Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Donald Trump: The Raw and Naked Face of a System That Showers Speculators with Obscene Riches

Paul Jay says the enablers of Trumpism are the leaders of both major parties and the corporate media

Donald Trump is not an aberration. He's the raw and naked face of an economic system that showers speculators with obscene riches and political power.

"I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few." That's a quote attributed to Adolf Hitler. Donald Trump is not the only actor on the political stage who ascribes to such methods. The enablers of this surging far right "populism" are the leaders of both major political parties and the corporate media. Whether it's the charming smile of leading Democrats or the religious fervor and patriotic zeal of establishment Republicans, they both ensure super-profits for the super-rich.

According to an IPS report, the Forbes list of the top 400 American billionaires hold more wealth than the bottom 61% of the nation combined. In the years of the Obama administration, the top 1% of the population captured 95% of the post-recession increase in income. This is the legacy Hillary Clinton promised to continue. For most people living conditions are more insecure and for many desperate. No wonder some turn to a snake oil salesman. The growth of such inequality, managed by the Democratic and Republican Party leadership, has facilitated conditions for the election of this dangerous caricature.

Corporate media focuses on the horse race. A contest they need to feed their treasuries with the more than 6 billion dollars they reap in political advertising. They talk about Trump's temperament and showmanship as he surrounds himself with the dregs of the far political and religious right.

His VP and cabinet choices are war mongers and climate change deniers of the worst sort. He is poised to undo what's left of the New Deal, and in spite of his promises to American workers, he will intensify their exploitation.

The liberal media mostly ignores the complicity of their own political heroes. Instead they feast on a morbid fascination with Trump's outrageous racism and xenophobia. They make a furor about the alleged role of Russia in the release of emails, yet the more important issue here are the revelations about Clinton and her campaign.

The corporate media hide the underlying truth. The rise of such a dangerous farce to the White House is a sign of the deep decay of the system itself.

Capitalism has lost its dynamism. Too few people own far too much. More profits are generated from parasitical speculation than productive investment. The elites who revel on the deck of the Titanic have next to no interest in the well-being of the majority of people.

Trump's major billionaire backer Robert Mercer made his fortune in high frequency stock trading, gaming the stock market using advanced algorithms and data analysis to create unprecedented profits.

Mercer's daughter Rebecca helps run the Trump transition team, and key Trump advisors Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon both worked for Mercer.

Another major backer is Sheldon Adelson, who made his billions owning Las Vegas casinos. Adelson, a close ally of Israeli PM Netanyahu, reportedly gave Trump twenty-five million dollars.

From climate disaster to the destructive orgy of unrestrained finance, the billionaire class and their political minions are not even capable of dealing with threats to the very system that made them so wealthy. It's the whole of humanity that will pay the price.

The ruling elites are dysfunctional. Their answer in times like these has always been war. They are not fit to rule.

A critical piece of this rotting politics is the corporate news media that makes the rule of billionaires seem so reasonable, civilized, and inevitable.

TV news, the gatekeeper of mass consciousness, is necessary to the elite's ability to maintain control. If we are to transform this country, we have to break the corporate monopoly on daily video news.

We need to speak to the real concerns of working people and focus on what real effective solutions look like.

We must create a Global Climate Change Bureau.

We need a global platform to discuss and debate what to do next.

In 2016, the movements for the Sanders campaign, to defend black lives and fight to save the planet, have challenged the politics of the powerful at an unprecedented scale.

If a broad front is built that can contest the elites' control of the political process, it could usher in a new phase of struggle of the American people. As this fight develops, TRNN will be there.

The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law by Jameel Jaffer

The Drone Memos collects for the first time the legal and policy documents underlying the U.S. government's deeply controversial practice of "targeted killing"--the extrajudicial killing of suspected terrorists and militants, typically using remotely piloted aircraft or "drones." The documents -- including the Presidential Policy Guidance that provides the framework for drone strikes today, Justice Department white papers addressing the assassination of an American citizen, and a highly classified legal memo that was published only after a landmark legal battle involving the ACLU, the New York Times, and the CIA -- together constitute a remarkable effort to legitimize a practice that most human rights experts consider to be unlawful and that the United States has historically condemned.

In a lucid and provocative introduction, Jameel Jaffer, who led the ACLU legal team that secured the release of many of the documents, evaluates the "drone memos" in light of domestic and international law. He connects the documents' legal abstractions to the real-world violence they allow, and makes the case that we are trading core principles of democracy and human rights for the illusion of security.

The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program by Jeremy Scahill

Major revelations about the US government's drone program--bestselling author Jeremy Scahill and his colleagues at the investigative website The Intercept expose stunning new details about America's secret assassination policy.

When the US government discusses drone strikes publicly, it offers assurances that such operations are a more precise alternative to troops on the ground and are authorized only when an "imminent" threat is present and there is "near certainty" that the intended target will be killed. The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has been trust, but don't verify.

The online magazine The Intercept exploded this secrecy when it obtained a cache of secret slides that provide a window into the inner workings of the US military's kill/capture operations in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Whether through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be employed, these documents show assassination to be central to US counterterrorism policy.

The classified documents reveal that Washington's fourteen-year targeted killing campaign suffers from an overreliance on flawed signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects. This campaign, carried out by two presidents through four presidential terms, has been deliberately obscured from the public and insulated from democratic debate. The Assassination Complex allows us to understand at last the circumstances under which the US government grants itself the right to sentence individuals to death without the established checks and balances of arrest, trial, and appeal.

The book will include original contributions from Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden..