Treason

Russia wants to destroy western democracies. Not just the United States. There has been media reports of Russia’s efforts to impact elections in France, Germany, Belgium, and other nations. Their reason, I believe, is that Vladimir Putin is a dictator and the success of western democracies is demonstration to his countryman that the will of the people results in a more successful nation. National leaders like Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, and Hassan Rouhani of Iran are the dictatorial leaders that Putin admires.

I believe that Donald Trump, his son Donald Junior, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort are all guilty of treason. They all colluded with the Russian government in the 2016 presidential and have continued to collude since Donald Trump’s election. I suspect their reason for the collusion is to earn money for themselves. They have little or no regard for American democracy.

Update 7-18-2017:

Trump and Putin spoke a second time for nearly an hour at G20 summit, White House says. Apparently the only people at that meeting were Trump, Putin, and a Russian translator. As this was not a meeting that Trump wanted to be known, isn’t this another piece of proof of collusion?

Trump’s repeated claims of fake news and his contention that everyone does the things he and his inner circle have done are all part of politics strains credulity beyond what any reasonable person would expect.

Read this definition of treason from thefreedictionary.com
n. the crime of betraying one’s country, defined in Article III, section 3 of the U. S. Constitution: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Treason requires overt acts and includes the giving of government security secrets to other countries, even if friendly, when the information could harm American security. Treason can include revealing to an antagonistic country secrets such as the design of a bomber being built by a private company for the Defense Department. Treason may include “espionage” (spying for a foreign power or doing damage to the operation of the government and its agencies, particularly involved in security) but is separate and worse than “sedition” which involves a conspiracy to upset the operation of the government.

I know that as of today the Republican Party is not ready to charge Trump or his inner circle with treason. I predict that the day is coming.

Alex Jones the Conspiracy Theorist

Alex Jones has made a living selling conspiracy theories. In every instance he appears to believe that the government has an ulterior motive. If you say that someone has an ulterior motive for doing something, you believe that they have a hidden reason for doing it.

Jones has now been given the gift of appearing on Megyn Kelly’s program tonight. That decision by NBC only gives legitimacy to Jones’ theories. I am disappointed in NBC. The likely viewership of the program and the possible income the network might obtain is clearly more important than honesty. I hope the number of people watching is very low. However, since the public appetite for the outrageous never seems to end NBC will probably have a big hit.

Newsweek’s online web site provides Jones’ top conspiracies.

New World Order: The world’s elite are planning on “exterminating” 80% of the world’s population so that the remaining population can live forever thanks to advanced technologies.
9/11 Was an Inside Job: Jones describes himself as “one of the very first founding fathers of the 9/11 truth movement.” He claims that was in “inside job” orchestrated by the U.S. government to enslave the world.
Major shootings, Bombings Were “False Flag” Operations: Jones sees “false flags” including Oklahoma City, Boston Marathon bombings as events orchestrated by elites.
Obama is “Global Head” of Al-Qaeda: Jones called Obama “the Global Head” accusing him of funding and arming terrorist organizations to achieve his own political goals.
Government Creates Homosexuality: Jones said the government is using juice boxes to make children gay to slow and eventually revers the growth of population. In one of his popular videos je claims that chemicals in the water are “ turning the freaking frogs gay.”

Perhaps NBC sees the Kelly program is just another form of entertainment and not to be taken seriously. Sadly too many people do take everything they see on television seriously.

Oregon’s History Of White Supremacy

I have visited Oregon at least three times. All were wonderful experiences. From the Oregon Caves to the Columbia River it is all beautiful scenery. I never gave a thought about their racial make up or their apparent hate history. I was upset over the stabbing in Portland as were most people. Even more upsetting is Oregon’s History Of White Supremacy. It was reported on my local NPR radio station.

Portland Train Murders Highlight Oregon’s History Of White Supremacy

4:40 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered

NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with Randy Blazak, chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime, about the state of white supremacy in the Portland area and the state of Oregon.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

We now turn to the chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime, Randy Blazak. He teaches criminology at the University of Oregon and has been tracking the white supremacist movement in the state for more than 20 years. Welcome.

RANDY BLAZAK: Hello.

SHAPIRO: While Portland has a reputation for being progressive, it is also the whitest big city in America. Tell us about Oregon’s history with racist policies.

BLAZAK: Well, we’ve kind of got a long history that goes back to the founding of the state. I mean the Oregon Trail was – the Land Donation Act was for white settlers only. The state was founded in 1859 as a white-only state, and then that was on the books until 1922. Portland and Oregon had the largest Klan west of the Rockies, the largest per capita actually in the whole country.

SHAPIRO: That’s amazing.

BLAZAK: So…

SHAPIRO: Oregon had the largest per capita Klan membership in the entire country.

BLAZAK: That’s right. It was very active. They elected a governor, Governor Pierce, who went to work outlawing Catholic churches as one of his first duties, which was soon overturned by the Supreme Court. But it was a very active Klan state. And it’s a part of the explanation about why Portland is as white as it is in the year 2017 – is this long racial history the state has.

SHAPIRO: Has Oregon ever taken steps to address or undo legacies of its racist past?

BLAZAK: Sure. I mean it’s had to rewrite some parts of the Constitution that had words like colored people and mulattoes in the constitution. That was only taken out about a decade ago. There has been an attempt to redress or at least acknowledged some of its history, but it’s kind of woven into it up into the modern-day issues around gentrification where we see minority people being pushed out of neighborhoods to make room for incoming moneyed whites. I mean it’s sort of this long story that’s been told that has many chapters. And this unfortunately is just the latest chapter in our history.

SHAPIRO: Well, what do you see in today’s chapter that’s different from what we’ve seen in the past?

BLAZAK: You know, we’ve certainly had racial violence, including the murder of an Ethiopian immigrant by skinheads in 1988 in Portland. But this version is…

SHAPIRO: I remember that. I was in school at the time in Portland.

BLAZAK: Yes, Mulugeta Seraw – I mean many people still remember that incident that – you know, this brings about the role of the Internet, the role of online radicalization and the way that this subculture has sort of morphed into this more invisible world. I mean there used to be physical places that you would go to Klan rallies or to skinhead meetings. And now it kind of takes place online, and people express those views more openly. And so it’s a new version of an old phenomenon. But in a way, it’s more insidious because it sort of exists in the ether and not in a physical place.

SHAPIRO: We just heard about the debate in the city over whether this so-called Trump free speech rally with alt-right groups should be allowed to go forward. Are you concerned that there could be more violence if these happen?

BLAZAK: There’s a lot of tension that’s been building. It’s been building in this city for a long time. I mean Portland became known as skinhead city in the 1990s because of, like, rival factions of racist skinheads and anti-racist skinheads going at it. And so we’re seeing a new version of this. But it’s been kind of magnified by the election politics and the rhetoric of the alt-right and the ability to kind of rally the troops fairly quickly over the Internet. And I think the city is sort of bracing itself for something that might turn quite ugly.

SHAPIRO: Do you go into the chat rooms and other places where these communities gather online? And…

BLAZAK: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: Can you describe how they’ve been reacting to this stabbing?

BLAZAK: You know, both sides have been talking about this incident. There are members of people on the right-wing side of the spectrum that would like to see more of this violence and have vilified the victims as sort of the people who prop up the status quo and defend multiculturalism and the Islamification of America, as they’ve called it.

The people on the left side are concerned that the police are overly protective of what they’re calling fascists in the streets of Portland and are not doing enough to shut down these folks who of course have a First Amendment right but also are causing concern around the issue of agitating more right-wing violence. So it’s really – it depends on where you’re standing what the perspective on the city’s role on this issue is.

SHAPIRO: That’s Randy Blazak, chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime. Thanks for joining us.

BLAZAK: My pleasure.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE WEAKERTHANS SONG, “ELEGY FOR GUMP WORSLEY”)

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

The Trump 100 Day Legislative Disaster

Mexico is not paying for the wall. The Trump travel ban has twice been blocked by the courts. Trump has failed to mobilize a Republican monopoly on power in Washington and his big legislative goal — repealing Obamacare — crashed.

Not one single major piece of legislation has been passed by congress and signed into law.

Most of what Trump has accomplished has been through executive order.

Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter was his 100 day action plan. The plan was announced on October 26, 2016.

How did he do?

Six measures to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, DC:

★ FIRST, propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress. NOT DONE.

★ SECOND, a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health). THE FEDERAL HIRING FREEZE WAS IMPOSED IN JANUARY. IT WAS LIFTED ON APRIL 14.

★ THIRD, a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated. DONE.

★ FOURTH, a five-year ban on White House and Congressional oﬃcials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service. DONE.

★ FIFTH, a lifetime ban on White House oﬃcials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. DONE.

★ SIXTH, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections. DONE.

Seven actions to protect American workers:

★ FIRST, I will announce my intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205. DONE. HE WILL RENEGOTIATE.

★ SECOND, I will announce our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. DONE.

★ THIRD, I will direct the Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator. NOT DONE. REVERSED OPINION.

★ FOURTH, I will direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately. NOT DONE.

★ FIFTH, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal. DONE.

★ SIXTH, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward. DONE.

★ SEVENTH, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure. DONE. EXCEPT NO WATER AND INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS HAVE BEEN BUDGETED.

Five actions to restore security and the constitutional rule of law:

★ FIRST, cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama. NOT DONE.

★ SECOND, begin the process of selecting a replacement for Justice Scalia from one of the 20 judges on my list, who will uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. DONE. MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENT.

★ THIRD, cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities. NOT DONE.

★ FOURTH, begin removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back. DONE.

★ FIFTH, suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered “extreme vetting.” NOT DONE.

Are robots about to replace humans?

Last week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he wasn’t worried at all about advancing artificial intelligence taking over jobs anytime soon. In fact, he said, he wouldn’t be worried about it for another 50 to 100 years.

That was a surprising commentary considering the advance of AI (artificial intelligence) and the advances in robotics. New York developer Rockefeller Group is building two warehouses in Riverside County, California that will span 1.45 million square feet. The purpose of those warehouses is to be a distribution point for goods received at the ports of Long Beach/Los Angeles.

Giant cranes unload those cargo container ships far faster than the longshoreman directed activities of the past. Thanks to bar code technology the location of every widget in a warehouse can be identified and fetched by robots that can lift and move 3,000 pounds with ease. That means fewer jobs for operators of large fork lifts.

Recent studies from McKinsey and the economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne estimate that around 45 percent of workers currently perform tasks that could be automated in the near future. And the World Bank estimates that around 57 percent of jobs could be automated within the next 20 years.

Robots install rivets on a 2015 Ford F-150

Automobile welding as car move down assembly lines have become so common that photos of the action no longer attract too much attention.

Sellafield, on the coast of the Irish Sea, more than 300 miles north (and a bit west) of London, at the dawn of the Cold War; the U.K. chose this site as the place to begin enriching uranium for its first nuclear weapon. But in the country’s haste to build a bomb, little thought was given to disposing of the waste. The U.K. government is spending about £2 billion ($2.5 billion) a year at Sellafield to contend with the nuclear waste. A new model of a cleanup robot “will make its own decisions” in dealing with the waste.

The technology already exists to make long haul trucks self-driving. There are 8.7 million trucking-related jobs in the United States. It is easy to understand why the changeover to those autonomous trucks will take time. It is not going to take 50 to 100 years.

This Robotic Sex Doll Isn’t Just Looking For A One Night Stand, She Wants To Meet Your Parents.

The Conflicted Presidency

The following editorial appeared in today’s Los Angeles Times. While I do not usually re-print their editorials, this one is particularly important. This commentary points out that Donald Trump does not care what you think or what you believe.

Donald Trump in the East Room discussing health

Financial conflicts abound when the orbits of the highest office and the family business overlap.

Donald Trump ran for office as a candidate so deeply enmeshed in his family business that just about any remedy short of selling the Trump Organization would lead to conflicts of interest for his presidency. Two months later, that’s exactly what we’ve got: conflicts galore.

Trump made a big pre-inaugural show of separating himself from active participation in the Trump Organization by turning control over to his children. Yet he retains a financial stake, so any profits that accrue to the business accrue to him too. And since Trump has broken with four decades of tradition by refusing to make his tax returns public (an outrage that he still should rectify), the nation doesn’t even know where all his conflicts might be. And as Trump has repeatedly noted, the president is exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest laws that his appointees must follow.

The problems exist at two levels. First is the clear potential for self-dealing. But benefits also could fall to President Trump through unbidden acts by others, such as foreign governments granting advantages to his overseas properties hoping to win favor with the administration. In fact, China recently approved three dozen Trump-related trademarks in what some experts say was an expedited process. And with Trump as the U.S. government’s chief executive, his private business holdings will routinely put underlings in fraught situations. If they roll back regulation, was it because it needed to be changed or because it might help the boss?

So where are Trump’s conflicts? Pretty much everywhere. Since the inauguration, Trump has spent four weekends at Mar-A-Lago, his private Palm Beach resort that on Jan. 1- three weeks before Trump’s inauguration – doubled its initiation fee to 9200,000. Trump’s backers argued that it was overdue- the fee had been halved in the aftermath of the Bernie Madoff scandal, which hit Palm Beach hard. Yet the timing is, at the least suspect, as though the resort was capitalizing on the desire of the well-heeled to hobnob with the new president.

And when Trump is in Florida, he plays golf at one of two nearby Trump courses, among the 17 owned or controlled by Trump Golf, five in foreign countries. Son Eric Trump, who oversees the golf portfolio, said recently that “the stars have all aligned … I think our brand is the hottest it has ever been.” What aligned those stars? Trump’s election, which added value to the brand.

And among the first regulations Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency targeted for repeal is known as the Waters of the United States rule. That rule put costly restrictions on runoff from, you guessed it, golf courses.

The Trump Organization also lists 14 hotels, six overseas and eight in the U.S., including the new Trump International in the renovated and government-owned Old Post Office building a few blocks from the White House. The lease for that building bars elected officials from receiving benefits from it, and although it appears Trump is now in violation, it is up to his government employees to enforce or re-negotiate. Foreign diplomats have thrown business to the hotel because the president’s name is on it, revenues that ethics experts say violate the emoluments clause in the U.S. Constitution barring the president from receiving money from foreign governments. And last week the owners of a nearby wine bar sued, complaining that competitors operating in the hotel had an unfair advantage because the president’s name is on the building.

The list goes on. Trump says he is under audit by the Internal Revenue Service, which now works for him, raising questions about its independence. Trump will be appointing a majority of the National Labor Relations Board, which lists 47 active cases involving Trump businesses. Trump’s been renting space to the Secret Service in his Trump Tower to provide security for his wife and son, who remain in New York City.

Trump will not resolve these conflicts on his own – he’s shown that he intends to bull ahead, the interests of the nation be damned. Among those who could force the issue are congressional Republican leaders – but they seem content to let it simmer. That is unacceptable. The system of checks and balances requires action, not quiet acquiescence, and Congress should be ensuring that the executive does not violate the Constitution.