Trump SCRAMBLES as his campaign suffers FATAL blow
---- "Project 2025: How Trump Win Would Imperil Worker Organizing Gains Under Biden's NLRB "B402, H/t sortagreen -- Project 2025 poses threat to democracy [...]he decadeslong trend in the U.S. of weakened labor laws—achieving a high rate of workers voting to join unions, requiring thousands of workers to be reinstated at their jobs after being illegally fired for organizing, and increasing the number of workers who are eligible to unionize.
As Common Dreams has reported .. https://www.commondreams.org/tag/project-2025 , Project 2025 is spearheaded .. https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf .. by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and includes agenda items for continuing to roll back reproductive rights, imposing mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, and rolling back climate actions taken by President Joe Biden and other administrations." ----
C'mon, Joe. I know you would be a great president for four more years, sitting with advisors easy, time to ponder time to think .. stagecraft is not running the presidency. That's just on what a know, Joe. Do you still think better than your walk. You gotta convince them, Joe.
Aside: I was watching the video, bang, no sound (might of clicked the screen, top left, not sure), no sound. Yet i had sound on other Yts. So i fiddled, sent reports, restarted computer, checked volume controls, googled how to fix... , lol, did all that must of been at least a half hour ... gave up and was in the midst of creating a post asking help, here, ..........and snap on going to get that video here .. bingo! .. out of the blue LOLs 'from the heavens' -- there was sound .. how ffflllucking good was that. :-) .. any explanation anyone? Could someone have turned the volume off for a time??
HEAR YE HEAR YE FRANCE JUST KNOCKED BACK THE FAR-RIGHT. .. say no more .. vote Joe, if he is fit enough to win.
Democracy in Distress: Navigating the Crisis of U.S. Politics and Media
"Project 2025: How Trump Win Would Imperil Worker Organizing Gains Under Biden's NLRB "B402, H/t sortagreen -- Project 2025 poses threat to democracy"
Related: After 50 Years, This Right-Wing Law Factory Is Crazier Than Ever "The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: ‘We Are Seeing Them Emboldened’" The American Legislative Exchange Council is where corporations and far-right groups go to buy government policy. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174180654
The Claremont Institute, of course, is one of the conservative outfits pushing the Agenda 2025 platform Trump, and some of his campaign team, insist upon continually lying about. [...] Trump disavows Project 2025, but he has long-standing ties to some key architects https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174940216
Elections 2024 December 18, 2023
By Gregg Barak
The political reality of a US Democracy in crisis is a byproduct, not only of the master storyteller Donald Trump, but more fundamentally it has to do with both a broken fourth estate and society.
In the process, Trump has not only normalized calls to violence in public spaces, but he also continues to stoke violence against vulnerable populations.
Like Ifill and many others, including Thom Hartmann .. https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/alec/ .. the progressive radio commentator has been addressing what is at stake or at risk should the Insurrectionist-in-Chief be elected to the POTUS for a second time. Namely, the far “right’s fever dreams of gutting the US Constitution of checks and balances.” While at the same time officially turning the nation “into a legal oligarchy with a strongman presidency, a nearly bullet-proof immunity for the morbidly rich, and full personhood for corporations.”
This new authoritarian regime is being brought to the United States by the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Earlier this month ALEC completed its winter National Policy Summit get-together in Scottsdale, AZ with Speaker Mike Johnson as its keynote speaker, where they were busy fine-tuning their efforts to change the US Constitution.
For those of you who may not know ALEC is the same group that brought “Stand Your Ground” and voter suppression “model” legislation to Red states across America. ALEC is also the group that for the past fifty years has been “bringing together corporate lobbyists and Republican state-level politicians to make state after state more corporate- and billionaire-friendly,” as Hartmann puts it.
Once again, Ifill’s bottom line was this: if we can “make it out of this moment with the rudiments of our democracy still in place,” then “we will be facing an opportunity that we have not had in decades; a chance to build a truly healthy democracy.”
So let me now turn to what needs to be done and to describe what the struggle for a new American democracy looks like. In the United States, there are two constitutional traditions: one derived from the federal constitution and the other derived from 50 state constitutions. The former tradition has been largely static, even stagnant, and has not been meaningfully amended since 1971 when the voting age was lowered from age twenty-one to eighteen. Comparatively, the state constitutional tradition has been a dynamic history of change, revision and innovation .. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/opinion/midterms-states-constitutions.html .
During the 2022 midterm elections, for example, by way of referendums or initiatives and propositions, voters across the nation decided constitutional matters by general votes .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-elections/ballot-measures .. on abortion and healthcare, elections and voting, firearms, marijuana, minimum wage, and sports betting.
Specifically, voters in California, Michigan and Vermont amended their state constitutions to effectively secure the right to an abortion; voters in Oregon amended their Constitution to give every resident a fundamental right to affordable health care; voters in Nevada amended their Constitution to allow open primaries and ranked-choice voting; and voters in Iowa amended their Constitution to affirm the right to keep and bear arms.
In contrast to the U.S. Constitution and the convening of national conventions that are quite limited or restrictive when it comes to amendment or change, the state constitutions are far more flexible and directly accessible to the people. They have been “a forum for reconsidering, and ultimately revising or rejecting, a number of governing principles and institutions .. https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700616893/ .. that were adopted by the federal convention of 1787.”
In other words, while the federal constitution does not permit citizens to play a role in lawmaking beyond voting for representatives in Congress, many state constitutions require certain measures to be submitted to the people before they can take effect. Similarly, other state constitutions may allow for the enactment of some, or even all, statutes based on the outcome of a popular vote.
Let me be clear and underscore before continuing that the prevailing economic and political arrangements of democracy are more than a matter of individual agency or politicians doing the morally right thing. Within the presently constructed federal republic of the Constitutional United States, the increasingly divisive polarities and episodic paralyzes of governing are also a matter more importantly of the structural arrangements that reflect the reproduction of a symbiotic political economy as well as an orchestrated system that favors the interests of a minority over the interests of a majority.
In other words, both the bipartisan and hyperpartisan arrangements of American democracy have always supported a “tyranny of a minority”as the byproduct of the undemocratic rules of the political contests derived from the Electoral College, gerrymandering, the filibuster, and more recently Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, as well as the Uber bourgeois legal infrastructure from its regressive taxing policies to its lack of universal health care to its inadequate ecological protocols to its contradictory policies of debt relief .. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10612-020-09542-0 .. or to international humanitarian engagement.
Under the current political-economic system of selecting a presidential party nomination as well as electing a president every four years, there are many negative consequences that we could talk over and ironically “election security” or “rigged elections” should not be one of those as confirmed by more than sixty lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
In any case, I want to emphasize the length of the process involved in picking a nominee for president as one negative effect deserving of long overdue electoral reform. As Hans Noel, a professor of government and the author of “Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America,” has written, “The long primary process is not the most democratic system .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/opinion/biden-primary-democrats-republicans.html ” especially because,
“Voters choose candidates in a sequence of state-level primaries and caucuses. Those contests select delegates and instruct them on how to vote at a nominating convention. It’s an ungainly and convoluted process, and politicians begin positioning themselves a year in advance to succeed in it.”
Noel continues, “It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be.” Political parties in most democracies have the power to nominate and choose their leaders in much less time and for far less money than in the United States. There are several models .. https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voting-systems/types-of-voting-system/ .. and alternatives to choose from. For example, open primaries rather than closed primaries would reduce polarization and facilitate bipartisan majoritarianism.
Originally, the House was supposed to grow with every decennial census. James Madison had even proposed in the Bill of Rights an amendment laying out a formula forcing the House to grow from 65 to 200 members and to expand after that as well. Moreover, the one and only time that George Washington spoke at the Constitutional Convention was on its final day when he endorsed an amendment lowering the ratio of constituent members to 30,000.
The rationale was that responsive representation requires allowing representatives to meaningful know their constituents and vice-versa as a means of taking care of business. Presently, House members represent approximately 762,000 people each, a number that is projected to become one million by 2050.
The second sentence of the 14th Amendment reads:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Unfortunately, as the historian Eric Foner .. https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393358520 .. demonstrated in the 2019 “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution”, the justices of the Supreme Court in a series of rulings culminating with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 had narrowed the scope of the 14th Amendment to the point that it was little different than it was before the Civil War.
And despite Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 and the passage by Congress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, we find ourselves once again thanks to an alt-right Supreme Court and the passage of ensuing discriminatory legislation in red states, returning to the pre-Civil War period unrestricted by federal intervention.
Transitioning away from the old tyranny of the minority and toward the new and improved tyranny of the majority requires that we transform the rules of these political and economic arrangements. Dialectically, this involves pushing back against and resisting those Republican forces that have been doubling down on contracting the tyranny of the minority by using the “counter majoritarian features of the system to build redoubts of power, insulated from the voters themselves .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/opinion/constitutional-amendments-american-history.html .. . .”
For example, there is the Supreme Court that has been using “its iron grip on constitutional meaning to accumulate power in its chambers, to the detriment of other institutions of American governance.” There is also an authoritarian movement “led and animated by Trump, that wants to renounce constitutional government in favor of an authoritarian patronage with Trump’s family at its center.” As James Bouie of the NYTimes has been arguing .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/opinion/constitutional-amendments-supreme-court.html , each of “these forces are trying to game the current system. But there’s nothing that says we have to play this anti-democratic game or that “we can’t write new rules.”
For legal, political, and economic reasons, limiting terms for Supreme Court Justices from life appointments to 10 to 12 years is one necessary reform of that institution that currently sees the highest court of the land at a historically low in respectability. The process of becoming a nominee should resurrect the former American Bar Association as the vetting mechanism of potential nominees rather than the politically reactionary and financially enriched Federalist society.
Not to mention the need to ameliorate the juridical issues of SCOTUS becoming a court of first resort, ignoring the coveted tradition of legal standing, and usurping the power of the executive and legislative bodies to make policy rather than settle law. For example, over the past couple of decades, the Court has been restricting bribery statutes and other types of public corruption.
There are many institutionalized changes in the political and economic organization of American life that would benefit the interests of the People and society rather than the special interests of corporate greed, corruption, and immorality, such as publicly financed campaign elections lasting no more than 60 to 90 days. Other kinds of structural reforms would ameliorate the current and long-lasting problems that have been hurting democracy and immobilizing the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government.
These include transformative structural changes that would ideally include the elimination of uber-capitalists, multibillionaires, mega monopolies, the electoral college, filibusters, upper chamber supermajorities, super PACs, Citizens United as well as the “invisible” party primaries that precede the People casting their votes for selected nominees during the overly long and financially expensive marathon season of primaries, caucuses, and general elections.
All these necessary changes on behalf of a New Democracy seem like monumental challenges on so many levels especially because they will be resisted tooth and nail by the powers that prevail and by the rest of those people captured by the political status quo. And that is assuming that American democracy survives the autocratic wannabe Donald Trump and the 2024 presidential election.
For more than a half century this nation has been frozen in a kind of constitutional stasis of democracy.
As historian and director of the Amendments Project, Jill Lepore, has been arguing the best way to save American democracy and stave off constitutional extinction is to amend the original document. Reform and change of that charter and related matters are well past due. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt .. https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Minority-American-Democracy-Breaking/dp/0593443071 .. have argued in their recent book “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,”, the United States will either “become a multiracial democracy” or it will “cease to be a democracy at all.”
One way to facilitate a multiracial democracy would be to establish a multiparty democracy. These two developments in tandem would go a long way toward fixing polarization and escaping from the current zero-sum game of U.S. politics or winners-take-all. By contrast, a system of proportional representation with larger districts in the lower chambers of Congress that would elect multiple representatives each with seats parceled out according to the percentage of the vote that each party received would be less polarizing.
[B402, You missed. Surely you saw the sarcasm in my '20 from the same town' was only pointed at your "...and let those that wish to be elected be elected based on their ideas." P Not sure why but maybe it's our system of proportional voting which has us with more independents in our federal parliament. Though you do have your Democrat blue-dogs and your Republican Cheneys. P - What’s going on with independent candidates and the federal election? https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168281086 .. and .. Still top of the Senate Republican heap, eh. One difference between Australia and the U.S.A. The Representation of Small Parties and Independents https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164939659]
These reforms would also help to transform the US political system from a two-party or bipartisan democracy to a multiparty and less partisan democracy that naturally moves power away from minority rule and toward majority rule.
Of course, this takes us full circle back to the existential threat of electing the former president in 2024 because of the fact that Republicans who plan to vote for Trump in the upcoming primaries “know that he has promised to be a dictator.” They also know that he is not joking. In fact, they are “just thrilled, because they loathe America’s multiracial democracy and want to bring it to an end .. https://www.salon.com/2023/12/15/know-isnt-joking-with-his-dictator-remarks-its-why-they-love-him/ .”
Cheerleaders for Donald Trump have gleefully raised the prospect of the extremist Project 2025 policy blueprint being implemented by the new administration as they taunted Democrats after the Republicans’ victory over Kamala Harris.
Project 2025 is an initiative coordinated by the rightwing Heritage Foundation and presented to the American public in the form of the Mandate, a 900-plus page policy plan. Proposals for a second Trump administration include political purges of the federal government and attacks on minority rights and environmental protections among many other hard-right policy ideas.
“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda,” said Matt Walsh, a popular podcaster, commentator and author, on X, adding: “Lol”.
Benny Johnson, an internet provocateur and proven plagiarist, chimed in: “It is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time.”
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist, recently imprisoned for contempt of Congress and soon to face fraud charges in New York, used his War Room podcast to display a copy of the Mandate for Leadership, a Project 2025 publication.
On Friday, the Guardian reported on a forthcoming book, introduced by JD Vance, the Ohio senator and vice-president-elect, in which Kevin Roberts, the Heritage president, advocates “burning” institutions including the FBI and the Department of Education, as part of a campaign against “those who seek to abolish the existing order in the name of emancipation, freedom, and progress”.
Democrats seized on Project 2025 and its links to Trump as a campaign issue. Such attacks proved effective. Roberts’s book was delayed until after the election, and Paul Dans, the former Trump White House official and head of Project 2025 stood down, while Trump was compelled to lie about not knowing about the initiative or working with Roberts, despite plentiful evidence to the contrary.
Now, as Trump prepares to return to power, Project 2025 has returned to the public agenda. Its links to Trump world are legion.
Authors of chapters in the Mandate for Leadership seen as contenders for jobs in the new administration include Chris Miller, who was acting defense secretary during the January 6 Capitol attack; Ken Cuccinelli, formerly acting deputy secretary of homeland security; Russell Vought, Trump’s chair of the Office of Management and Budget; Peter Navarro, a trade adviser who, like Bannon, went to prison for contempt of Congress related to investigations of Trump’s election subversion; and Roger Severino, formerly a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Arguing that progressive panic over Project 2025 is overstated, some observers and analysts point out that the Heritage Foundation has been producing such plans for new Republican administrations since 1981, without much chance of full implementation.
[Insert: That doesn't excuse Trump from distancing himself from it. And where are the newspaper headings saying Trump lied himself into the White House again. Republicans box and wrestle while the press and Democrats play chess.]
Sources also say that the more radical plans in the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, such as political purges of federal departments or the outright abolition of the education department, would be sure to become entangled in protracted legal battles.
Furthermore, sources say the true engine of planning for Trump’s second termis not the Heritage Foundation, but the America First Policy Institute .. https://americafirstpolicy.com/ .. (AFPI), a nonprofit founded by Stephen Miller, a Trump adviser, speechwriter and anti-immigrant hawk widely expected to assume a senior post in the new administration.
AFPI’s work on the Trump transition is being run by its president, Brooke Rollins, acting director of the Domestic Policy Council in the first Trump administration, and Linda McMahon, AFPI board chair and formerly both chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment and chief of the Small Business Administration under Trump.
McMahon is an official Trump transition co-chair, with Howard Lutnick, chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald.
Other AFPI members who served under Trump include Larry Kudlow, a TV host turned economic adviser, and Chad Wolf, acting secretary for Homeland Security between 2019 and 2021.
Still, key players in Project 2025 continue to celebrate their win.
In a statement greeting Trump’s election victory, Roberts, of the Heritage Foundation, said: “We look forward to this historic term, during which President Trump has an opportunity to make America great, healthy, safe, and prosperous once again.
“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state.”
The “deep state” conspiracy theory holds that a permanent government of bureaucrats, intelligence operatives and progressives exists to thwart Trump. Bannon is among its chief propagators. Nonetheless, he has said it is “for nut cases”.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
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:-) .. any explanation anyone? Could someone have turned the volume off for a time?? 
AI
