As I documented at the height of the controversy over the Snowden reporting, top government officials - including President Obama - constantly deceived (and still deceive) the public by falsely telling them that their communications cannot be monitored without a warrant. Responding to the furor created over the first set of Snowden reports about domestic spying, Obama sought to reassure Americans by telling Charlie Rose: "What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls ... by law and by rule, and unless they ... go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause."

The right-wing Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time, GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, echoed Obama, telling CNN the NSA "is not listening to Americans' phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law."

Those statements are categorically false. A key purpose of the new 2008 FISA law - which then-Senator Obama voted for during the 2008 General Election after breaking his primary-race promise to filibuster it - was to legalize the once-controversial Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping program which the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing in 2005. The crux of the Bush/Cheney controversy was that they ordered NSA to listen to Americans' international telephone calls without warrants - which was illegal at the time - and the 2008 law purported to make that type of domestic warrantless spying legal.

Because warrantless spying on Americans is so anathema to how citizens are taught to think about their government - that's what Obama was invoking when he falsely told Rose that it's "the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause" - the U.S. Government has long been desperate to hide from Americans the truth about NSA's warrantless powers. U.S. officials and their media spokespeople reflexively mislead the U.S. public on this critical point.

It's no surprise, then, that as soon as Rand Paul was done uttering the unpleasant, usually-hidden truth about NSA's domestic warrantless eavesdropping, the cavalcade of ex-intelligence-community (IC) officials who are now heavily embedded in American punditry rushed forward to attack him. One former NSA lawyer, who now writes for the IC's most loyal online platform, Lawfare, expressed grave offense at what she claimed was Sen. Paul's "false and irresponsible claim."

The only thing here that's "false and irresponsible" is Hennessey's attempt to deceive the public about the domestic spying powers of her former employer. And many other people beyond Rand Paul have long made clear just how misleading Hennessey's claim is.

The liberal Congressman from California, Ted Lieu, has made it one of his priorities to stop the very powers Hennessey and her IC colleagues pretend does not exist: warrantless spying on Americans. The 2008 FISA law that authorized it is set to expire this year, and this is what Lieu tweeted last week about his efforts to repeal that portion of it:

As Lieu says, the 2008 FISA law explicitly allows NSA - without a warrant - to listen to Americans' calls or read their emails with foreign nationals as long as their "intent" is to target the foreigner, not the American. Hennessey's defense is true only in the narrowest and empiest theoretical sense: that the statute bars the practice of "reverse targeting," where the real intent of targeting a foreign national is to monitor what Americans are saying. But the law was designed, and is now routinely used, for exactly that outcome.

How do we know that a key purpose of the 2008 law is to allow the NSA to purposely monitor Americans' communications without a warrant. Because NSA and other national security officials said so explicitly. This is how Jameel Jaffer, then of the ACLU, put it in 2013:

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military "virtues" are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminant and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.

The graveyard of world empires-Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian-followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society as its members retreat into privileged enclaves.

The elites' myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump's decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.

The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in "The Collapse of Complex Societies," is that "collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole."

Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their "greatness." Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.

"Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes," Ronald Wright writes in "A Short History of Progress." "Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism."

The Trump appointees-Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Alex Acosta and others-do not advocate innovation or reform. They are Pavlovian dogs that salivate before piles of money. They are hard-wired to steal from the poor and loot federal budgets. Their single-minded obsession with personal enrichment drives them to dismantle any institution or abolish any law or regulation that gets in the way of their greed. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is "a machine for demolishing limits." There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.

Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life, Eros, the quest to love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including our own beings. One of these two forces, Freud wrote, is always ascendant. Societies in decline enthusiastically embrace the death instinct, as Freud observed in "Civilization and Its Discontents," written on the eve of the rise of European fascism and World War II.

"It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros," Freud wrote. "But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter's old wishes for omnipotence."

The lust for death, as Freud understood, is not, at first, morbid. It is exciting and seductive. I saw this in the wars I covered. A god-like power and adrenaline-driven fury, even euphoria, sweep over armed units and ethnic or religious groups given the license to destroy anything and anyone around them. Ernst Juenger captured this "monstrous desire for annihilation" in his World War I memoir, "Storm of Steel."

A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call "crisis cults."

Norman Cohn, in "The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements," draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.

"These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it," Cohen wrote. "But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all."

These movements, Cohen wrote, offered "a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security-even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.

"So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century."

Donald J. Trump was a builder of casinos and high-priced hotels and golf courses. Now he is a builder of a tower of contradictions for the American people that is making "America Great" at their expense.

He made many conflicting promises throughout his presidential campaign. He was going to be the "voice of the people." He was going to make their safety and their job expansion his number one priority. He was going to make sure that everybody had health insurance under his then unannounced plan. He was going to deregulate businesses, cut taxes, increase the military budget, build and repair the country's public infrastructure and not surge the deficit. He was going to scrap the trade agreements known as NAFTA and the WTO.

Now in the White House, he proceeds to push programs and policies that contradict many of his promises. He is ballooning an already massive, bloated military budget by cutting the health and safety budgets of consumer, environmental and labor regulatory agencies and housing and energy assistance. Reportedly he wants to cut one billion dollars out of the budget of the Centers for Disease Control that works to detect and prevent global epidemics! Just today, the Congressional Budget Office announced that under the proposed Republican Health Plan, 24 million people will lose health care by 2026. Apparently he is oblivious to the perils of Avian Flu, SARS, Ebola and Zika threatening our national security and the health and lives of millions of people.

There is more to this emerging betrayal. Trump is supporting Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's "you're on your own, folks" devastating health insurance plan. Slash and burn Ryan, comfortably fully insured by the taxpayers, publicly admits he doesn't know how many people will lose their health insurance. Imagine the impact of strip-mining Medicaid on the poor - nearly 70 million, including many children, are on that program. Runaway Ryan even fantasizes over going after Medicare next and corporatize it.

Republicans such as Mick Mulvaney, the new director of Trump's Office of Management and Budget, argue that these measures are necessary for "efficiency." Yet neither Trump, nor Mulvaney, nor Ryan, nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have ever gone after $60 billion in business fraud on Medicare each year. The Congressional Government Accountability Office's (GAO) reports ten percent of all health care spending is drained away by computer billing fraud and abuse. That would be about $340 billion this year alone - an estimate considered rock bottom by the nation's leading expert on health care billing fraud - Professor Malcolm Sparrow of Harvard University.

It gets nuttier. Trump wants to increase the budget of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security but cut the budget of the US Coast Guard (which is part of the Department) and whose budget is already strapped in safeguarding our coastlines (See David Helvarg's engrossing book, Rescue Warriors, which describes the Coast Guard's often unsung missions).

Trump seems unwilling to oppose the more extreme "mad dogs" among the Congressional Republicans who want to erase the budgets for legal services for the poor (150 corporate law firms last week signed a letter saying they support maintaining the budget for legal services for the poor), public broadcasting and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. The total number of dollars for all these programs is about $1 billion annually, or one thirteenth the cost of another redundant air craft carrier (we already have twelve in service-more active service carriers than the rest of the world combined).

Moreover, this self-touted "voice of the people" is instead placing in the highest government positions the "voices" of Wall Street billionaires. Next door to his Oval Office is Gary Cohn, former Goldman Sachs boss, a supposedly smart man who just mimicked Trump by absurdly claiming "we have no alternative but to reinvest in our military and make ourselves a military power once again." Who in the world doesn't think US Empire, bristling with arrays of weapons of mass destruction and able to immediately destroy far weaker adversaries in the air, on the sea and land is not a military power?

Wall Street and the mega-wealthy now run the Treasury Department, the State Department, and the Department of Education while corporatists and militarists run other major departments and agencies. Where are the people's voices in that plutocratic park?

As the opposition coalesces in their resistance to various measures pushed by Trump's tantrums, it is interesting to note the surprising diversity of those challenging President Trump. More than a few corporate leaders are appalled by extreme Trumpism and their opposition is not restricted to the destabilizing bill to replace Obamacare or to Silicon Valley.

Sure, corporate CEOs are tempted by the tax cuts and jettisoning of some regulations. But they know they are making record after-tax profits, record corporate after-tax pay for themselves, and the stock market is soaring. As they watch the growing rumble from the people in street demonstrations and at Congressional town meetings, there is building a little foreboding.

They're thinking - why rock the boats (or yachts) - Trump is taking away what people already have - their health insurance - and their health and safety protections while the Republicans plan to continue depressing their vote and rigging the electoral districts by gerrymandering. When a society, blocked from advancing justice, is unraveling what fair play there remains, the corporate bosses, who see beyond tomorrow, get worried, for good reason.

On March 16, I'm going to give a short talk at a writers' convention in, wait for it, Hawaii! Yay! Never been there before. Am quite looking forward to it.

In order to warm up for this big event, I'd like to talk here about what happens to me when I write. It's a subliminal process. I try to keep my conscious brain very quiet so that I can spy on the secret workings of my subconscious mind, back there where all the good stuff is lurking in the shadows, swamps, recesses and mountain-tops of my own mental reservoir.

There are several ways to spy on one's brain. Meditation, long walks, dreams. It doesn't take waterboarding or the NSA to figure this stuff out. Just try to shut up and listen.

Another way to find out what's going on backstage in my mind is to actually physically write down words on paper. Who the freak knows what will actually come out of my brain if I do that? Certainly not me.

In her book Wild Mind, Natalie Goldberg suggests writing ten minutes a day -- starting each paragraph with "I remember..." I can do her one better than that. Buy a 10.4x8-inch wide-ruled spiral notebook and write two pages a day, starting each paragraph with "I predict..." And then finish off each paragraph with what you think about your new prediction.

You can think big, such as "I predict that ten years from now Americans will feel as foolish and embarrassed about hating Russia as they now feel foolish and embarrassed about their tainted love affair with Senator Joseph McCarthy back in the 1950s."

What do I think about that prediction? "If Americans actually do come to their senses in just ten short years, I will be very surprised. There is no indication at all so far in the last fifty years that Americans are anything but gullible dupes for any kind of propaganda that is shoved in their faces."

Or I might write, "I predict that, in the future, Americans will finally realize that they've been suckered into 'wars' on Syria, Libya, Palestine, Yemen, Ukraine, etc. just like they were suckered into the 'wars' on Vietnam and Iraq."

My thoughts about that? The Nazi Holocaust only murdered six million Jews. The American/British/French/Israeli/Saudi neo-colonial Holocaust has already slaughtered seven million Muslims. But then who's counting dead Muslims? Certainly not any of us American suckers.

Or how about this one? "I predict that Americans are really going to miss unions after they're gone." No, that's just wistful thinking. Americans will be too busy working three jobs and scrambling to keep out of the poorhouse to think philosophical thoughts like that.

PS: The last time I did a whole bunch of spying on my own mind, I ended up writing a book. "Visions of a Lost and Future World." So if I can do it, then so can you.

PPS: My life is going along really well right now. I'm speaking at a book conference, just had the principal role in a student film at the California College of the Arts, have a car that is still running, my Social Security pension keeps me going and am in good health thanks to Medicare. And the greedy idiots in the beltway are, as usual, busy trying to screw up my good life in any way that they can.

We haven't had anyone who knew what they were doing in Washington since the CIA had John Kennedy assassinated -- with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter. Bush, Reagan, Eisenhower, both Clintons, Obama, Bush 2, Congress and even the freaking Supreme Court have done every single thing that they possibly can to destroy our economy and get us into World War 3. And now Trump is also trying to screw up my world by bombing babies in Syria and Yemen and giving Wall Street a free lunch.

And what the freak was a Navy SEAL doing in Yemen anyway? Besides helping those mean Saudi bullies steal poor defenseless Yemen's oil?

Doesn't anybody inside the Beltway know how to do anything right? Doesn't any one of those jackasses know that America is all about me -- and those salt-of-the-earth types like me -- and not about them. Apparently not.
(c) 2017 Jane Stillwater. Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books!

Thanks to a recent Wall Street Journal article, I've been hearing from Democratic partisans that President Trump has done something brand new, and that it amounts to tearing up the War Powers Resolution by giving the CIA the power to make war.

Now, I am seeking to build support for abolishing the CIA, and for impeaching Donald Trump, and for banning weaponized drones. So I'm not exactly a fan of murder by robot or a partisan Republican. And I'm all in favor of any new reasons (fact-based or otherwise) people might find to try to put an end to government killings. But I think there's some confusion we'd be better off without.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to make war, a power it has relinquished since 1941. President George W. Bush went through certain vestigial formalities of lying to Congress and obtaining vague authorizations. President Barack Obama, in launching a war on Libya, intentionally avoided any appearance of Congress having any role whatsoever. He also radically expanded drone wars in several countries (and "special" operations in numerous countries) -- in the case of Yemen predictably escalating it into a wider air and ground war, again without Congress. In Syria and Iraq he used foreign troops, then U.S. "advisors" combined with bombings to inch his way into new wars.

Obama oversaw the creation of the CIA's drone war operations. And while he advertised in the New York Times his role in picking whom to murder, he did not actually give the order each time. He delegated that power to subordinates. The Wall Street Journal's article suggests that Obama never gave the CIA the role of deciding whom to murder. This is contradicted by numerous reports over the years suggesting otherwise, including those claiming that, late in his presidency, Obama took that power away. But even those reports admit that very little is known and nothing officially stated about the CIA's role, and that the CIA has remained closely involved. We also know from a former drone pilot turned whistleblower that the CIA's drone pilots have always actually been Air Force pilots anyway:

"The CIA might be the customer but the air force has always flown it. A CIA label is just an excuse to not have to give up any information. That is all it has ever been."

The one partial transcript we have of a drone murder, out of all the hundreds of transcripts and videos that likely exist, depicts blood thirsty sadists eager to kill. The many thousands of reports we have on specific drone murders have not identified a single one in which any of the criteria that President Obama established for them was met. We know of no victims who could not have been arrested instead, or who were "an imminent and continuing threat to the United States of America," or whose killing involved zero risk of killing civilians.

Supposedly, the greater the role of the military, and the lesser the role of the CIA, the greater the capacity of Congress for oversight. That's a great argument for abolishing the CIA. But, in reality, we have yet to see the vaguest hint of Congressional oversight. Congress has not informed the public of the nature of the drone wars. We've seen no additional transcripts and no videos. Congress has not made use of the Constitution or even the War Powers Resolution to halt or even limit the drone murders in any way. Congress has not objected to the failure of Presidents Obama or Trump to meet Obama's self-imposed criteria. Nor has it created its own criteria.

The reputation of Roundup, whose active ingredient is the world's most widely used weed killer, took a hit on Tuesday when a federal court unsealed documents raising questions about its safety and the research practices of its manufacturer, the chemical giant Monsanto.

Roundup and similar products are used around the world on everything from row crops to home gardens. It is Monsanto's flagship product, and industry-funded research has long found it to be relatively safe. A case in federal court in San Francisco has challenged that conclusion, building on the findings of an international panel that claimed Roundup's main ingredient might cause cancer.

The court documents included Monsanto's internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup's main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

The documents also revealed that there was some disagreement within the E.P.A. over its own safety assessment.

The files were unsealed by Judge Vince Chhabria, who is presiding over litigation brought by people who claim to have developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma as a result of exposure to glyphosate. The litigation was touched off by a determination made nearly two years ago by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, that glyphosate was a probable carcinogen, citing research linking it to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Court records show that Monsanto was tipped off to the determination by a deputy division director at the E.P.A., Jess Rowland, months beforehand. That led the company to prepare a public relations assault on the finding well in advance of its publication. Monsanto executives, in their internal email traffic, also said Mr. Rowland had promised to beat back an effort by the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct its own review.

Dan Jenkins, a Monsanto executive, said in an email in 2015 that Mr. Rowland, referring to the other agency's potential review, had told him, "If I can kill this, I should get a medal." The review never took place. In another email, Mr. Jenkins noted to a colleague that Mr. Rowland was planning to retire and said he "could be useful as we move forward with ongoing glyphosate defense."

The safety of glyphosate is not settled science. A number of agencies, including the European Food Safety Agency and the E.P.A., have disagreed with the international cancer agency, playing down concerns of a cancer risk, and Monsanto has vigorously defended glyphosate.

But the court records also reveal a level of debate within the E.P.A. The agency's Office of Research and Development raised some concern about the robustness of an assessment carried out by the agency's Office of Pesticide Programs, where Mr. Rowland was a senior official at the time, and recommended in December 2015 that it take steps to "strengthen its human health assessment."

In a statement, Monsanto said, "Glyphosate is not a carcinogen."

It added: "The allegation that glyphosate can cause cancer in humans is inconsistent with decades of comprehensive safety reviews by the leading regulatory authorities around the world. The plaintiffs have submitted isolated documents that are taken out of context."

The E.P.A. had no immediate comment, and Mr. Rowland could not be reached immediately.

Monsanto also rebutted suggestions that the disclosures highlighted concerns that the academic research it underwrites is compromised. Monsanto frequently cites such research to back up its safety claims on Roundup and pesticides.

In one email unsealed Tuesday, William F. Heydens, a Monsanto executive, told other company officials that they could ghostwrite research on glyphosate by hiring academics to put their names on papers that were actually written by Monsanto. "We would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak," Mr. Heydens wrote, citing a previous instance in which he said the company had done this.

Asked about the exchange, Monsanto said in a second statement that its "scientists did not ghostwrite the paper" that was referred to or previous work, adding that a paper that eventually appeared "underwent the journal's rigorous peer review process before it was published."

David Kirkland, one of the scientists mentioned in the email, said in an interview, "I would not publish a document that had been written by someone else. We had no interaction with Monsanto at all during the process of reviewing the data and writing the papers."

The disclosures are the latest to raise concerns about the integrity of academic research financed by agrochemical companies. Last year, a review by The New York Times showed how the industry can manipulate academic research or misstate findings. Declarations of interest included in a Monsanto-financed paper on glyphosate that appeared in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology said panel members were recruited by a consulting firm. Email traffic made public shows that Monsanto officials discussed and debated scientists who should be considered, and shaped the project.

"I think it's important that people hold Monsanto accountable when they say one thing and it's completely contradicted by very frank internal documents," said Timothy Litzenburg of the Miller Firm, one of the law firms handling the litigation.

The issue of glyphosate's safety is not a trivial one for Americans. Over the last two decades, Monsanto has genetically re-engineered corn, soybeans and cotton so it is much easier to spray them with the weed killer, and some 220 million pounds of glyphosate were used in 2015 in the United States.

Dear Deputy Fuhrer Tillerson,

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 pledge to intimidate every other country on Earth, 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 Tillerson, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence