mike Pence the president, that concern is apt to bypass one set of key considerations after another. Along the way, in political terms, people need to think through the implications of the fact that Trump could only be removed from office with the help of many votes from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Even if every Democrat in the House voted in unison to impeach Trump, impeachment would only be possible if at least two-dozen Republican members of the House voted in favor. Likewise, a vote in the Senate (requiring two-thirds) to remove Trump from the presidency would only be successful if at least 19 Republican senators voted for conviction. Such events would badly splinter and damage the Republican Party -- causing divisive bitterness, putting GOP leaders back on their heels and hobbling a Pence presidency.

Arguably most important of all, democracy requires that no one be above the law-a principle that's most crucially applied to the holder of the most powerful office in the U.S. government. Extreme abuse of power from the top of the government must be seen and treated as intolerable.

The Constitution that Trump continues to flagrantly violate is supposed to be "the supreme law of the land." To give Trump a pass would be to wink at his merger of vast personal wealth and corporate holdings with vast governmental power.

From the grassroots, it's crucial for constituents to push back with determination. As the Impeach Donald Trump Now campaign's website documents in detail, Trump's personal riches are entangled with countless policy options for his administration. That precedent must be resisted and defeated.

So far, the Democratic Party's leadership in Congress has shown scant interest in impeaching Trump. With escalating pressure from constituents, that may soon change.

Congressman Nadler's unusual resolution of inquiry will be able to avoid some of the standard roadblocks in the House. As his website explains, "A Resolution of Inquiry is a legislative tool that has privileged parliamentary status, meaning it can be brought to the floor if the relevant Committee hasn't reported it within 14 legislative days, even if the Majority leadership has not scheduled it for a vote."

l According to journalist Yanatab Zunger, Donald Trump currently appears to be targeting the CIA and its other Deep State cronies for extinction -- while at the same time hiring his own security team to protect himself. Ah, if only President Kennedy had engineered this kind of power-grab/self-protection combination when he was first elected, he would still be alive today and we would live in a whole different (and far better) world. https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5#.dg9vu3e70 

Make no mistake, Trump is no friend of democracy like JFK obviously was, and I am totally appalled by many of Trump's policies and buddies. With regard to Trump's plans to cut MediCare, Social Security and various government food and housing programs, these cuts basically amount to the financial genocide of America's elderly -- the very same white male demographic that The Donald has sworn to protect. And the buddies he has chosen to guide him appear to be totally committed to ecological genocide of the entire human race as well.

However. Trump, like Kennedy before him, also seems to be calling out the Deep State's right to rule America (and the world) with an iron hand. Good luck with that one, President Trump. Let's just hope you don't go the way of others who have also tried this in the past. Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy immediately come to mind. http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/book-review-devils-chessboard-david-talbot

The so-called Deep State, AKA the military-industrial complex and/or Wall Street and War Street, is a political dinosaur whose time has come -- and gone. These days, "People everywhere just want to be free," to paraphrase an old-school New Jersey rock band. But this particular Deep State dinosaur seems at first glance to be the T-Rex of them all, impossible to defeat even though its extinction has already been written in the sand. http://time.com/4657648/charles-koch-donald-trump/

So who better to take out a mean dinosaur than another mean dinosaur? Enter the Trump political machine. Battle to the death here folks. But no matter if Trump loses and ends up in the tar pits of Vegas or if the Deep State loses and ends up buried in the swamps of Washington DC, hopefully democracy will be the ultimate winner. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2017/01/why-im-going-to-las-vegas-on-valentines.html

PS: The reptilian part of the human brain still seems to be the boss of most human mental operations these days. Even after almost a million disastrous years of this kind of thinking, since even before caveman times, many of us still function mainly from the depths of our reptile cortex -- and still believe that full-spectrum dominance will solve any problem. But as St. Valentine constantly reminds us, love is a much sharper tool.

But Trump and the Deep State aren't the only ones who still think like dinosaurs. There is also the Pentagon, ISIS, the Israeli/Saudi alliance, the para-military police up at Standing Rock, serial killers, child abusers, Klan members, banksters, gang-bangers and other hooligans of all types. The list goes on and on. However, like the T-Rex and the brontosaurus before them, these outdated reptiles are also doomed to extinction.

But, sadly, if these gross dinosaurs with expired sell-by dates who now run our show don't "get their minds right" immediately, the rest of us evolving types who try very hard to live in the image of MLK, JFK, Gandhi and even Buddha and Jesus -- we also are gonna be doomed, right along with the reptiles of Wall Street and War Street.
(c) 2017 Jane Stillwater. Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books!

Michael Flynn participated in mass murder and destruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, advocated for torture, and manufactured false cases for war against Iran. He and anyone who appointed him to office and kept him there should be removed from and disqualified for public service. (Though I still appreciate his blurting out the obvious regarding the counterproductive results of drone murders.)

Many would say that prosecuting Al Capone for tax fraud was a good move if he couldn't be prosecuted for murder. But what if Al Capone had been funding an orphanage on the side, and the state had prosecuted him for that? Or what if the state hadn't prosecuted him, but a rival gang had taken him out? Are all take-downs of major criminals good ones? Do they all deter the right activities by up-and-coming criminals?

Michael Flynn was not removed by public demand, by representative action in Congress, by public impeachment proceedings, or by criminal prosecution (though that may follow). He was removed by an unaccountable gang of spies and killers, and for the offense of seeking friendlier relations with the world's other major nuclear-armed government.

Now, in a certain sense, he was taken down for other related offenses, just as Bill Clinton was not technically impeached for sex. Flynn lied. He may have committed perjury. He may have obstructed justice. He supposedly made himself susceptible to blackmail, although the logic of Russia wishing to reveal its own secret and punish those who help it seems weak. Flynn also dealt with a foreign government on behalf of an election campaign.

