Trumpinsomia

The idea of "President Trump" (or similar, if he falls down a balcony and Mike Pence takes over it won't make any difference) is beginning to affect my emotions and therefore my sleep. Yeah, the USA is far away across the Atlantic but, it's not just the main superpower, but also it is very plausible that the same will happen across Europe, with Le Pen maybe winning the French presidential election or the equally fascist Hofer quite likely winning the republic's top post in the repetition of the Austrian polls next month. The prospect of Beppe Grillo (another professional buffoon, like Trump) maybe becoming the next Prime Minister of Italy is not the least comforting either, as the unusual 5 Star Movement aligns with the Far Right beyond the Alps and is also penetrated by many neofascists inside.

Sure the Great Coalition parties are not comforting at all either but we all know that outright Fascism is much much worse, notably because it is much much more difficult to revert once in power.

And the brown shirts are beginning to show up very clearly in the upcoming US government. For example Trump has appointed the well known extremist Stephen K. Bannon, a total psychopath, as his chief strategist.

He is not just a racist bigot, he is an extremist misogynist, confirming the worst suspicions about Trump's sexism. Just read his own articles at his own site (link1, link2), which could well have been signed by the self-appointed Caliph of Raqqa. He's also the best known leader of the so-called "alt-right", the modern version of Fascism in North America.

I watched yesterday this fragment of Michael Moore's last film, which is so well told an clairvoyant, that the very supporters of Trump used it, cutting off the last part, for their campaign. But the last part is where the panic sets on, because the foreseeing Moore states unmistakably that Trump will be "the last President of the United States".

Truly scary but it is happening right now.

And, thanks to the authoritarian complacency of his predecessors, Trump will have a lot of legal mechanisms to make his Fascism unstoppable: many emergency laws that dramatically increase presidential power, a heavily militarized police, an ultra-conservative Supreme Court, etcetera. Just as Hitler used in 1933 the emergency provisions that the pre-existing legal system allowed for emergencies, it seems very likely that Trump will do the same, even if he needs to fabricate a pretext, as Hitler did with the Reichstag fire. 

It looks very bad, because there are no legal emergency breaks for a situation like this, only a true revolution could change things but I seriously doubt that the USA is mature for such a critical scenario, really.

The rain dance is broken

Unimaginative "more of the same" after eight years of THE CRISIS? Seems it does not work anymore just pretending that old school methods will work and that somehow miraculously there will be light out of the tunnel just out of the blue. 

A medicine man, or woman, who is unable to call the rain won't be respected, a superstitious doctrine that promises rain but only produces drought again and again will lose support sooner than later. That is what is happening and that's why Hillary More-of-the-Same Clinton could not beat Trump: her doctrine is spent, less and less people can believe in the old magics because they just don't work and credulity is limited. 

Of course nothing guarantees that a new medicine-man with new pretentious rituals will produce the so-desired rain. Almost certainly he won't but there is a good logic on trying something new when the old method is so clearly broken. And that's why opinion polls predicted better chances for victory to Sanders than to Rodham-Clinton, because he at least promised something not so clearly demonstrated to be wrong, something innovative enough to raise the hope of the masses.

That's the logic of these elections and probably many others: more of the same doesn't work and people is not anymore believing in it, they want and really need to try something new, because just repeating a clearly failed routine is clearly not a reasonable option. 

With the beginning of the Trump presidency, after all, we will be entering the 10th year of THE CRISIS, if we count from the Lehman Brothers affair: that's just too long of not getting things straight. No, Trump won't solve anything: THE CRISIS is here to stay sadly enough and his methods are even worse; for example he is a climate warming negationist, what is as good as negating the deep causes and effects of the crisis, which goes well beyond the mere economy into the ecology. Actually there is no possible exit within Capitalism but it seems that more frustration and even desperation is needed before most people realizes this basic truth.

But I guess that in terms of symptoms it is a positive note that people is willing to experiment somewhat and that they are not taking anymore proven inefficacy. All the rest that comes in the package I don't like and I do fear but, well, history is complicated, dialectic, convoluted and contradictory. What is clear is that the unimaginative "center" of "the lesser evil" does not work as it used to. One does not need to be radical or leftist to be outside of the "center", it is enough to be provocative and extremist -- even if that is empty posturing. And it is the time when to be at the center, to be pseudo-moderate gathers more hatred than love, because the system is so broken that it does not rally support anymore. 

And that's why Sanders could have won: because he is not just "more of the same" but much less of the same than Trump, who in most ways is also "more of the same"... just pretending not to be.

Too close to call yet but it seems it's gonna be Trump

Well, not really surprising for me but seems that it was for most. Apparently a dull ultra-Zionist hawkish corporatist and right-leaning candidate presented to the left should have been able to beat a dynamic blunt provocative and somewhat anti-system far-right candidate presented to the right and whoever in the grey zone was tired of more of the same. Seems that the prognostic was not correct at all.

Clinton could not appeal to her supposed voters (too far to the right, too rich, too corporatist, too establishment, too hawkish and too Zionist), Sanders could have won (so said early polls) but the establishment was not willing to accept a self-proclaimed socialist as candidate (and I guess Sanders himself was not as good tactician as Trump, so he could not beat Clinton at her own game in the Democratic Party, while the madman did instead beat each of his opponents one by one in a masterful game of power).

So the devil won, the witch came close second but almost doesn't count. What now?

The truth is that nobody seems to know but here there is a clue, courtesy of The Real News: his vice president Pence wants to be like Dick Cheney:

And I guess that if Trump falls out of a balcony accidentally, he would like to be like Caligula, right?

Dick Cheney was not a bit less hawkish than Clinton, I'd say he was even more aggressive, and particularly creative at rallying the nation around the false flag attack of 9-11. Are we set for another Hollywoodian staged self-attack? One that will bring the USA against China after securing the neutrality of Russia? Just saying, I really don't know but I guess it fits with what Trump has mumbled so far: Russia cool, China bad, Mexico scum.

Over here a lot of left-leaning people (the right, the center and the center-left are all with Hillary) has been speculating about whether a Trump victory could be relatively "good" (maybe he dismantles NATO with his weird ideas about everybody paying their share, even those who are totally uninterested in NATO and are only in by inertia, maybe he makes friends with Putin delaying WWIII, it can't be worse than more-of-the-same-but-even-worse Hillary, right?) But I don't think it will be any good: it's debatable if he'd be worse than Rodham-Clinton but he's not clearly going to be any better at all. 

Maybe good for Syria and the real Ukraine, as he's said he will respect Putin's Russia. And that is also good for Europe in principle, at least for most of us (all those who are not crazy ultra-nationalist and ultra-catholic Poles or similar). But the dangers seem to lay everywhere else, particularly I would be quite unhappy in the position of China (although they will probably outsmart the New Yorker, they have done before). I would also be very unhappy in the position of the Eurocrats, who are just totally in the role of being self-interested subservient cogs of NATO, which he may well dismantle, almost accidentally, when he demands protection money to totally broken economies. And I would be absolutely unhappy in the shoes of Mexico, of course, because the colonial status quo forged by the Coca-Cola boy, Fox, is suddenly being questioned in its entirety. 

Actually the uncertainty is so extreme that Japan's Nikkei has collapsed and Mexico's financial bodies have called a press conference later today. The Mexican peso is sinking relative to the US dollar but the imperial currency is also falling severely relative to such a Frankenstein currency as is the euro. Good for US exports to Europe, I guess, bad for Gringo imports from places other than Mexico.
Currency falls, inflation, are bad for importers and consumers but good for exporters. 

Anyhow: will Trump victory be a brown shirts' march towards Washington, sort of, as many fear in the USA? I can't say but we know already that French fascist Marine Le Pen has been the first European leader to congratulate Donald Trump on his apparent victory, and also that the Canadian immigration service online page has collapsed tonight because of excess visitors. Canada is not far enough and anyhow you can't really run away from the main global superpower, with military bases and occupation contingents all over the World, with the NSA so actively spying the Internet and with laws that allow the Government to assassinate anyone anywhere, including of course US citizens. Look at the difficult situation of several better known US and allies' dissidents: Manning in jail and apparently attempting suicide once and again, Assange for several years refuged in the Ecuador Embassy in London, Snowden fled to Moscow, Meissan (French investigative journalist) had to find refuge in Syria, Assata Shakur has been refuged in Cuba since the 70s, etc. Maybe rather than looking for refuge in Canada, you should consider places like North Korea, really - at least they have nukes and a crazy chubby leader mad enough to threaten the USA itself, he may like you, who knows?

Well, so far my improvised opinions. Which are yours?

USA elections: only option is to vote for Jill Stein

Jill Stein and Ujamu Baraka
(Green Party candidates for President and VP)

The mad man and the mad woman, the witch and the devil. Clearly US citizens tomorrow will have a non-election in which whoever win will be bad and even worse. 

Why to bother voting then? Because it's not just about these elections: it is about building hope for the future and the more votes that Green Party candidate Jill Stein, the only decent candidate, gets is a brick on the rampart of a better democracy tomorrow. 

Do not choose the lesser evil, there's no such thing, choose the reasonably good one. It's not better the devil you know than the devil you don't: they are both horribly bad. 

Stein backed Sanders for the Democratic nomination but old Sanders and his illusion of a Democratic Party relocated to the left (rather than clearly to the right, as it is under Rodham-Clinton) is out of the contest (he didn't even get the post for Vice-President). There is no realistic option but voting for Stein. Abstaining will not help, building up percentage will instead. There is a future after 2016 and you have to look forward to it.

Also voting Hillary will make you accomplice of her heinous war crimes in the Middle East, past and future, among other stuff. Please don't do that.

Erdogan arrests MPs in a new phase of his totalitarian coup

The Islamist President has launched a new offensive against what may remain of "democracy" in the Turkish Republic. Tayyip Erdogan, self-proclaimed admirer of Hitler and one of the main backers of Islamist terror in Syria and Iraq, has taken yet another step forward in his career to become an absolutist tyrant, ordering the arrest of many leaders of the Democratic Party of the Peoples (HDP), including its two co-presidents, which are both MPs. In order to do that he has decreed the end of Parliamentary immunity. 

Among the victims of Erdogan's fascist repression are Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag (photo), Turkish and Kurdish, male and female, co-presidents of the internationalist and socialist party that was in the last half-transparent elections (the last ones were a partial fraud) the third largest in the Turkish state and, by far, the largest one in Northern Kurdistan and some other "less Turkish" areas of the East. Also arrested have been the co-mayors of Diyarbakir, Gultan Kisanak and Firat Anli, who have been replaced by some guy directly appointed by Ankara. Many other HDP MPs have been arrested as well.

Connection to Internet in North Kurdistan and possibly other areas of the Turkish state has been severed. In the rest of the state access to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. is extremely difficult. 

Coverage of what is happening, in Western as well as in Russian media, is scant at best, very distorted at worst. 

Erdogan's slow motion coup recap

Right after the (staged?) military putsch attempt of July, Erdogan began purging the state from everyone who disagreed with him: public officers, judges, teachers, etc. were expelled en masse. This was the real coup, something Erdogan had prepared beforehand. A new phase of the coup is happening this week: first he jailed key progressive journalists of the main independent newspaper Cumhuriyet, now he's frontally charging against the HDP. If someone blinks, as Merkel just did, he says that they are "aiding terrorism", by which he means not the terrorism of his Islamist paramilitary dogs nor the one perpetrated by the Turkish state against Kurds recently as well, but the armed struggle of the Workers' Party of Kurdistan (PKK). 

Incidentally the very first part of Erdogan's coup was to break the years-long truce with the PKK (using, as the Nazis did so often, a false flag attack as pretext) in September 2015. This change of Kurdish policy awaited almost exactly until the arm of Syriza was broken in the Greece-EU standoff of early 2015. Why? Because earlier he was ready to stage a war against Greece if Athens dared to disobey the Troika's mandate. Only once the "western front" was clear, he turned to the "eastern front" with all his might and cruelty. That is because the petty dictator knew that Turkey would have a very hard time fighting in those two fronts simultaneously, plus the still not healed internal Turkish class front (remember the widespread 2013 protests). 

But why would Turkey attack Greece? Because the Western powers asked them maybe? Well, I can't say for sure but most probably yes. It was mainly because of the unspoken but known Turkish threat that Greece could not afford to challenge the Troika, exactly the same reason why Cyprus could never incorporate the British colonial bases because, well, Turkey invaded the north of the island back in the day.  

So when Erdogan now, after the mysterious military coup of which we know almost nothing, appears to have pushed him towards Russia, I just have a very hard time believing anything. Putin is here behaving very naively, in my opinion, unless he has some hidden cards that I am unaware of. It would not be the first time the retorted maneuvers of the Western secret services catch the Kremlin off guard anyhow, look at what happened in Ukraine! 

Russia is tough in the military aspect no doubt but when it comes to intelligence they seem to be always behind NATO and particularly Washington. It is not the first time that Russia plays unwillingly the West's game: a lot of UN Security Council resolutions that gave the USA pretext for war against small countries, from Afghanistan to Syria itself, were passed with the approval of Moscow and Beijing. Putin is not that smart, really: he's been conned too often. Maybe this Turkey's flirting is just another instance of the same NATO convoluted power games, or maybe is just Erdogan on his own tricking Russia into not backing the PKK (a well funded Kurdish guerrilla would be a nightmare for his totalitarian aspirations), only to backstab Moscow later again when he feels stronger.  

In any case Erdogan, Hitler's 21st century apprentice, is clearly consolidating his totalitarian power in the Turkish state, without making any major concessions to anyone, blackmailing the EU into submission by manipulation of refugee flows and quite possibly terrorist attacks signed by his loyal DAESH puppet, making peace with Russia after shooting down their airplane and keeping the very all-powerful USA unwilling to make any sudden move against him. 

One could say it's masterful, I say it's devilish. 

Must watch: Di Caprio's "Before the Flood"

The documentary, sadly confirming that we are already immersed in the ecological catastrophe of Global Warming, is very good and is freely available at NatGeo.

Erdogan continues with his nazification of Turkey

The Turkish admirer of Adolf Hitler continues with his rampage towards a fully totalitarian "neo-Ottoman" state in which he is to be the sole Sultan and dogmatic extremist versions of Islam would become the only law. Maybe like Iznogoud he wants to be Caliph, not instead of the Caliph (because the only self-appointed Caliphate, Erdogan's terrorist puppet, is collapsing as I write) but to occupy a long vacant throne. 

I was to put a link to Iznogoud's famously comical sentence, "I want to be Caliph instead of the Caliph", but I just realized that the English version was censored and the word Caliph replaced with that of Sultan, how lame! I guess that you can listen to this cool and provocative song in Spanish by Def Con Dos, which uses the sentence once and again. Anglosaxon cultural repression: lame, lame, lame!

Anyhow, let's focus: Erdogan has recently persecuted "pro-Kurdish" media, fired not less than 10.000 public officers (again) and even imprisoned journalists of the very popular Cumhurriyet newspaper, almost the only one that opposes him today and the oldest of the republic.

How many steps left until he becomes the Turkish Hitler in full? How much time?

It is just another reason to leave NATO, but a very good one: Erdogan sucks and we don't want to have anything to do with him, rather the opposite.