by
Joseph D. O’Shaughnessy
In the Winter of 2016, a collusion between certain wealthy Fascist Americans and operatives of the Russian dictator Putin resulted in the election of a man who is on a path to become the worst President in our country’s history.
We elected Trump. Trump the documented 90% liar. Trump the serial adulterer. Trump the quite possible traitor. And Trump the Fascist. What do we mean by “Fascist?” One strong method of Fascist propaganda is to attack some minority, relatively powerless, group about which the overall community knows little. They usually are people who have a good reason to stay out of the limelight, and Fascists know this and use it.
For example, in Nazi Germany the Jews lived separate lives for a couple of good reasons. The Jewish religion was different and strange to many Germans. Throughout the centuries the Jews, having experienced mass murder, pogroms and exile, tried to stay in the background. They were looked on with suspicion.
Today, in the United States, illegal aliens, while an integral part of the Hispanic-American communities, are at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to jobs. They are, in fact, here illegally. At the slightest infraction, they can be deported. Needless to say, this makes them vulnerable. Like the Jews, they are at a considerable disadvantage, even in a country in which we still have the freedom to protest and speak out.
If you are a Fascist, and if you want to use some obscure group as a scapegoat to distract from your illegal activities or your corrupt political policies, you look at this group and you see a target. You create a huge propaganda campaign, that the great unwashed and the semi-literate never challenge. They are too busy watching reality TV or sports or the latest movie based on a comic book. In the meantime, the exaggerations, the “big lie” continues. People who merely want a job and a place to rest are demonized as criminals.
I submit this video as evidence that this is exactly what Donald Trump is doing. Watch the video and see if you don’t agree.
xxxThe Republican Party since 1980, and as far back as the Nixon era had been using illegal methods to attack the Democratic Party and used every foul, filthy technique of Fascists to attack the electoral process. Now they have found their master, the ambitious, ruthless, demagogue Trump. He is doing everything he can to drain the last remnants of value from our government.
For over 150 years, independent news sources in this country have reported for the most part accurately on the conditions within the society. Today, this President calls these respected sources “fake news.” A president, by the way, that two independent fact-checking sources, funded by individual citizens, say has lied approximately 84% of the time. That means that almost 9 out of ten times you hear Trump speak, he is lying! When a Fascist lies, he then immediately challenges anyone who opposes him by calling them liars. It is standard technique.
Other fact checking groups simply play his words on one occasion, stating that he will do one thing and then play his words on another occasion when he says he will do the opposite. That’s not fake news. That is merely believing your own eyes and ears rather than some propaganda organization, like Fox News. He lied his way and cheated his way into the Presidency as we now know he has done his whole life, always cheating around the edges.
And what is the source of his wealth? Manhattan real estate. Trump inherited tens of millions in New York City real estate in the five boroughs going as far back as the late 1960s, His father was a slumlord. He, Trump junior, was sanctioned by the city for racism in his housing policies. Estimates give him around $2 billion in net worth, almost all of which is in New York City real estate, which has been the source of huge fortunes for generations. Since the second half of the 20th Century, however, New York real estate has made people rich, even if they did absolutely nothing or less than nothing. Which pretty much describes Trump personally.
According to Prudential Douglas Elliman, the preeminent authority on New York City real estate for 100 years—and just starting with values in 1980 (the increases were even larger in previous decades) per square foot of Manhattan real estate was as follows: in 1980 $250 per square foot, in 1990, $590 per square foot, in 200, $1,200 per square foot. So let’s just stop there and talk about Trump in the 21st Century, by which time his net worth…if he just sat in his office and did nothing…not even collected rents—would have been $960 million, just $40 million shy of being a billionaire—just from the original value of those old slum tenement buildings.
Contrary to popular opinion, he has not been universally successful in business. He bought casinos with highly leveraged loans. He bought the Taj Mahal and the Trump Castle in Atlantic City and so encumbered them with debt that, while other casinos were making fortunes, his properties went into bankruptcy four times, each time creating greater losses for his investors. He bought and lost the Plaza Hotel and the Regency Hotel in New York City.
Some of his ventures have been considered scams, as for example Trump University. He has failed at creating Trump products, even with his huge brand name, personally developed on reality television. Even though he made them in China with labor paid fifty cents or less an hour.
He created his own fictitious persona on television then used that persona to create another image of himself as the master of “The Art of the Deal.” As it turns out, 62 million voters were fooled by this charlatan of a TV pitchman into voting against their own best interests. Now we see that he is a phony, a fake, a mere pitchman who is only exceeded in his ignorance and stupidity by those who voted for him.
He promised to secure Social Security but has done the opposite. Despite the warnings of almost every single economist and the vast majority of American CEOs, he created needless tax cuts for billionaires that will cost the average citizen a $1.5 trillion increase in the national debt. That means that the Right Wing Billionaires, who never liked paying for government got their wish. No wonder David Koch has retired. He has now…at least at this point it looks that way…destroyed the American Middle Class.
There is no greater criminal activity in the history of this country than the acts of both David and Charles Koch. They are responsible for the divisions that have led the Confederate states to be controlled by former Segregationists and White Supremacists in the Republican Party. They are responsible for the organizations that lobbied for the removal of all restrictions on campaign contributions by the rich. They are the ones who finally (after their father failed) succeeded in creating hundreds of Right Wing (now Fascist-leaning) organizations designed to drive a wedge between different classes of Americans to split the Middle Class.Lynching would no longer be sufficient to provide a sufficient penalty for these evil men.
They led us to Trump and a solidly obedient, obsequious Republican Party…now totally committed to one-party, tolerating no objections to their policies. This is as close to the old Fascist regimes as a political party can expect in the 21sr Century in a nation with some still remaining outposts of free elections and free thought.
Using ALEC, the Koch brothers and their fellow billionaires have purchased the obedience of total state legislatures and governors in the majority of the states. In those states, the governors and the state legislators have drained the resources from the people, cut health care, roads, education and other services in order, as in Kansas, to virtually bankrupt the states, while using the propaganda support of the Kochs and others to make the people believe that their lives are as good as those in states where incomes are double and services for everyone, including health care and education, from birth to death, are readily available.
The fools who supported Trump have fallen victim to his Fascist technique of blaming others for things that he is in fact doing himself. The Nazis blamed the Jews. Now the Republicans and Trump are blaming the people we invited here for generations to do our yard work and our back-breaking vegetable farming for their depressing wages so that corporate CEOs could hire Chinese labor and earn an extra ten million in bonuses from the billionaires who own the companies.
Immigrants haven’t depressed wages or replaced workers. We have had a steady increase in employment since President Obama turned around the Great Bush Depression–not only without the help of Republicans, but with the enormous opposition of the Republicans. By the time President Obama left office, despite McConnell and his 400 filibusters and despite Ryan and his refusal to bring any positive legislation to the floor of the House for a vote, he had created 79 straight months of economic growth and reduced the unemployment figures from 10.8% down to 4%. That is real–and successful–not fake, political and economic accomplishment.
This President is a phony. Worse than that he has all the earmarks of a tyrant. Hitler was thought to be a buffoon. Mussolini looked and acted like a buffoon, but in reality he was a tough, brutal thug, who accomplished his early successes through violence. Both of them had no problem killing people for their own purposes. Yet they were portrayed as cartoonish characters. Let us not be fooled by Trump. Before they hanged Mussolini by his heels in the public square and let him bleed out like the pig that he was, he helped the Axis powers start a war that killed 50 million people.
You need to do more than vote against Trump or against Repbulicans, who, trust me, now follow blindly the Neo-Fascist principles of the leaders of their party, bought and paid for by billionaires. You need to get out and work for Democrats. Do your best to encourage all those people of good faith and honor and dignity in this country to vote out all Republicans until we can restore sanity to the United States of America.