Some of these are very serious charges. If you removed all liars from the U.S. government, you'd suddenly have room in their empty offices to house all the homeless, but even the selective punishment of lying has a certain merit. And electoral campaign dealings with foreign governments has a nasty history including Nixon's sabotaging of peace in Vietnam, Reagan's sabotaging of the release of U.S. hostages in Iran, etc.

But what did Flynn supposedly talk about with the Russian ambassador, before or after the election? Nobody accuses him of trying to keep a war going or people locked up. He's accused of talking about removing sanctions, possibly including sanctions used to punish Russia for things it did not do. The notion that Russia was the aggressor in Ukraine or invaded Ukraine and conquered Crimea on the model of the U.S. invasion of Baghdad is simply false. The idea that Russia hacked Democratic Party emails and gave them to WikiLeaks is a claim for which we have not been shown credible, non-ludicrous evidence. Despite somebody leaking it every time Donald Trump blows his nose, nobody has yet leaked actual evidence of this supposed Russian crime.

Then there's what members of the U.S. public tell you that it's obvious Flynn simply must also have talked about. Supposedly he must have arranged for Russia to steal the U.S. election for Trump, either by informing the U.S. public of the crimes and abuses of the Democratic Party in its members own words, which supposedly swayed huge numbers of voters -- though there's no evidence Russia did this or that it had this impact, and a better informed electorate is a stronger democracy, not one that has been "attacked" -- or by somehow directly altering vote counts or manipulating our minds or something. If anything along these lines were proven it would be serious indeed, although it would be one of a great many fatal flaws in the U.S. electoral system alongside legalized bribery, corporate media, the electoral college, gerrymandering, unverifiable counting, open intimidation, purging of rolls, etc.

And then, finally, there's what journalists and members of the public will tell you Flynn's offense consists of, once it's been established that Russia is evil. He was friendly with Russia. His colleagues in the White House love Russia. They've visited Russia. They've met with other U.S. business tycoons in Russia. They're planning business deals with Russians. And so on. Now, I'm opposed to corrupt business deals, if they are corrupt, anywhere. And if Russian fossil fuels, like Canadian and U.S. fossil fuels, don't stay in the ground, we're all going to die. But the U.S. media treats U.S. business deals in other countries as ordinary respectable plundering. Any association with anything Russia has become a sign of high treason.

Timothy Snyder, a Yale scholar and an authority on European political history, has spent decades studying the rise of fascist movements. With the ascension of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, Snyder sees echoes from history, and warns that the time to save America from autocracy is in short supply.

"I think things have tightened up very fast; we have at most a year to defend the republic, perhaps less," Snyder stated in an interview with German outlet Suddeutsche Zeitung. "What happens in the next few weeks is very important."

Snyder, whose multiple books include On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, points out that Americans must dispense with wishful thinking about institutions helping to curb Trump's power. In fact, that misguided notion is precisely what landed us in this situation.

"The story that Americans have told themselves from the moment he declared his candidacy for president, was that one institution or another would defeat him or at least change his behavior-he won't get the nomination; if he gets the nomination, he will be a normal Republican; he will get defeated in the general election; if he wins, the presidency will mature him (that was what Obama said)," Snyder recounts. "I never thought any of that was true. He doesn't seem to care about the institutions and the laws except insofar as they appear as barriers to the goal of permanent kleptocratic authoritarianism and immediate personal gratification. It is all about him all of time, it is not about the citizens and our political traditions."

In the days after the election, Snyder penned a must-read Slate article that recalled historical markers from Hitler's rise to reveal the similar path of Trump's advance. The historian had hoped to cajole Americans out of complacency, to urge them to "find their bearings," to remind them none of this is normal and that democracy is in the crosshairs.

"The temptation in a new situation is to imagine that nothing has changed," Snyder says. "That is a choice that has political consequences: self-delusion leads to half-conscious anticipatory obedience and then to regime change... Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history. Americans tend to think: 'We have freedom because we love freedom, we love freedom because we are free.' It is a bit circular and doesn't acknowledge the historical structures that can favor or weaken democratic republics. We don't realize how similar our predicaments are to those of other people."

"I wanted to remind my fellow Americans that intelligent people, not so different from ourselves, have experienced the collapse of a republic before. It is one example among many. Republics, like other forms of government, exist in history and can rise and fall."

Snyder points to the desperate need to shake off historical amnesia as the Trump administration looks to authoritarian regimes as models. "One reason why we cannot forget the 1930s is that the presidential administration is clearly thinking about them, but in a positive sense," Snyder stated. "They seem to be after a kind of redo of the 1930s with Roosevelt where the Americans take a different course-where we don't build a welfare state and don't intervene in Europe to stop fascism. Lindbergh instead of FDR. That is their notion. Something went wrong with Roosevelt and now they want to go back and reverse it."

"During the campaign (Trump) used the slogan 'America First' and then was informed that this was the name of a movement that tried to prevent the United States from fighting Nazi Germany and was associated with nativists and white supremacists. He claimed then not to have known that. But in the inaugural address he made 'America First' his central theme, and now he can't say that he doesn't know what it means. And of course Bannon knows what it means. America First is precisely the conjuration of this alternative America of the 1930s where Charles Lindbergh is the hero. This inaugural address reeked of the 1930s."

Snyder urges immediate resistance to the administration's targeting of Muslims, immigrants, blacks and LGBT people, because if it can "slice off one group, it can do the same to others." He says protest and pushback should continue with regularity.

"The Constitution is worth saving, the rule of law is worth saving, democracy is worth saving, but these things can and will be lost if everyone waits around for someone else."

Dear Deputy Fuhrer Sessions,

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 Sessions, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence