During those two years, and definitely in the aftermath of the now-notorious "Barr summary," the country divided itself into camps based on opinions of the investigation. Some saw the whole affair as a cover-up for Clinton's defeat in 2016. Some didn't buy it even without the alleged DNC skullduggery. Others invested an ocean of faith in Mueller, and still others waited and watched with tempered hope. Each group had its own arsenal of facts to deploy in its defense, and when the Barr summary hit, it served as a national Rorschach test for what these groups believed they already knew.

There is another group, larger than all the others combined, for whom the Barr summary was simply a fait accompli. A whole lot of people whose faith in the concept of justice was already torn and frayed are now abandoning even the concept of hope. It isn't difficult to understand why. The people whose bank accounts and political associations allow them to exist above the law don't just win all the time nowadays; they rub their victories in our faces because cruelty and mockery are the new cool for the untouchable few.

Meanwhile, there appears to be no meaningful political opposition inside the Beltway to the ever-increasing severity of that cruelty. "In the absence of any knowable facts, Republicans declare victory and invent their own," wrote Dahlia Lithwick for Slate in the aftermath of the Barr summary. "In the absence of any knowable facts, Democrats declare defeat."

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) provided a perfect example of the practice of mocking cruelty this week during floor debate on the Green New Deal. The outcome of the vote was preordained to favor the career climate denialists in that chamber; it would get no GOP votes, and most every Democrat voted "present" to thwart Mitch McConnell's malicious intentions. Still, there was Lee in the well of the Senate with a poster depicting Ronald Reagan firing a gun with a bazooka strapped to his back while riding a velociraptor that was clutching a huge American flag, all of which was somehow supposed to disprove the existence of anthropogenic climate disruption.

The most immediate reaction to such rank absurdity is to write Mike Lee off as just another far-right Republican brain donor, but that reaction misses the fact that these people pull these stunts with deliberate intent. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) didn't throw a snowball at a Senate page just to "disprove" the existence of climate change; he wanted to make you too angry to think clearly. These people seek and receive the visceral reactions and the emotional disruptions that serve their ultimate ends. They scramble the conversation deliberately because their victory lies within that disruption.

To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, people like Trump, Lee and Inhofe are fully aware of the absurdity of their statements. "They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge," wrote Sartre in his 1946 essay on anti-Semitism. "But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors."

What was true in 1946 is true today: A troll is a troll is a troll. "The crimes of the Nazis have, for some, obscured the extent to which they relied on murderous insincerity and the unwillingness of liberal societies to see the Nazis plainly for what they were," writes Adam Serwer for The Atlantic. "In the 1930s, falling for this ploy might have been understandable; with the hindsight of history, it is incomprehensible that many continue to do so. But it is important to understand that weaponized insincerity was an essential element of fascism from the very beginning."

Nazi comparisons are notoriously facile (paging Mr. Godwin), but the correlation is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention over the last several years... and therein lies the dilemma, because paying attention comes with a vicious personal cost, thanks to these tactics. Those people who refused to believe anything significant would come of the Mueller report were practicing enlightened self-defense.

"I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head," asked Harry Truman, "before you find out who's hitting you?" A great many people have found out, and are now checking out of any emotional investment in the concept of justice because, well, just look around. Ample reasons for despair are jumping off the front pages and pouring from the news networks like excrement from a shattered sewer pipe. One does not need to range very far to find a reason for throwing up your hands.

And that is how fascists win.

One solution to this crisis of the spirit, I believe, is to genuinely connect with other people by trying to help someone within reach of your arm. Working in a vacuum as isolated individuals, none of us can fix Trump, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, or the climate, or the media, or greed, or war, or any of the other massive problems before us.

We can, however, start to connect with each other by finding small ways in our local communities to push back against the ugliness of racism, sexism, nationalism and greed that we can see in our own institutions and from our own windows. We can also connect with activist movements that already have momentum and the capacity to connect us to others working on these issues nationally and globally.

Despair is contagious, and right now it's spreading. To act is to be, and there is so much to do. By helping your neighbor, you will be helping yourself return to a place inside where hope is more than a four-letter word.

The Constitution of Iraq, as it was crafted in 2005, guaranteed that "Iraqi citizens, men and women, shall have the right to participate in public affairs and to enjoy political rights including the right to vote, elect, and run for office."

In Afghanistan, the Constitution provides every citizen with "the right to elect and be elected."

The German Constitution crafted in the aftermath of World War II declared that every adult "shall be entitled to vote." In Japan, the Constitution announced: "Universal adult suffrage is guaranteed."

And, of course, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt did so much to establish, declares: "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures."

Most Americans are unaware that they do not have a defined-let alone guaranteed-right to vote.

But this is the case. And this is a serious issue.

"Because there is no right to vote in the US Constitution, individual states set their own electoral policies and procedures," explained FairVote, the national group that seeks to ensure that American elections are free, fair, and representative. "This leads to confusing and sometimes contradictory policies regarding ballot design, polling hours, voting equipment, voter registration requirements, and ex-felon voting rights. As a result, our electoral system is divided into 50 states, more than 3,000 counties and approximately 13,000 voting districts, all separate and unequal."

That has never been acceptable to Pocan, who now serves as the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. With Ellison, who now serves as Minnesota's attorney general, he has kept introducing the right-to-vote amendment.

The movement to enshrine voting rights in the Constitution has drawn support from veterans of the civil-rights movement, such as Congressman John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat who says, "The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool for change that we have in a democratic society, We need to make it simple and easy for every American citizen, who is of voting age, to weigh in on the matters that govern their lives. This bill guarantees that eligible citizens cannot be so easily disenfranchised, and the right of each have a say in the democratic process is protected."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson says, "As our civil and human rights democratic movement continues to struggle for full equality for all Americans, it's not obvious that there was a 'before Selma' dimension to our struggle for voting rights, but that there must also be a 'beyond Selma' dimension."

Now, with Elizabeth Warren's announcement, a presidential contender has taken up the call, amid growing recognition that Pocan is right to speak of the amendment as an urgent and necessary intervention on behalf of the American experiment.

"A core principle of our democracy is the ability for citizens to participate in the election of their representatives," explains the Wisconsin Democrat. "We have seen constant attempts by some states to erode voting rights and make it harder for citizens to vote. This amendment would affirm the principle of equal participation in our democracy for every citizen. As the world's leading democracy, we must guarantee the right to vote for all."

More recently, a photo snapped by NASA's Curiosity Rover depicts an unusually shaped mound high on a hill in the distance. Scott C. Waring, who maintains a daily blog of UFO sightings, suggests this mound, because of its shape, may be a crashed UFO. He notes that the disk is partly buried in the surface of the hill. It measures about 40 meters in width.

Then a new report by a team of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago claims evidence that Mars was once literally inundated with water that flowed in great rivers wider than the Mississippi. The team, headed by Professor Edwin Kite, published its findings in the journal Science Advances in the March 27 edition.

Using data from Curiosity Rover, which has been exploring and sampling the Martian landscape since 2012, the team believes Martian rivers flowed intermittently but intensely over a 4.5 million-year history.

So where did all of this water come from, and where and why did it disappear? These appear to be questions still unanswered as research teams continue to study the planet's climate history. NASA plans to launch a new rover in 2020 that will be making a specific study of an ancient river delta inside the Mars Jezero Crater. And as in earlier rover studies, the search continues for evidence of life on the red planet.

Finally there is another strange twist to events surrounding NASA's Martian adventures. A U.S. spy research team, called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), recently disclosed that after spending months examining the Global Surveyor pictures, has found what appears to be the lost Global Lander. This craft allegedly crashed landed near the Martian South Pole in December, 1999. Now the agency says the lander appears to be resting on its four extended legs as if it made a proper landing.

The loss of the Global Lander appeared to have been a major embarrassment for NASA at the time of its disappearance. But Hoagland suggested that its recent discovery by a spy organization suggests that our government might have turned the lander's cameras off after it landed. He believes the mission was declared a failure for other reasons.

Hoagland suggests that the lander dropped amidst some kind of plant-like objects that have since been photographed by the Surveyor from miles overhead. These pictures, which also have captured the imagination of Clarke, suggest that something alive has been found on the planet's surface.

"We have to say that if nothing else, the contents of this image are something extraordinary," Hoagland wrote. "Whatever this is, it resides in the South Polar regions just a hop, skip and a jump from the designated MPL (Mars Polar Landing) site.

"And certainly, if this is at all indicative of what's to be found below the receding ice of the South Polar caps, then it is easy to see why somebody at NASA would decide that it was a little too soon for the public to get a first-hand look at it . . . and pulled the plug."

Trump thinks he won last week.

This is how he acts when he wins.

Imagine 2021: President Trump is cutting against historical and political norms on a trifecta of big issues at the heart of U.S. domestic, economic and security policy.

Driving the news:

Trump is seeking to kill "Obamacare" through the courts over the objection of his own attorney general and top GOP congressional leaders.

The White House is publicly pushing the Fed to cut interest rates, something prior administrations never contemplated doing.

The president is again publicly threatening to close ports of entry on the U.S. southern border. "I'm not playing games," Trump said Friday in Florida.

The State Department said the U.S. will cut off aid to the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras - the Northern Triangle. Trump said: "No money goes there anymore. ... We stopped payment." The WashPost reports that the escalation involves hundreds of millions of dollars.

A Trump administration official familiar with the situation told Axios that the president "is definitely serious about" closing the border and "has talked about it quite a few times and wanted to do it several times."

The source said Trump's idea would mean that day laborers could cross the border, but that it would otherwise be a "total no entry."

But administration officials privately say it's unlikely Trump will follow through on his threat, and they acknowledge that they're nowhere near prepared to execute on such a radical plan on the president's threatened timeline of this week.

The widespread view within the White House and at the Department of Homeland Security is that it's a terrible and unworkable idea.

Trump administration officials have been discussing the impracticalities, such as U.S. citizens coming and going across the border.

But Trump wants it. So "it's being looked into, what it could and would look like," the administration official said.

He gets angry when he thinks he's won because he wants revenge for ever having been opposed in the first place. He believes it's "unfair" for him to be questioned.

At 16, Greta Thunberg may not be a little child, but she's showing tremendous leadership. The Swedish student has galvanized a world movement, pressing adults to remove the blinkers of corporate and political self-interest and recognize that their refusal to respond appropriately to climatologists' urgent warnings is leading to the destruction of a future for all generations to come.

Children don't have a large stake in the status quo so they aren't bound by the constraints of business and politics. They aren't yet part of it, except as budding consumers and victims of political machinations. Children speak from their hearts with an innocence, naivete and idealism only they possess.

For decades, environmentalists calling for government action to transform our energy sources from fossil fuels to cleaner renewables have been marginalized as unrealistic, extremists or anti-business. Even activists have imposed self-restraint in our calls for political action lest we be seen as a threat to jobs, corporate interests or the economy.

Thunberg's laser focus is on what politicians are doing (or not doing) rather than saying. And what they're doing is refusing to take the necessary actions outlined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's special report in October. It warns that failing to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next 11 years will put humanity - and numerous other species - on the road to catastrophe.

The United Nations established the IPCC in 1988 to be the most authoritative source of scientific information on climate change, compiling research from scientists and experts worldwide to inform governments and the public of the current state of scientific knowledge. Because it's intergovernmental, its reports are vetted by countries like Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and Russia, which have their own agendas. This makes the reports invariably cautious. Every IPCC prediction (temperature, sea level rise, weather events) over five-year periods has fallen short of what actually occurred.

In 2015, the world - including Canada, which emerged after almost a decade of government denying the issue - committed to keeping global average temperature from rising more than 1.5 to 2 C above pre-industrial levels. To environmentalists' cheers, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for keeping to the lower 1.5 C limit.

The IPCC's special report noted the planet has already warmed by 1 C and warned that exceeding 1.5 C warming would cause climate chaos. To avoid that will require a 45 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2050. It's a shocking wake-up call. To achieve such a target in a short time means adhering to international commitments on the scale of a world war. Using carbon pricing to reduce emissions, encouraging electric vehicle purchases, installing LED lights and other actions, while important, will not keep us in line with the IPCC target.

In 1988, climatologists were convinced that humans were contributing to global warming, mainly through burning fossil fuels and destroying carbon sinks like forests and wetlands. Their understanding of the physics behind global warming had become increasingly robust since at least 1824, when French scientist Joseph Fourier discovered what would later be called the "greenhouse effect." To avoid catastrophic climate change, scientists led by NASA's James Hansen recommended a 20 per cent reduction in emissions within 15 years of 1988. Had the world taken the threat seriously and acted, we could have avoided the crisis we're in today.

Instead, the fossil fuel industry and its supporters in media, government and "think tanks" campaigned to deny or downplay the threat. Rather than slowing fossil fuel development and investment, they accelerated it, determined to get the last bit of value out of the resources before markets confronted the reality of climate disruption.

Despite the urgency of the crisis, governments, industry and banks continue to invest in and expand fossil fuel infrastructure and development, and emissions continue to rise. "We aren't going to get off fossil fuels overnight," they say, while making few attempts to get off them at all.

Children, inspired by Greta Thunberg, are telling adults their future is at stake. Those who believe short-term economic gain is more important than protecting the biosphere on which all life depends are betraying them and all children.

I continue to be intrigued by the place that the issue of criminal-justice reform has in our politics, which is roughly the same as the position held by Ulysses among comp-lit majors-widely admired, but rarely acted upon. It's as though somebody placed the thing in a bell-jar of the finest crystal and put it on a shelf marked "Bipartisan Initiative" so that all the politicians in the country can walk by and admire its beauty on their way to whatever the next fundraiser on the schedule is. I do admire the people on both sides of the big ditch trying to push the same button at the same time.

Take this report from 60 Minutes about a prison in Connecticut.

It's a two year old program based on therapy for 18-25 year old prisoners, whose brains, science shows, are still developing, and their behavior more likely to change. The idea came from Germany where the main objective of prison is rehabilitation and where the recidivism rate is about half that of the U.S.

Warden Scott Erfe and his staff, assisted by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice, created a program called T.R.U.E. -- short for truthful, respectful, understanding, and elevating -- that was inspired by Germany's prison system, which focuses on human dignity and rehabilitation. Out of a pool of some 200 applicants, Warden Erfe selected about 50 prisoners between the ages of 18 and 25...Their crimes range from drugs to arson to violent assault. Erfe placed them in a cell block with about 20 respected, older prisoners he tapped to serve as mentors.

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy meets with prisoners at the new DUI unit of the Cybulski Community
Reintegration Center in Enfield, Connecticut. Malloy's 'Second Chance Society' which he signed into law in
July 2015, has been described as at the cutting edge of criminal justice reform efforts nationwide.

"All we knew was we was gonna try and stop these young cats from becoming us. 'Cause you don't want this. If there's one thing I'm an expert in, it's screwing up. I have a PhD in consequences. I can tell you what tear gas tastes like. I can tell you what it feels like to watch your family see you get sentenced to life without parole. And I can tell you the decisions I made to get to that. After that the choice is yours...I don't have to die a waste. I tell these guys all the time they give me purpose to live. They give me something to leave behind."

The prison he found seemed virtually ungoverned. Corrections officers disappeared from cellblocks for long periods. Those who were present were often disregarded. With officers absent or ignored, vulnerable inmates, including those who were wounded and bleeding, often pleaded in vain for help, several inmates said. Violence - robberies in dark tunnels, assaults in crowded dormitories, stabbings in cramped cells - was virtually unavoidable. "Like Devil's Island," one current inmate said. Mr. Simon had not been there a month when a man began stabbing him in the face and neck in the middle of the night. He recalled being told afterward by an officer that the man had just been released from the segregation unit: the isolation cells reserved for punishment but increasingly seen as safe havens. "When we let him out of lockup, he said he was going to stab someone to get back in," Mr. Simon said he was told. "But they didn't think he was really going to do it." Locks have been broken at St. Clair since the 1985 riot and are easily "tricked," or opened with prison ID cards. Like the other state prisons, St. Clair has been severely overcrowded for many years, as Alabama has long spent less on inmates than almost any other state. Health care across the system has been "grossly inadequate," a lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center contended. The suit claimed that staff members had given razor blades to suicidal prisoners, and that ill inmates had been placed under "do not resuscitate" orders without their consent.

St. Clair Correctional Facility

But former inmates and officers at St. Clair say the downward spiral began in earnest in 2010, when Mr. Wise, who had become the warden, was moved out. During his tenure, politicians visited and spoke, religious volunteers were constantly on site, inmates taught anti-violence classes, and rewards such as meals from outside were given. "These are human beings you're dealing with, not potted plants," Mr. Wise said. Or as one retired St. Clair corrections officer, Jacky Mashburn, put it: "Idle hands is the workshop of the devil."

Not everyone in the Corrections Department - including the new warden, Carter Davenport - appeared to favor this approach. After he arrived, cutbacks began - of chapel nights, programs, rewards, volunteer visits. The staff steadily began withdrawing from the population, officers and inmates said. Prisoners were left to themselves. "Under Wise, bed changes were granted when problems arose," one longtime inmate still in St. Clair said, echoing accounts in affidavits. After the warden left, the inmate said, "if you had a problem, it was, 'Get a knife.'"

The limited capacity of segregation made consistent discipline almost impossible. But that did not mean that punishment stopped altogether. The Equal Justice Initiative lawsuit contains abundant accounts of beatings at the hands of officers on what was described as arbitrary grounds, resulting in stitches and broken bones, and in some cases involving inmates who were shackled. Mr. Davenport, prison officials acknowledge, reported himself for hitting a man who was handcuffed. Mr. Davenport was a "carry-a-big-stick type of guy," said a former officer who recently quit but did not want to be identified because he was looking for work. "But we didn't have the numbers in staffing to do that. And that's when the inmates started figuring out they outnumber the officers."

He described the recent efforts at improving St. Clair as only a temporary fix, "robbing Peter to pay Paul." The construction of modern prisons, he said, is the important first step to making changes that will last, allowing for safer facilities and more rehabilitative programming. But the plan, still making its way through the Legislature, has met with deep skepticism, objections that it costs too much, worries from small towns dependent on prisons for jobs and arguments that it does not address the fundamental problems.

(c) 2019 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent almost two years to produce a $25 million report that is a flat tire. Still unreleased in full to the American people, Trump's acolyte, Attorney General William Barr, a longtime friend of Republican Mueller, gave us what Trump long craved-by stating that "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities" during the 2016 election. As for obstruction of justice by Trump, Attorney General Barr cryptically burped, that "The Special Counsel states that 'while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him"-whatever that means. Give people the whole report now, as the House of Representatives voted 420 to 0 to do.

What a farce and distraction this whole exercise turned out to be! Mueller's assigned subject was Trump. So, does this prosecutor demand to interview Trump, to subpoena Trump? No. Does this special investigator conclude with any legal recommendations at all? No. He just wants to be forgotten as he slinks away into deliberate silence (unless he is made to testify before the House Judiciary Committee).

Really, what should we have expected from someone who, as FBI Director, testified before Congress as part of the Bush/Cheney regime, pushing for the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003?

The assignment to Mueller was doomed from the start. Its charge was far too narrow and proof in such matters is very difficult to find. Intent to collude requires direct examination of the President himself. But why would Trump have to collude at all? The Russians interfered in his favor in various ways to the detriment of Hillary Clinton and all he had to do was accept such foreign largess.

An inquiry into Trump and all his business deals and business proposals with various governments point to Trump's disregard for the law. By the way, whatever happened to the IRS audit that Tricky Donald kept using as an excuse in 2016 for not releasing these voluminous tax records depicting suspicious relations that Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston has written about for years (see his book The Making of Donald Trump)?

The endless speculation and successful prosecutions of Trump's associates largely focused on ancillary lies and thefts not leading directly to the White House.

Trump couldn't have distracted the mass dittohead media any better from his true crimes. Those include unlawful war-making, corruption, wasting public funds, and unlawfully handcuffing or firing the federal "cops" whose job is to save the lives, health, safety, and economic assets of all the American people from big corporate predators across the land.

Consider all the print, TV, and radio time the mass media used on the Mueller Russian probe compared to Trump's cruelty and viciousness from his brazen "deregulation," or open flouting of statutorily mandated government missions.

These policies have directly harmed innocent children, the elderly, patients, consumers, and workers and have wreaked environmental ruin, polluting the air, water, and soil with lethal toxins. He proudly took away protections leaving defenseless humans to suffer more deadly coal dust, coal ash, and coal pollution.

He has blocked our government's responses to the climate crisis looming everywhere.

He has gotten away with massive federal deficits caused by his tax holidays for corporations and the rich, including the Trump family. Take that, next generation of Americans!

He backs for-profit colleges who have committed serial crimes against their impoverished students while heavily subsidizing these corporations with your tax dollars.

He is pushing to weaken or eliminate modest controls over imperial Wall Street, upsetting even Wall Streeters like Timothy Geithner, setting the stage for another Wall Street collapse on the economy, causing workers to lose their pensions and savings, before they, as taxpayers, are required to again bailout the Wall Street speculators and crooks.

He lies repeatedly about current realities, falsely brags about conditions he is actually worsening. He opposes any increase in the frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and does not adequately enforce fair labor standards. He has hired and personally profited from many undocumented workers while attacking their presence in the U.S.

He pays more attention to one golf ball than he does to the estimated $60 billion in annual wage theft or $350 billion a year in the health industry's computerized billing fraud, or the gouging drug prices he falsely promised the people he would reduce.

Never mind impeachment, millions of Trump's victims, regardless of how they voted in 2016, should demand his resignation. A million-people march should surround the White House and peacefully make this demand repeatedly.

Enough of lying Trump's slimy bigotry and his snarling, hateful, bullying speech always directed at the powerless. Enough of his destructive impact on millions of children imitating his coarseness toward siblings and parents who, when admonished, blurt out that the President says this and does that. That daily acidic intrusion into family life-a cultural time bomb-has yet to properly interest the media.

Cheating Donald J. Trump has gotten away with everything in his failed businesses and his Electoral College-caused Presidency. In so doing, he has taught us much about ourselves, how much we tolerate with chronic indifference to the flaying of the rule of law, and the principles of decency, helpfulness, peace, and justice.

He has taught us about the costs of not doing our political homework, of staying home civically and electorally. He has taught us that if we do not look ourselves in the mirror, the three horsemen of fascism, lawless plutocracy, and oligarchy will run our beloved country into the ground, if not over the fiscal cliff.

As a farmer told me, "You can still make a small fortune in agriculture, but you have to start with a large fortune."

Farmers tend to be optimistic pessimists. The odds are against them - the bankers, bugs, monopolists, weather, and sorry politicians. Yet they keep at it, battling the odds to nurture the seeds that bring us an abundance of foods. Coping with natural disasters is to be expected, but it's the unnatural disasters of rigged economic policies and unrestrained corporate profiteering that slam the door on good, efficient family farmers.

Now in the sixth year of plummeting prices, farmers are producing more, getting less... and going broke. For example, it costs dairy farmers on average $1.92 to produce a gallon of milk, but monopolistic buyers pay them only a-buck-32 per gallon. No surprise then that since 2000, half of America's dairy farmers have been squeezed out of business. Overall, farmers' profits have fallen by almost half in the last five years, so farm debt, bankruptcies, and suicides are rising again towards the calamitous levels of the 1980s farm crisis.

A central cause of today's spreading farm depression is the increasing monopolization of all things farmers must buy (from seeds to machinery) and monopolization of the markets that buy from them. Just four biotech giants, for example, control 63 percent of all commercial seeds sold in the world; four meat processors control 84 percent of the US beef market, and four global traders control 90 percent of the entire world's grain sales.

This monopolistic structure is robbing farmers, ransacking rural vitality, and ripping off consumers. Yet, Congress and Trump are coddling the robbers, ransackers, and rip-off artists. To help counter their insanity, join forces with the grassroots power of FarmAid at www.FarmAid.org/issues.

Dear Administrator Verma,

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, Donald J. Trump, 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 attempts to change Medicare and Medicaid from government to private insurance programs, 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 "Rethuglican 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 05-18-2019. We salute you frau Verma, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence