Day: April 8, 2019

The 51st State?

Closing Thought–08Apr19

This is a story that has been a long time in coming……the bill to make Puerto Rico our 51st state…..

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Thursday that would admit Puerto Rico into the union as the 51st state without a referendum on the island’s territorial status.

The bill was unveiled by Florida Rep. Darren Soto, a Democrat who represents parts of Orlando and its large Puerto Rican community, during a press conference in Washington attended by the island’s Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, a vocal supporter of Puerto Rican statehood. If enacted, the legislation would automatically trigger the island’s admission into the union, bypassing any referendum. 

“I’m exited about the possibility of finally ending this historic injustice. It’s time for all Puerto Ricans to be united behind a noble and Democratic effort,” Soto said alongside Rosselló, local Puerto Rican leaders and Reps. Ruben Gallego, Jamie Raskin, Don Young and Jenniffer González-Colón, the island’s non-voting delegate. “It’s time to let the old battle lines fade away. It’s time to end 120 years of colonialism.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/statehood-for-puerto-rico-lawmakers-to-introduce-bill-granting-puerto-rico-statehood-bypassing-any-referendum/

Will this come to reality?  If it does will Trump veto the bill?

I mean he does not seem to like or appreciate that Puerto Rico is part of the US territories…plus they speak Spanish and we know what he thinks of people that speak Spanish now don’t we?

His admin is trying to screw Puerto Rico out of disaster funds…..and as usual the president  the pillar of America is punching down in his insulting Twitter style…what a pathetic human.

Personally, I think it is a great idea and should have happened 50+ years ago when Hawaii and Alaska were added to the total.

Any thoughts?

“The Country’s Full”!

Once again Trump has outdone himself on the issue of immigration…..he made another one of his lame ass statements…..”Turn around the country is full”…….(a paraphrase)…..

Donald Trump once again insisted the US immigration system was overburdened and illegal border crossings must be stopped on a visit to the US-Mexico border in California.

Trump traveled to Calexico, California, on Friday to view a section of the border barrier and participate in a roundtable on immigration.

“There is indeed an emergency on our southern border,” Trump said at the briefing, adding that there had been a sharp uptick in illegal crossings. “It’s a colossal surge, and it’s overwhelming our immigration system. We can’t take you any more. Our country is full.”

Trump, as he so often does, mixed fact with fiction when warning of the threat.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/05/trump-border-us-immigration-calexico

But a trip in the “Way Back Machine” and we can see that it is not the first time a president has tried to limit or exclude some from enterimng into the US……would you like to know when?

Sure you would!

The year is 1942 and a boat load of Jews fleeing Germany arrived in NYC……

In the summer of 1942, the SS Drottningholmset sail carrying hundreds of desperate Jewish refugees, en route to New York City from Sweden. Among them was Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, a 28-year-old from Germany, who was also seeking entry to the United States. When he arrived, he told the same story as his fellow passengers: As a victim of persecution, he wanted asylum from Nazi violence.

But during a meticulous interview process that involved five separate government agencies, Bahr’s story began to unravel. Days later, the FBI accused Bahr of being a Nazi spy. They said the Gestapo had given him $7,000 to steal American industrial secrets—and that he’d posed as a refugee in order to sneak into the country unnoticed. His case was rushed to trial, and the prosecution called for the death penalty.

What Bahr didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t mind, was that his story would be used as an excuse to deny visas to thousands of Jews fleeing the horrors of the Nazi regime.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/#lVgE6M2T0SFAHC18.99

See Trump is not the first president to claim national security while keeping immigrants out of the country.

My question for Trump is……if the country is full does that apply to whites looking for a better life?

 

Stir The Pot For War

The US foreign policy pundits have done all they can to stir the pot in the past……for Iraq, for Syria and those are just the most recent.

These people have lied to the American people in an attempt to get them to support their adventurism and intervention and their silly regime change fantasies.

Well nothing is new…the Trump Pentagon is set about lyimng to make an armed strike against Iran tolerable.

How are they doing this?

When the Pentagon starts throwing around estimates of who got killed and how in its assorted wars in the Middle East, they are often wildly inaccurate. Nowhere was this more apparent than a new briefing this week on estimates in the 2003-2011 Iraq War.

Designed for Special Envoy Brian Hook to give hawkish speeches on Iran, the briefing estimated that Iran was “responsible” for the deaths of 608 US troops during the Iraq War. This was an upward revision from a 2015 estimate of 500, and seemingly was only done to allow Hook to bring it up now.

A more accurate estimate would, of course, be zero deaths. Despite years of anti-Iran rhetoric, the US has never conclusively pinned a single death on the Iranian government or its forces. Rather, these deaths are all loosely attributable to Iraqi Shi’ite factions.

That anyone Shi’ite is necessarily under Iranian command is a popular conceit for US officials, and in Iraq, where 60 percent of the population is Shi’ite, there are no shortage of Shi’ites to blame, particularly militias that didn’t support the US occupation of Iraq.

Some of these groups had ideological ties to Iran, though other substantial factions, like the Mehdi Army, were nationalist groups that opposed both US and Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs. It is convenient for the US to blame Iran, however, so that’s what they’re doing.

Trying to make all Shi’ites equal Iran has continued beyond the Iraq War. In Syria, the US has routinely threatened Shi’ite militias for being “Iranian fighters,” and the entire justification for US meddling in the Yemen War is that the Shi’ite Houthi movement, whose form of Shi’a Islam is distinct from the one in Iran, must be in league with Iran.

This is the usual lie and if ignored then we will be in conflict with yet another country because of a damn lie perpetrated only as a way to enhance the profits of the M-IC.

This accusation is a LIE!

But that is what they do……they do as they are told by the defense industry…after all that is why the pay Congress to do their bidding.

Now the ante is upped……

The Trump administration is preparing to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “foreign terrorist organization,” an unprecedented move against a national armed force that could have widespread implications for US personnel and policy in the Middle East and elsewhere, the AP reports. Officials informed of the step said an announcement was expected Monday, after a monthslong escalation in the administration’s rhetoric against Iran, its support for militia groups in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, as well as anti-Israel groups in the region and beyond. It would be the first such designation by any American administration of an entire foreign government entity, although portions of the Guard, notably its elite Quds Force, have been targeted previously by the US.

Two US officials and a congressional aide confirmed the planned move. Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, seemed to anticipate the designation, saying in a tweet Sunday aimed at President Donald Trump that Trump “should know better than to be conned into another US disaster.” The designation, planning for which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes with sanctions, including freezes on assets the Guard may have in US jurisdictions, and a ban on Americans doing business with it or providing material support for its activities. The designation could significantly complicate US military and diplomatic work, notably in Iraq, where many Shiite militias and Iraqi political parties have close ties to the Guard.

Just one brick in the wall……making a case for armed action…..and making the case for the US to involve itself in yet another war…..

When is enough enough with the American public?

The “Establishment” Awaits

WE all have heard about the “establishment” right?

These days some even call it “The Man”……but all in all it is the same…..

So what is this shadowy group we call the “establishment”?

To me, in politics, it is whichever group is in control of the government……but others have tried to define it as well…..this from 2016…..

No more sulfurous epithet has been sounded in our current presidential campaign than the charge that a candidate, media outlet, or party represents the “Establishment.” You knew what Bernie Sanders was feeling when he called Hillary Clinton the “candidate of the Democratic establishment”; you can taste his contempt in his brush-off of the Des Moines Register and the Concord Monitor’s endorsements of Clinton this weekend, calling it the work of the “media establishment.” So possessed with antiestablishmentarianist instincts is Sanders that for a short while he was even including Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign as part of an Establishment that is aligned against him.

Proving the plasticity and universality of the term, Hillary Clinton went on CNN last week to refute Sanders. “Are you the establishment?” Wolf Blitzer asked her. Unleashing her best verbal boomerang, Clinton responded that the true Establishment candidate is Sanders. “He’s been in Congress, he’s been elected to office a lot longer than I have,” Clinton said. “I was in the Senate for eight wonderful years representing New York. He’s been in the Congress for 25, and so I’ll let your viewers make their own judgment.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/what-is-the-establishment-now-213565

And this from npr.org….https://www.npr.org/2016/02/11/466049701/how-establishment-became-the-buzzword-of-the-2016-election

I thought about this after I read an article about the “establishment” and war…….

The question before us is a relatively simple one: What would be the criteria for removing our remaining troops from the Iraqi, Syrian, and more general Middle Eastern conflicts? Or, for that matter, from Afghanistan, where we have been trapped for more than 17 long years of still open-ended occupation?

If the answer to that question is that only when each of these countries is a healthy pro-American democracy, and Islamist terrorism has ceased to be an “enduring” threat to the West, then the answer, as the old Bob Mankoff joke has it, is “How about never — is never good for you?”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/andrew-sullivan-establishment-will-never-say-no-to-a-war.html

It matters not which party is in control……they all are beholden to the defense industry and the arms dealers….so a case will be made by the government to enter into an armed conflict….not out of necessity but rather out of corporate greed.