How Dare Trump Speak of Law & Order?
How dare Trump speak of Law and Order? Trump has nothing to tell the people about law and order, as he clearly know nothing and cares nothing about it. In fact, the most heinous U.S. crimes of the century have been committed by those in the highest positions of power. Two of them are the unconstitutional, Supreme Court, Citizens United ruling and similar rulings which handed our formerly much more free, fair, and democratic elections to the highest bidders: the billionaire oligarchs; and the unconstitutional permissions granted by the U.S. Congress and executive branch to the same billionaire oligarchs to buy up and create an oligopoly out of our mass media — the lion’s share of our formerly much more free press. Considering that any violation of the Constitution is a felony, and that these two are two of the most serious crimes of high treason of the past century, why are we even tolerating Trump uttering the words “Law and Order” if he is not doing anything to restore such fundamental, Constitutional rights to us? And why are we not out in the streets protesting to have them restored to us? Any president worth their weight in salt would do something about these monumental crimes of high treason. Where are our patriotic, populist presidents of yesteryear who rescued us from such terrible circumstances as those caused by the Great Depression, the Robber Barons, and slavery?
Priority One for any president is stated in the oath of office for presidents contained in the U.S. Constitution:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
If Trump really cared about Law and Order, he would have been doing what he could “to the best of his Ability” to help reverse the effects of the unconstitutional Citizens United and similar rulings. Further, he would have done all he had in his power to do to break up the big-6 oligopoly that owns and controls the mass media, thus restricting our freedom of the press.
On the contrary, Trump has done nothing to get an amendment passed restoring free, fair, and democratic elections; nor to help restore our freedom of the press. Quite the opposite. In the area of our right to freedom of the press, soon after he took office, Trump appointed a new FCC chairperson, Ajit Pai, whom he knew would and wanted him to vote in favor of allowing greater censorship by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the form of creating “fast lanes” and “slow lanes” for people’s internet connections (based on the ISPs’ own choices and how much people and companies paid), and other unconstitutional forms of internet censorship. The internet is a part of our press: it is a means by which Americans communicate and share news and information. The internet is also a means citizens use to assemble online, as opposed to in-person — so it involves our First Amendment right to freedom of assembly.
In the area of taxation, we have had more taxation without representation with the Trump administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy, which were sold using a combination of false promises that they would 1) be tax cuts for all, and 2) create a “trickle-down” effect, because the rich would invest their windfall savings back into the economy to create jobs. The rich used them instead to buy back stock in the companies they owned and for other self-servicing purposes, and so, solely for the purpose of increasing their own wealth — which was not necessary nor in the public interest. The more wealth the ultra-wealthy acquire, the more acquisitive and dictatorial they get. This “trickle-down” voodoo has never materialized in all the decades this worn-out tune has been played, starting with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.
Time magazine recently published an article, “The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% — And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure,” which elaborates on the robbing of the American people by the billionaire oligarchs and the top 1% richest. The issue of security involves the hardships caused so many by the increasing inequality in the U.S., which, in turn, has been causing people to become more and more frustrated, desperate, and angry about their government, which has nurtured it. The government has not listened to people’s voices on this or hardly any issues. As John F. Kennedy said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” So much for the odds of our maintaining Law and Order, or for the concern of those in the highest positions of power in regard to it.
It is clear that one of the things Trump really does care about is stopping the American people from exercising their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to bring up grievances to the government by crushing the protests over the recent, unjust, blatantly intentional, and unnecessary police killings of black people. Instead of caring about the major Law and Order issues of the day, and condemning the killings, he has been working with Attorney General Barr to commit more violations of the people’s First Amendment rights. He has been also been turning a blind eye to acts of violence committed by his followers, such as the driving of vehicles into crowds of protestors, and by supporting law enforcement, including the FBI, in the committing of further violations of Americans’ First Amendment rights. One shocking instance has been the kidnapping of protestors by government agents into unmarked vans.
Trump would hide his crimes behind the black curtain of deceit he is calling “Law and Order,” which he, as previous demagogues and crooked politicians have done, raise in order to conjure up visions of mob rule by protestors — when the real mob is made up of the organized crime family that occupies the highest positions of governmental power. Trump has been stoking the flames of racism and discrimination from a time long before his run for president, and more and more since. To do this is the equivalent of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater — but on a national level. It is a recipe for inciting hatred, disrespect of others’ civil rights, and violence. He clearly does not crave Law and Order. Quite the opposite. He is doing all he can to incite hatred, civil unrest, and violence, and he is doing this actively and blatantly.
In regard to our right to free, fair, and democratic elections, the rigging of the Democratic presidential primaries by the DNC in 2016, which was exposed by Julian Assange and Wikileaks (along with U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq), the DNC actually argued in court that they had the right to cheat in the 2016 Democratic primaries and to collude with top executives of major media outlets to rig the primaries against Bernie Sanders to get Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination. They argued that this even though their actions violated the bylaws of their own corporate charter. Why? The stated, because they were a private corporation — so they could do whatever they wanted. Really. This brings up the question: if that’s how they see their mission, why are we the people allowing our elections to be hijacked by a corrupt, private corporation — I mean two corrupt, private corporations? There is one other problem with the DNC’s argument: their actions violated the RICO organized crime act — but no matter … to the court of Law. We are living in a time of the “gangsterization of the world.” Law and Order garners no respect among gangsters, and that includes our government and our press.
To be fair to Trump, I have to point out that neither did Obama care about the major Law and Order issues of the day when he did nothing to stop the vicious and violent assaults committed by police and security officers against the peaceful Standing Rock protestors who were protesting on their own sovereign lands, and who were fighting to stop an ecologically disastrous, tar sands, oil pipeline that was being built through their own sovereign lands. It is clear that Obama did not care about their rights to freedom to assemble and to protest, or their right to sovereignty on their sovereign lands — et tu, Barack?
To his credit, Obama did voice his opposition to the Citizens United decision after it was handed down by the Supreme Court in 2010, two years after Bush had stepped down and he had entered the White House. It is odd that the Supreme Court waited those two years to plunge the U.S. into the nightmare of our elections that the case has brought, as it was Bush who appointed the last two of the Justices who sided with the 5–4 majority decision. All five of these corrupt Justices took the two oaths required of them before being seated on the Supreme Court bench:
“I, ________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
“I, _________, do solemnly swear or affirm that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as _________, under the Constitution and understanding, agreeably to the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.”
Then in a short time, they sold us out — and our government — to the highest bidders. Clearly, their solemn oaths of office meant nothing to them, and Law and Order meant nothing to them.
Neither did Obama care about the paramount Law and Order issues of his time as president in the area of banking fraud. Shortly after he became president, he appointed Wall Street bankers to his cabinet and supported them in bailing out the big banks instead of the American people: the victims of their massive banking fraud that resulted in the Great Recession. If Obama had cared about the major issues of Law and Order, he would have had the Justice Department investigating and prosecuting the big bankers and investment bankers for the massive mortgage fraud and derivatives fraud they had committed in the previous years during the Bush administration. Obama ran on the platform of “Hope,” which turned out to be a cruel Joke. It was clear to economists and investment experts that the mortgage crisis had been caused by the bankers’ fraudulent and predatory mortgage lending practices; and that the derivatives crisis had been caused by their outrageous misrepresentation of the risks associated with those same mortgage loans — which the bankers and investment bankers had bundled into derivatives. Not only did they cause millions of avoidable foreclosures on Americans — and millions of homeless American — but a great number of investors in the U.S. and around the world were defrauded of trillions of dollars. They literally shook the entire world economy to the core.
Sadly, the most telling of all the evidence of Obama’s corruption is the fact that, shortly after he left the presidency, he started giving speeches of around one and a half hours to audiences associated with the same big banks he had bailed out and let off scot-free, and was richly rewarded with $450,000 and up per speech — a trick the Clintons had also used to collect on corrupt favors granted to the big bankers.
George W. Bush was another president who ascended to the Oval Office, like Trump, with only a minority of the popular vote — and even a minority of the Electoral College votes. This well documented election fraud was made possible because the Supreme Court did not condemn the election fraud committed in Florida, of which state, Jeb Bush, George W.’s brother, was Governor. While president, did George W. care about the major issues of Law and Order? If we are to judge him based upon his allowing the reckless and fraudulent mortgage loan practices of the bankers — which economists were screaming in his ears would end in disaster — then the answer would have to be no. If we are to judge him by the notorious lies he and Prime Minister Blair of Great Britain told, knowing full well that they were lies, about the certainty of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction in order to get us to go to war with Iraq, then the answer again would have to be no. Quite the contrary. These historic lies were covered up, and we were not told the truth by our billionaire-oligarch-owned oligopoly of a mass media — the same billionaire oligarchs who benefitted from their ownership of the military-industrial complex. Few people were paying attention at that time to the independent economists and political experts or to alternative news sources, so few people were getting any glimmers of the truth about the “WMD” in Iraq.
There was the recent and much too little publicized release of the “Afghanistan Papers,” which proved, as the Pentagon Papers did in regard to the Vietnam War, that the government was covering up the truth about the War in Afghanistan: that, in fact, they had not believed for many years that it could be won. The revelations that have come out of these documents reveal government cover-ups and lies told to the people that go back to previous administrations. That’s a fairly major Law & Order issue, taking a country to war on false pretenses.
The restriction of freedom of the press always leads to major Law and Order issues — and hardly ever, if ever, in the people’s favor. That’s why it was guaranteed to the people in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The first ten Amendments to the Constitution, as is well-known, are called the Bill of Rights, and for a reason. One of our rights is the Fourth Amendment right to privacy. This right was violated by the 2001 Patriot Act. Not only did this act violate our right to privacy, but the scope of what was “authorized” in the Act itself was violated.
These “over and above” violations of a congressional act which was unconstitutional to begin with were exposed by Edward Snowden, an IT specialist turned whistleblower employed by the National Security Administration. Snowden, as is well-known, had to flee the country for fear of being prosecuted for telling the people the truth and was granted asylum in Russia. Currently, Julian Assange is being held in a British prison, and is undergoing a trial in which the U.S. is seeking to have him extradited to the U.S. for his role in telling us the truth about Afghanistan and the DNC rigging of the 2016 Democratic Presidential Primary.
But we are all victims of oppression due to the major, high crimes and misdemeanors committed by our presidents and other un-freely, unfairly, and undemocratically elected government officials. In a way, we are all imprisoned like Julian Assange — but in an increasingly unjust, unequal, and oppressive society. But there is little talk about Assange in our mass media. The really major Law and Order issues just keep get dunked and sunk in murkier and murkier waters by our “hostage-taken” press till we are at a point in our “dumbing down” and “propagandization” that many, if not most, of us are condemning the very messengers of the truth whom we would formerly have celebrated, and should now be celebrating. Add to the list of courageous whistleblowers now in prison or who have formerly been imprisoned for their acts of courage: Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner. When our prisons are used to punish our whistleblowers and truth tellers, so that corruption and deceit in our government can go unchecked, what kind of Law and Order is it that we have? Is that the kind that makes us more, or less, safe?
Bill Clinton cared very little about the major issues of Law & Order. Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act, which allowed the massive consolidation of the mass media into an oligopoly of six mega-corporations, owned and controlled by billionaire oligarchs. In fact, he championed and signed so many bills and trade bills that worked against the people and caused so much poverty, misery, oppression, injustice, and homelessness, that it is a miracle that there is any Law and Order left in this country. As mentioned above, the Telecommunications Bill was a major violation of our constitutional right to freedom of the press, in view of the fact that 90% of Americans get all their news, information, and entertainment (including films) from the current oligopoly of six mega-corporations, which are collectively known as the “mainstream media” or “mass media.”
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton lobbied hard for the 1994 Landmark Crime Bill, and Bill Clinton proudly signed it into law. Joe Biden has proudly claimed that he was the main author of the bill. This bill, which is a continuation of the secret, unconstitutional policies contained in the “War on Drugs” that was waged by the Nixon administration, resulted in the unjust targeting of blacks and other minorities for differential treatment of similar crimes (powder cocaine vs. crack cocaine), harassment (racial profiling), arrest and incarceration for such long sentences that they bore no resemblance to justice. The phrase “cruel and unusual punishment” applies here. The bill also included provisions for the massive expansion of the capacity of the American prisons — which led to the clearly planned mass incarceration for which we are the bane of the world today. The 1994 Crime Bill did not further the cause of Law and Order, but instead furthered the perpetration of egregious high crimes and misdemeanors in the form of blatant and egregious racial discrimination on a massive scale — the opposite of Law and Order.
Back in the Reagan administration, there were bills that got the ball rolling on allowing for the consolidation of our mass media, and there was also one in particular that allowed for the end of the requirement of fairness in reporting: the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. The repeal of this doctrine, which was introduced in 1949, has been blamed for the rise of disinformation on the part of such extremely partisan news and information outlets as Fox News, mandated that news outlets had to present opposing sides of political issues and had to give people who were being attacked in the news the opportunity to present their side — and in fact, put the burden on the news outlets to notify the subject of any such attack. It is the rise of extremely partisan and fact-warping media outlets, such as Fox News, that has done the most to create divisiveness and civil unrest in the U.S., and that can be traced straight back to the repeal of the Fairness Act. Without a fair and balanced presentation of the news, how can we maintain Law and Order?
The Fairness Doctrine was a wise policy, which provided for the protection the people needed against any fanatical demagogues or dishonest politicians working to misinform and mislead the public. Partisan extremists and special interests have had a field day spoon-feeding anyone who will listen to their hateful, divisive, and violent messages since the repeal of the Fairness Act, and all unchecked as the people who would stand up to them are left helpless to stop them — and this has led to our current, dangerous period in which we are very close to descending into an all-out civil war. The fallacious justification that was presented in favor of the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine was that Americans now had access to many different news programs, as the radio and television channels had increased. However, most people will not tune into a variety of news programs. People are creatures of habit, and prefer to keep things simple. They will tune into the kind of news shows they agree with and feel comfortable with. Because of this, they won’t usually be exposed to a variety of viewpoints — they won’t usually hear both sides, or the many different sides, of issues. There is a definite need to restore the Fairness Doctrine, as the track record has proven.
The American people enjoyed a brief period of bliss — of real Law and Order — of real freedom, openness, and justice in our government with Jimmy Carter, who uncannily, was elected in 1976, the year of the U.S. Bicentennial. Nonetheless, early on in his administration, the press, which was even then dominated by the ultra-rich, was constantly eviscerating him and everything he tried to do. Also, it is clear that Wall Street, and the intelligence services, did not have his back, or any of our backs during that period. Carter was what America yearned for won after the scandalously corrupt Nixon administration. Carter was an honest, kind, and even truly principled and spiritual president. Under the Carter administration, Congress passed a few reforms that were meant to prevent another Nixon from running the executive branch amok with corruption, but most of them were reversed in a short time.
Unfortunately, the American people were lulled back into complacency with Carter in the White House. And how could we not? We were under the spell of a restricted press and its misinformation, which was all working in sync with the pressures coming from certain of the ultra-rich in their quest to gain power and control over our government — and over us. This trick worked then, and may work again, if we are ever able to get Congress and the courts, and the rest of our government “of, by and for the people,” to do something about the current state of corruption. What is the answer to this? To quote Thomas Jefferson: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
Nixon ran for president on a “Law & Order” platform, and then proceeded to commit some of the worst exposed high crimes and misdemeanors in modern history. The Watergate scandal, which was revealed by two New York Times investigative reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, working with a mysterious whistleblower — William Felt, a special agent for the FBI, who used the code-name, “Deep Throat” — exposed Nixon’s unconstitutional election tampering. But Nixon’s election tampering was child’s play in comparison with the voter suppression and misinformation campaigns going on today, and the rigging of the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Party’s presidential primaries against Bernie Sanders — yes, they did it again in 2020, and their tactics were blatant and sickeningly unfair to those who had been monitoring the 2016 primaries.
Daniel Ellsberg, another famous whistleblower, released the Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, which showed that the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about whether they believed that the U.S. could win the war in Vietnam: they did not. Nonetheless, year after year, they lied to the American people, telling them such unrealistically hopeful messages as “there is light at the end of the tunnel” and we are “winning the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people. Yet Nixon, as Johnson had done before him, presented himself as a great upholder of Law and Order, and presented to Vietnam protestors as the enemy of Law and Order — when all along, they had it right.
The “War on Drugs,” as John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s closest advisors, revealed long after Nixon was out of office, was never really meant to fight drug addiction or drug sales, but was designed to target hippies and minorities (especially blacks) for harassment, arrest, and incarceration — people the corrupt Nixon viewed as his political opponents because they were most likely to be Vietnam protestors and to vote against him and other Republicans. So much for Law and Order in the area of drug-related “crimes.” In fact, using people’s drug addiction problems as a means to arrest and incarcerate them makes as much sense as using a person’s debt to arrest and incarcerate them in debtors’ prisons made in the past. The whole topic of drug addiction is now viewed by most Americans as best dealt with by treating it as a disease and not a crime.
The list of lawlessness and law breaking, on a constitutional level, on the part of those who occupy the highest positions in government goes on and on. One thing that is certain is that it has fueled our current crisis of Law and Order: the massive civil unrest and very present danger of civil war. The point is, how dare Trump, or any of his accomplices, speak of Law and Order? In fact, how dare any of the corrupt government officials who have been involved in committing or have connived in preserving, by sins of commission or sins of omission, any of the most egregious, treasonous and traitorous high crimes and misdemeanors of the past few decades ever speak of Law and Order? How dare any of the Supreme Court Justices who sided with any of the decisions which violated the Constitutional right of the American people to free, fair, and democratic elections ever call themselves “Justices”? They care nothing about justice — and in fact, they hate it. All these traitors and sell-outs care about is satisfying their own greed and power-hunger — and the people and the Constitution, and Law and Order be damned!
Sources:
Corbett, Erin. Sept. 17, 2020. “Portland Protestors Are Being Abducted In Unmarked Vans — Here’s What’s Really Going On.” MSN. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/portland-protestors-are-being-abducted-in-unmarked-vans-here-s-what-s-really-going-on/ar-BB16S20b
Hanauer, Nick; and Rolf, David M. September 14, 2020.“The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% — And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure.” Time. https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/