This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

“Inspectors General are crucial parts of the apparatus that keep the government accountable to everyday people. IG offices investigate real cases of fraud, waste and abuse, and work to remedy them. Unlike DOGEーthe agents of rampant destruction that are running amok across Donald Trump’s governmentーIGs use disciplined investigative approaches to ensure that government works for real people.”

“Instead of investing in those offices, their leaders, and their crucial work, Donald Trump has fired most of them, and in their stead offered brazen partisans with records of using their positions to allegedly engage in nepotism and outright theft. For many years, those holding this position were held to a particularly high standard of ethics and public service. Now, having a besmirched legacy is not seen as an automatic disqualifier, but is seemingly viewed as an asset for a potential Trump administration Inspector General.”

“The Revolving Door Project will continue to track the bad actors running these offices, because the decimation of the institutions structured to hold the government to account impacts us all. IGs have long been bulwarks against the use of public offices and public funds for self-enrichment schemes, for personal gain, for personal retribution and more, and their replacement is a crucial part of the Trump corruption project. Should Trump succeed in staffing them with loyalists and crooked characters, another barrier in the way of autocracy will fall. We encourage all those committed to covering the Trump administration’s abuses to avail themselves of this resource.”

The tracker can be viewed here and will be regularly updated to reflect changes made by the Trump administration.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

US President Donald Trump and his team is pursuing a white man’s racist agenda that is corrupt at its core. Trump’s advisor Elon Musk, who often seems to be the actual president, is handing his companies multiple contracts as his team takes over or takes down multiple government departments and agencies.

Trump wants to be the “king” of America and is already floating the idea of a third term, an action that would be an obvious violation of the US Constitution he swore to uphold but is doing his best to violate and destroy.

Every time we hear the Trump team spouting a “return to America’s golden age,” they are talking about 60-80 years ago, when white people ruled and schools, hospitals, restrooms and entire neighborhoods were segregated and African Americans and other minority groups had little opportunity.

• READ MORE: Obama praises Harvard for ‘setting example’ to universities resisting Trump
• Other Giff Johnson articles

Every photo of leaders from that time features large numbers of white American men. Trump’s cabinet, in contrast to recent cabinets of Democratic presidents, is mainly white and male.

This is where the US going. And lest any white women feel they are included in the Trump train, think again. Anything to do with women’s empowerment — including whites — is being scrubbed off the agenda by Trump minions in multiple government departments and agencies.

“Women” along with things like “climate change,” “diversity,” “equality,” “gender equity,” “justice,” etc are being removed from US government websites, policies and grant funding.

The white racist campaign against people of colour has seen iconic Americans removed from government websites. For example, a photo and story about Jackie Robinson, a military veteran, was recently removed from the Defense Department website as part of the Trump team’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Broke whites-only colour barrier
Robinson was not only a military veteran, he was the first African American to break the whites-only colour barrier in Major League Baseball and went on to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame for his stellar performance with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

How about the removal of reference to the Army’s 442nd infantry regiment from World War II that is the most decorated unit in US military history? The 442nd was a fighting unit comprised of nearly all second-generation American soldiers of Japanese ancestry who more than proved their courage and loyalty to the United States during World War II.

The Defense Department removing references to these iconic Americans is an outrage. But showing the moronic level of the Trump team, they also deleted a photo of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II because the pilot named it after his mother, “Enola Gay.”

Despite the significance of the Enola Gay airplane in American military history, that latter word couldn’t get past the Pentagon’s scrubbing team, who were determined to wash away anything that hinted at, well, anything other than white, heterosexual male. And there is plenty more that was wiped off the history record of the Defense Department.

Meanwhile, Trump, his team and the Republican Party in general while claiming to be focused on eliminating corruption is authorising it on a grand scale.

Elon Musk’s redirection of contracts to Starlink, SpaceX and other companies he owns is one example among many. What is happening in the American government today is like a bank robbery in broad daylight.

The Trump team fired a score of inspectors general — the very officials who actively work to prevent fraud and theft in the US government. They are eliminating or effectively neutering every enforcement agency, from EPA (which ensures clean air and other anti-pollution programmes) and consumer protection to the National Labor Relations Board, where the mega companies like Musk’s, Facebook, Google and others have pending complaints from employees seeking a fair review of their work issues.

Huge cuts to social security
Trump with the aid of the Republican-controlled Congress is going to make huge cuts to Medicaid and Social Security — which will affect Marshallese living in America as much as Americans — all in order to fund tax cuts for the richest Americans and big corporations.

Then there is Trump’s targeting of judges who rule against his illegal and unconstitutional initiatives — Trump criticism that is parroted by Fox News and other Trump minions, and is leading to things like efforts in the Congress to possibly impeach judges or restrict their legal jurisdiction.

These are all anti-democracy, anti-US constitution actions that are already undermining the rule of law in the US. And we haven’t yet mentioned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its sweeping deportations without due process that is having calamitous collateral damage for people swept up in these deportation raids.

ICE is deporting people legally in the US studying at US universities for writing articles or speaking about justice for Palestinians. Whether we like what the writer or speaker says, a fundamental principle of democracy in the US is that freedom of expression is protected by the US constitution under the First Amendment.

That is no longer the case for Trump and his Republican team, which is happily abandoning the rule of law, due process and everything else that makes America what it is.

The irony is that multiple countries, normally American allies, have in recent weeks issued travel advisories to their citizens about traveling to the United States in the present environment where anyone who isn’t white and doesn’t fit into a male or female designation is subject to potential detention and deportation.

The immigration chill from the US will no doubt reduce visitor flow resulting in big losses in revenue, possibly in the billions of dollars, for tourism-related businesses.

Marshallese must pay attention
Marshallese need to pay attention to what’s happening and have valid passports at the ready. Sadly, if Marshallese have any sort of conviction no matter how ancient or minor it is likely they will be targets for deportation.

Further, even the visa-free access privilege for Marshallese and other Micronesians is apparently now under scrutiny by US authorities based on a statement by US Ambassador Laura Stone published recently by the Journal

It is a difficult time being one of the closest allies of the US because the RMI must engage at many levels with a US government that is presently in turmoil.

Giff Johnson is the editor of the Marshall Islands Journal and one of the Pacific’s leading journalists and authors. He is the author of several books, including Don’t Ever Whisper, Idyllic No More, and Nuclear Past, Unclear Future. This editorial was first published on 11 April 2025 and is reprinted with permission of the Marshall Islands Journal. marshallislandsjournal.com

Freedom of speech at the Marshall Islands High School

The above is one section of the outer wall at Marshall Islands High School. Surely, if this was a public school in America today, these messages would already have been whitewashed away by the Trump team censors who don’t like any reference to “inclusiveness,” “women,” and especially “gender equality.”

However, these messages painted by MIHS students are very much in keeping with Marshallese society and customary practices of welcoming visitors, inclusiveness and good treatment of women in this matriarchal society.

But don’t let President Trump know Marshallese think like this. — Giff Johnson

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The campaign urges Congress to investigate the process by which Musk was granted authority, along with his abuses of power and emolument violations as the head of DOGE.

Explaining the new grounds, the campaign writes: “As head of DOGE—which operates without any congressional authorization or oversight—Musk and his DOGE-affiliated agents demanded and were granted access to sensitive personal and financial information of millions held by the Department of Treasury, in violation of federal law that prohibits improper disclosure and misuse of this data. And Musk is in receipt of unconstitutional emoluments via lucrative government contracts with Musk’s companies.”

Launched on Inauguration Day, the campaign has already garnered nearly 200,000 petition signatures supporting the impeachment investigation of offenses Donald Trump has already committed. These offenses include: violating the Emoluments Clauses from his first day in office by refusing to sell his ownership stake in companies receiving substantial payments from foreign governments; engaging in unlawful and corrupt conduct during the 2024 election campaign; abusing the pardon power; unconstitutionally stripping U.S. citizens of citizenship; dismantling independent government oversight; unlawfully firing Inspector Generals; unlawfully firing members of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board; abusing his power to seek retributions against perceived adversaries; abusing emergency powers; unconstitutionally usurping local and state authority, and unconstitutionally usurping legislative powers.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

President Joe Biden’s decision to grant clemency to a corrupt former judge has sparked widespread outrage, including from members of his own party. Biden announced nearly 1,500 commutations and pardons last week in what the White House described as the largest single-day act of clemency from a president, but among those whose sentences were reduced is former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan — one of two judges in the notorious “kids for cash” scandal. In 2011, Conahan was sentenced to 17.5 years for accepting nearly $3 million in kickbacks for sending 2,300 children, some as young as 8 years old, to for-profit prisons on false charges. His co-conspirator, former Judge Mark Ciavarella, remains in prison. We speak with filmmaker Robert May, director of the Kids for Cash documentary, and Sandy Fonzo, mother of Edward Kenzakoski, who was incarcerated as a teenager as part of the kickback scheme and later died by suicide. “It’s just reopening wounds that have never healed,” Fonzo says of the commutation. She describes her son as “strong” and “proud” before his time in detention, but says “he came out broken” and never fully recovered. “It stole his youth, his childhood.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Refugee advocates and academics are weighing in on Australia’s latest move on the Pacific geopolitical chessboard.

Canberra is ploughing A$100 million over the next five years into Nauru, a remote 21 sq km atoll with a population of just over 12,000.

It is also the location of controversial offshore detention facilities, central to Australia’s “stop the boats” immigration policy.

• READ MORE: Other Australian offshore detention policy reports

Political commentators see the Nauru-Australia Treaty signed this week by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Nauru’s President David Adeang as a move to limit China’s influence in the region.

Refugee advocates claim it is effectively a bribe to ensure Australia can keep dumping its refugees on Nauru, where much of the terrain is an industrial wasteland following decades of phosphate mining.

The Refugee Action Coalition told RNZ Pacific that there were currently between 95 and  100 detainees at the facility, the bulk of whom are from China and Bangladesh.

The deal was said to have been struck after months of secretive bilateral talks, on the back of lucrative counter offers from China.

The treaty ensures that Australia retains a veto right over a range of pacts that Nauru could enter into with other countries.

In a written statement, Albanese described the agreement as a win-win situation.

“The Nauru-Australia treaty will strengthen Nauru’s long-term stability and economic resilience. This treaty is an agreement that meets the need of both countries and serves our shared interest in a peaceful, secure and prosperous region,” he said.

‘Motivated by strategic concerns’ – expert
However, a geopolitics expert says Australia’s motivations are purely selfish.

Australian National University research fellow Dr Benjamin Herscovitch said the detention centre had bipartisan support and was a crucial part of Australia’s domestic migration policies.

“The Australian government is motivated by very self-interested strategic concerns here,” Herscovitch told RNZ Pacific.

“They are not ultimately doing it because they want to assist the people of Nauru, Canberra is doing it because it wants to keep China at bay and it wants to keep offshore processing in play.”

The Refugee Action Coalition in Sydney agrees.

The Coalition’s spokesperson Ian Rintoul said Canberra had effectively bribed Nauru so it could keep refugees out of Australia.

“It’s a very sordid game. It’s a corrupt arrangement that the Australian government has actually bought Nauru and made it a wing of its domestic anti-refugee policies,” he said.

“It’s small beer for the Australian government that thinks that off-shore detention is critical to its domestic political policies.”

Rintoul said that in the past foreign aid had not been used to improve life for Nauruans.

“The relationship between Nauru and Australia is pretty extraordinary and Nauru has been able to effectively extort huge amounts of foreign aid to upgrade their prison, they’ve built sports facilities,” he said.

“I suspect a large amount of it has also found its way into the pockets of various elites.”

Herscovitch said Nauru is in a prime position to negotiate with its former coloniser.

“When China comes knocking, Australia immediately gets nervous and wants to put on the table offers that will keep those Pacific countries coming back to Australia.

“That provides a wide range of Pacific countries with a huge amount of leverage to extract better terms from Australia.”

He added it was unclear exactly how the funds would be used in Nauru.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The post Corrupt Police Officer Candidate for Cook County Judgeship appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Now, in a news-report by Kit Klarenberg at The Gray Zone, Mr. Pavlovschi is quoted as saying: “Moldova now is governed by the US Ambassador. … He is practically governing Moldova at this particular stage. You have hundreds of consultants for the EU … working for each and every ministry here in Moldova. So it is under very, very strict control on the part of the EU.”

There is extensive history behind this. And it explains why the U.S. Government sub-contracts to the EU the political control over Moldova. (Ukraine had been treated the same way.) Richard J. Aldrich’s 2003 The Hidden Hand says, on page 366, about the CIA’s American Committee for a United Europe:

ACUE, more than any other American front organization of the Cold War, was a direct creature of the leading lights of the CIA. Indeed, it was so replete with famous CIA figures that its ‘front’ was very thin. Its early years seemed to have formed something of a laboratory for figures such as [Bill] Donovan, [Allen] Dulles, [Walter] Bedell Smith and [Tom] Braden, before they moved on to other projects in the mid-1950s. Over its first three years of operations, 1949-51, ACUE received $384,650, the majority being dispersed to Europe. This was a large sum, but from 1952 ACUE began to spend such sums annually. The total budget for the period 1949-60 amounted to approximately $4 million. As the quantity of money flowing across the Atlantic began to increase, ACUE opened a local Paris office to monitor more closely groups that had received grants. By 1956, the flood of increased funding was prompting fears among the Directors of ACUE that its work would be publicly exposed. …

The emerging European Economic Community (EEC) and the growing Western intelligence community overlapped to a considerable degree. This is underlined by the creation of the Bilderberg Group, an informal and secretive transatlantic council of key decision-makers [representatives of the billionaires who controlled U.S. and U.S.-allied international corporations]. Bilderberg was founded by Joseph Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1952 in response to the rise of anti-Americanism in Europe. … Retinger secured support from Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller and Walter Bedell Smith. The formation of the American wing of Bilderberg was entrusted to Eisenhower’s psychological warfare chief, C.D. Jackson, and the funding for the first meeting, held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Holland in 1954, was provided by the CIA.

Funds for these CIA operations came not only from the U.S. Treasury but from private sources, America’s super-rich, and, also from organized gangsters, as was revealed in the 1998 classic by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. This off-the-books funding comes from narcotics kingpins throughout the world, as protection-money, which is essential to keep them in business. So, the EU was financially fueled from all of these sources, and, basically, was a bribing-operation (to end up getting the ‘right’ people into the EU’s Parliament, etc.), in addition to be receiving funds from what might be considered idealistic philanthropic donors (because the dream of a united Europe had long preceded the grubby version of it that the CIA created for Europeans).

The EU was a Cold War operation, from its very start. It remains that to the present day.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of UK’s Telegraph newspaper issued two important articles about this, the first being his 19 September 2000 “Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs”:

DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement. … One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington’s main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.

The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA’s first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement’s funds.

The European Youth Campaign, an arm of the European Movement, was wholly funded and controlled by Washington. The Belgian director, Baron Boel, received monthly payments into a special account. When the head of the European Movement, Polish-born Joseph Retinger, bridled at this degree of American control and tried to raise money in Europe, he was quickly reprimanded.

The leaders of the European Movement — Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak — were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE’s funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government.

Then, on 27 April 2016, he bannered “The European Union always was a CIA project, as Brexiteers discover” and reported:

It was Washington that drove European integration in the late 1940s, and funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. … The US has relied on the EU ever since as the anchor to American regional interests alongside NATO. … It is odd that this magisterial 1000-page study found only a French-language publisher. [Roussel’s Jean Monnet. The French Wikipedia’s article on Roussel says “En 1995, il écrit une biographie consacrée à Jean Monnet2 qui reçoit le prix de l’Essai de l’Académie française, le prix Guizot, et le prix européen de l’histoire.” Despite all of those awards, the work is little-known, even in France.] Nor are many aware of declassified documents from the State Department archives showing that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the project. …

[The CIA] treated some of the EU’s ‘founding fathers’ as hired hands, and actively prevented them finding alternative funding that would have broken reliance on Washington. … The American ‘deep state’ was in up to its neck. …

Since that newspaper (like all major news-media in the U.S. and in its vassal-nations are) is both neoliberal and neoconservative, the neoconservative Pritchard approved of all this. He did it by saying: “There is nothing particularly wicked about this. The US acted astutely in the context of the Cold War. The political reconstruction of Europe was a roaring success.” However, obviously, no authentic democracy can exist in a nation that’s governed by means of deceiving its public; nor can any democracy be an empire, either the imperialistic nation itself, or one of its vassal-nations, because that’s merely “Deep State” rule, behind the scenes, by its billionaires — an aristocracy, and not a democracy, which reigns there. Though all of the country’s major news-media will support the aristocracy — since they’ll all be owned by the aristocracy — anyone who calls it a ‘democracy’ is transparently a fool or a liar, because it’s an aristocracy, which is the opposite. In fact, the CIA built today’s Europe on the basis of hiring ‘ex’-Nazis and ‘ex’-Fascists there.

Nowadays, some of America’s billionaires are bypassing the taxpayer-funded CIA, State Department, etc., in order to control European nations — and even the EU itself — directly, by hiring consultants to rate and evaluate each of the members of the European Parliament, in order to determine which ones need to be replaced and which ones need to receive increased campaign-funding. For example, one of these reports for George Soros, that leaked online, was the 119-page study, “Reliable allies in the European Parliament (2014 – 2019)”, which described and listed each one of them. And, too, there was the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, who on 27 January 2014, received by phone the instructions from Obama’s planner of the coup in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, on how to complete the coup and make it “stick”, and whom to place at the head of Ukraine’s government when it would be completed (“Yats” or “Yatsenyuk”) which did become successfully completed exactly a month later.

Unlike in former eras, when the billionaires were the large land-owners and got from the Monarch formal titles of Nobility and were quite open about the supremacist character of their Government, and the public were called “subjects” instead of “citizens,” the terminology has changed, though the reality has not. Nowadays they don’t even publicly declare their international dictatorship to be an “Empire,” and rule itself is entirely behind-the scenes by the billionaires by means of their millions of hired agents whose performance is being constantly monitored by or on behalf of their patrons, the groups of billionaires that are funding their careers. And so the aristocracy continues, but the terminology has changed in order to fool the public that they live in a “democracy.”

So: what Pavlovschi now is saying is that the corruption comes from the U.S. Government, by way of the EU.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

People watch with their mouths agape, trying to understand the scandal of Donald Trump leading a criminal insurrection to hold onto power even though he’d lost the election; of Supreme Court justices on the take; of political figures putting into law religious doctrine about the role of women in society.

They’re astonished by a media industry that seems to be a captive of the billionaire neofascist class.

They can’t figure out why extraordinarily wealthy people spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year stirring people up to hate each other.

They don’t understand why the morbidly rich are leading a campaign to destroy public schools, end Social Security, and prevent people from voting.

Why are these people so committed to propagating ideas and doing things that seem so antithetical to historic American standards of government and ethical behavior? Of democracy itself?

And if it’s just to get more money for the morbidly rich and political power for the players — as it appears — are they following a script? Is there a model they’re trying to emulate?

Or a person? Do they have a role model? Is somebody, who got there first, showing them the way?

It appears there’s an answer, one that grows clearer every day.

Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is hosting the CPAC Republican fascist-fest this week in Budapest, where the Hungarian “soft fascism” strongman president told the audience, to a standing ovation:

“Hungary is actually an incubator where experiments are done on the future of conservative policies. Hungary is the place where we didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.”

Orbán’s Fidesz Party and the GOP in most Red States have become virtually indistinguishable, from cronies owning the media, to packing the courts, to rigging elections through purging voters and gerrymanders, to putting polluting businesses in charge of regulatory agencies.

Now both have their sights set on the American federal government. Seriously, both. Orbán is now inserting himself into American Republican politics in a big way: last August he gave a major speech to Republicans in Dallas. Orbán has become a role model for many American politicians, particularly those in the GOP’s Sedition Caucus.

Steve Bannon celebrated Orbán as “Trump before Trump,” and Casey Michel on the NBC News site Think noted:

“From targeting migrants to inflaming an ethnonationalist base, from attacking the press to whipping up nativist conspiracies, from ushering in unprecedented corruption to tearing down basic democratic protections, Trumpism is increasingly indistinguishable from Orbánism.”

So, who is this guy, and what can we learn about the direction Republicans want to take America from his example they appear to be following?

I first heard of Orbán in August of 1989, when my best friend Jerry Schneiderman and I spent the better part of a week sitting in outdoor cafes on the Buda side of the Danube River, eating extraordinary (and cheap!) food, staying in a grand old hotel, and generally exploring Budapest.

Two months earlier there had been massive pro-democracy demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people demanding that the Soviet Union let Hungary go. The summer we were there, over a quarter-million showed up in Heroes’ Square for the reinterment of the body of Imre Nagy, a hero of the ill-fated 1956 rebellion against the USSR.

The final speaker was 26-year-old Viktor Orbán, a rising politician who would soon be a member of Parliament. To an explosion of enthusiastic cheers, Orbán defied the Soviets (the only speaker to overtly do so) and openly called for “the swift withdrawal of Russian troops.”

Nine months later, in March of 1990 and with the approval of Mikhail Gorbachev, Hungary held its first real elections since 1945; in 1999, it joined NATO; and in 2004, it became a member of the European Union.

And then, when he acquired power, Viktor Orbán succeeded in pulling off what Donald Trump had only tried.

For 20 years, Hungary was a functioning democracy; today, it’s a corrupt neofascist oligarchy. Europeans refer to it as “soft fascism.”

In the few short years after he was elected in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, now fabulously wealthy by Hungarian standards and an oligarch himself, succeeded in transforming his nation’s government from a functioning European democracy into an autocratic and oligarchic regime of single-party neofascist rule.

Republicans now want to do the same here, and the Hungarian strongman has dedicated himself to showing them how.

Orbán took over the Fidesz Party, once a conventional “conservative” political party like the GOP, with the themes: “Restore Christian purity” and “Make Hungary great again.” His rallies regularly drew tens of thousands.

He campaigned on building a wall across the entirety of Hungary’s southern border to keep out the brown-skinned “rapists and murderers” fleeing Russian violence in Syria, a promise he has largely kept.

He altered the nation’s Constitution to enable what we’d call gerrymandering and voter suppression in much the same way Republicans are now doing across Red State America, ensuring that his party, Fidesz, would win a majority of the votes in pretty much every election well into the future.

He’s packed the courts just like Trump and McConnell did, particularly Hungary’s equivalent of the Supreme Court, so thoroughly that even the most serious legal challenges against him and his party go nowhere.

Under Orbán, Hungary passed laws requiring “conservative” sex education in schools (“gay is bad” and “abstinence only”) and criminalized any positive portrayal of LGBTQ people on TV. In public campaigns he’s conflated homosexuality with pedophilia and the penalties are draconian. The latest anti-gay law passed the Hungarian Parliament by a vote of 157 to 1.

Republicans are trying to do the same here. Ron DeSantis is running, in Florida, a virtual clone of Orbán’s agenda in his effort to become the US president. Right down to creating his own private army and police force answerable only to himself.

Orbán’s party railed against teaching multiracialism and racial tolerance, instead rewriting elementary school textbooks to proclaim that refugees entering the country are a threat because “it can be problematic for different cultures to coexist.” Using this logic, he has locked up brown-skinned Syrian refugee children in cages with the enthusiastic support of Hungarian white supremacists.

When the Helsinki Committee said Hungary’s “indefinite detention of many vulnerable migrants, including families with small children, is cruel and inhuman,” Orbán said the influx of Syrian refugees seeking asylum “poses a security risk and endangers the continent’s Christian culture and identity.” He added, in true fascist style, “Immigration brings increased crime, especially crimes against women, and lets in the virus of terrorism.”

Five years and one week before Trump applauded the “Jews will not replace us” American Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing “patriots” held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest minority group, chanting “We will set your homes on fire!”

Orbán’s police watched the thugs, laughing and refusing to intervene, as Roma families fled their homes in terror. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals… unfit to live among people.” Orbán refused to condemn him or the violence, and life has become more and more difficult for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Not only are they routinely excluded from job markets, but are also frequently subject to violence at the hands of all-white “militias.”

Orbán has handed government contracts to his favored few, elevating an entire group of pro-Orbán businessmen (it appears all are men) who have now seized almost complete control of the nation’s economy. Those who opposed him have lost their businesses, been forced to sell their companies, and often fled the country.

Virtually all of Hungary’s press is now in the hands of oligarchs and corporations loyal to Orbán, with hard-right talk radio and television across the country singing his praises daily. Progressive media is functionally banned. Billboards and social media proclaim Orbán’s patriotism.

He told the American CPAC conference in Budapest last year they should do the same in America when Republicans next seize control of the US government:

“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added:

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

After his 2022 speech was publicized in the US, many American media outlets were banned from attending CPAC in Budapest. As Vice News reported:

“Besides VICE News, journalists from Rolling Stone, Vox Media, and the New Yorker were turned away from the conference on Thursday, despite repeated assurances from the American Conservative Union that access would be provided. Journalists from other non-Hungarian media outlets, including the Guardian and Associated Press, tweeted that they had also been denied accreditation, despite months of requests.”

His media allies are now reaching out to purchase media across the rest of Europe and inviting American rightwing groups to Hungary to help spread his racist, “soft fascist” message. Tucker Carlson took him up on his invitation last year, broadcasting his poison directly into American homes from his presidential palace.

Yesterday, in his opening comments, CPAC chairman (and accused sexual harasser) Matt Schlapp echoed Orbán’s strategy, as the Associated Press noted:

“In opening comments, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp said that CPAC in the U.S. had decided to ‘go Hungarian’ in their approach to the media, deciding for themselves ‘who is a journalist and who is not a journalist’ when determining which outlets to allow into their events.”

But journalism isn’t the only institution fascists want to tear down. Orbán recently began dismantling the Hungarian Science Academy, replacing or simply firing scientists who acknowledge climate change, which he has called “left-wing trickery made up by Barack Obama.”

The world, in particular the EU, has watched this rolling political nightmare with increasing alarm, and even the EU’s 2015 and 2018 attempts to essentially impeach Orbán have backfired.

EU criticism of him increased his two reelection margins, as his handmaids in the Hungarian media proclaimed him the victim of a European “deep state.” They say that meddling foreigners, particularly Jewish financier George Soros (who, ironically, once paid for young Orbán to attend college in Britain), are bent on imposing “tyrannical” government strictures on Hungary.

In May 2020, the same month Rudy Giuliani said he had a former Ukrainian prosecutor willing to testify that Joe Biden was corrupt, Donald Trump invited Orbán to the White House for a state visit; Orbán became one of Trump’s two primary sources of lies about how Ukraine’s Zelenskyy allegedly tried to sabotage the U.S. president.

Orbán has helped violent theocrats fully reinvent Christianity in Hungary, embracing a hard-right movement within the Catholic Church and among Protestant evangelicals.

He reshaped Hungary’s abortion laws to make it extremely difficult for a woman to terminate a pregnancy (it must threaten the life of the mother or be the result of a crime).

The Central European University fled Hungary in the face of growing threats of violence against progressive religious organizations, a ban on classes, and the tight embrace of rightwing churches by the government. Its rector, Michael Ignatieff, said:

“There’s just no doubt that this is organized as a way of saying that ‘Christianity’ means ‘white conservative Europe’. It’s a trope. Say the world ‘Christian’ and it says everything else that you want to say.”

Thus, Trump told Orbán:

“You have been great with respect to Christian communities…and we appreciate that very much.”

In a rally three months before his White House meeting with Trump, Orbán said that countries that accept non-Christian or non-white refugees are producing “mixed-race nations,” a trope frequently used in American rightwing media today.

Women in Hungary have been marginalized since Orbán came to power, both in business and in government. As the Hungarian Spectrum notes:

“According to him, Hungarian politics is built on ‘continual character assassination,’ which … ‘women cannot endure.’”

As noted in The Guardian in 2018:

“Orbán’s Fidesz party and its coalition partners the Christian Democrats have 133 MPs between them, of whom just 11 are women.”

Orbán is now ruthlessly using his own nation’s diplomatic and criminal justice systems to aid foreign criminal oligarchs, having surrounded himself with corrupt yes-men.

He has increasingly turned Hungary into a place of refuge for corrupt oligarchs and neofascists from other nations, most famously granting “asylum to convicted felon, fascist oligarch, and former Prime Minister of Macedonia Nikola Gruevski” in 2018.

Orbán is the only leader of an EU nation to refuse to condemn Putin for his slaughter in Ukraine, saying he doesn’t want to get “between the Ukrainian anvil and the Russian sledgehammer.”

He refers to those in Hungary who support Ukraine as “warmongers,” and refuses to participate in the EU embargoes of Russian fossil fuels.

Orbán has now largely crushed dissent in Hungary, arresting opposition politicians, “troublemakers,” and members of the independent press.

As Zach Beauchamp writes for Vox:

“At dawn on a Tuesday in May, the police took a man named András from his home in northeastern Hungary. His alleged crime? Writing a Facebook post that called the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a ‘dictator.’”

Orbán’s hard-right party is also reaching out to other white supremacist parties in Europe to forge alliances to overthrow the “liberal order” of the EU.

Conservatives in America are taking notice and writing glowing pieces about him, as rightwing movements across the world draw inspiration from both Orbán and Putin.

The international movement away from democracy and toward strongman authoritarian fascist and neofascist government is growing, and Viktor Orbán is one of its rising stars.

According to the Freedom in the World 2020 Report from Freedom House, 25 of the world’s 41 established democracies experienced net losses in 2019, and the report downgraded the freedom scores of 73 countries, representing 75 percent of the global population.

Putin, Xi, and Orbán are leaders of this movement, with Orbán having the greatest influence over the American Republican Party.

The tight embrace he’s held with by rightwing hate radio, Fox “News,” the GOP, and our domestic conservative movement make clear the danger of America sliding into the sort of “soft fascism” that Viktor Orbán has pioneered in Hungary.

If you want to see the GOP’s vision of America’s future, just visit that nation.

Forewarned is forearmed. Spread the word.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

Pisces Moon is couched as a memoir of Valentine’s journey to Southeast Asia in the early 1990s. His book, The Phoenix Program, the best book on the subject I’ve ever read, had caught the eye of The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Valentine was ‘hired’as a consultant to a documentary series the BBC was making about the CIA’s activities in South Vietnam. However, other consultants on the project more sympathetic to the crimes of the CIA such as John Ranelagh, objected to Valentine’s presence and once he arrived in Southeast Asia, he received little support from the feckless BBC; this even though he ‘muled’ ten grand to the BBC’s rep in Vietnam.

Largely left high and dry by the BBC, Valentine links up with locals and ex-pats alike and recalls his adventures including being briefly detained in Vietnam. The memoir/travel framework serves as a contemporary grounding for Valentine’s impeccable research. And his major reason for traveling to Indo-China, to interview three retired CIA station chiefs living in Thailand, Anthony Poshepny, John Shirley and William Young, do produce some revelatory results.

Valentine is a consummate researcher and interviewer with an amazing ability to get criminals to speak openly about their crimes. In fact, as I have observed over the years — confirmed by Valentine — these miscreants even, or especially, at the highest levels of the clandestine world like to brag about their international felonies.

Valentine, to this purpose, reprises Kathy Kadane’s reporting in the New York Times, concerning the slaughter of 900,000 Indonesians after the US mastered coup against Sukarno. Kadane told me personally that two CIA directors, William Colby and Richard Helms, had literally bragged about their parts in the wholesale butchery of nearly a million people. The same with Robert J. Martens, political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, who provided lists of ‘communists’ to the Indonesian military and the CIA’s Deputy Station Chief in Jakarta, Joseph Lazarsky. After a couple or three of scotches and a pretty face, these psychos probably thought this turned Kadane on, as these homicidal maniacs swaggered through their tales of mass murder. Valentine describes Bill Young as being “relatively open and held little back”.

So, in agreement with anthropologist Cora Du Bois, that there are cultural types, Valentine too describes the CIA as being made up of “criminal, sociopathic (often psychopathic), capitalist, ultraconservative, racist, sexist and fascist.” As Lenny Bruce joked apropos the Richard Daley Chicago Democratic Machine, “They’re so corrupt it’s thrilling”.

Valentine’s ability to make murderous thugs confess their crimes along with his deep research makes for an exhilarating brew. And Pisces Moon is no exception. Whether it’s John Muldoon, Richard Secord, Tom Clines or The Blond Ghost, Ted Shackley, Valentine has interviewed them all. And that takes guts.

I’m reminded of the way John Pilger cringed in fear when Duane ‘Dewey’ Clarridge, drunk as a skunk and reeking violence, challenged him over the number of Chileans the US had proxy murdered after the Salvador Allende coup during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. I don’t know if it’s his excellent preparation or because Doug looks so goddamn straight, which makes these black bag felons spill the beans. But Valentine has shown uncommon courage and composure taking them on as well as a detailed knowledge which demonstrates to them he is a serious interlocutor and not another media hack.

And as a result, Valentine in Pisces Moon moves seamlessly from facts culled from his interviews to his deep research into the background, the historical context where the new information fits in like pieces of a historically credible conspiratorial puzzle. As he states on page 142 of Pisces Moon, “My visits to Udon, Chiang Mai, Phuket and Bangkok provide me now with a means to chart the extent of CIA operations and drug trafficking in Southeast Asia. What follows is a summary of the origins of that apparatus, which will help put my interviews with Poshepny, Young and Shirley in perspective.” Then follows one of many historical accounts too rich in detail and source material to reprise here.

For me, the headlong plunge into the historical data is the most exciting part of this excellent book. And for anyone familiar with the material, Pisces Moon is an essential update. All the old perps are here from Vang Pao to Bill Casey, Lucien Conein to Paul Hellilwell, Ed Lansdale to Donald Gregg, Frank Nugen to Michael Hand, George White to Sidney Gottlieb etc. But as Valentine brilliantly demonstrates, the devil is in the details and the details in their own unique sociopathic way are exhilarating. Nobody writes more vivid, in your face historical reportage than Valentine.

For example, here’s bit of Valentine on the Hmong tribesmen and Vang Pao:

CIA case officers were also busy recruiting hilltribe chiefs with no loyalty to the indigenous lowland Laotians. Vang Pao, military commander of the Hmong tribe that had migrated from China in the 18^th century and settle on mountain tops in northeast Laos, was by far the most important. Not only were the Hmong outsiders, but Pao had proved himself as a soldier while fighting for the French at Dien Bien Phu, where the French made there last stand before turning Vietnam over to the Vietnamese in 1954. Located just inside Vietnam some 250 winding miles north to Luang Prabang, Dien Bien Phu was important for having been the center of the French opium trade since 1841. Notably, the French had relied on the Hmong in the surrounding mountains for their opium supply, not to the lowland White Thais who had inhabited the region for over a thousand years.

Or this corruption titbit about Deputy Director of the OSS in China, Willis Bird and Director of OSS ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan:

Central in the CIA’s underworld was Willis Bird, who surfaced after the war [WWII] in Manila where, on behalf of outgoing OSS Director William Donovan, he managed the disposal of military surplus worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As OSS officer Oliver Caldwell observed, ‘It became wise for the colonel [e.g. Bird] to leave the Philippines without stopping over in Washington. The last I heard of him, he was living in Thailand with a bevy of beautiful Thai girls.’

There has been much excellent detailed reporting on the connection between the CIA and the international drug trade from Alfred J. McCoy’s groundbreaking Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, to Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press; to Peter Dale Scott’s Cocaine Politics and most recently Aaron Good’s primer for the grandchildren, American Exception: Empire & the Deep State.

All of Valentine’s books including Pisces Moon abide in the pantheon of works on this most crucial topic. And all of these works expose the rot of American imperialism and its clandestine services, which, on the whole, helps explain America’s current decline. The US Evil Empire is on the wane and no doubt this is in large part a result of the institutionalized murder, theft and perfidy that are at the heart of US foreign policy. With the rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its commitment to peaceful development, the international community has caught on to such US militarily destabilizing efforts like Africom.

But this decline is, also, in no small part due to the efforts of courageous historians like Douglas Valentine and books like Pisces Moon. On page 213 of Pisces Moon, Valentine quotes William Burroughs calling the present collapse of US hegemony, “the backlash and bad karma of empire”.

In 1584, in the age of Elizabethan piracy and Spanish conquest, Giordano Bruno in his La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper, 1584) trumps Burroughs remark by 400 years. Bruno prophecies the future decline of the West in terms of the Age of Discovery and European Imperialism:

The helmsmen of explorations have discovered how to disturb the peace of others, to profane the guardian spirits of their countries, to mix what prudent nature has separated, to redouble men’s desires by commerce, to add the vices of one people to those of the other, to propagate new follies by force and set up unheard-of lunacies where they did not exist before, and finally to give out the stronger as the wiser. They have shown men new ways, new instruments, and new arts by which to tyrannize over and assassinate one another. Thanks to such deeds, a time will come when other peoples, having learned from the injuries they suffered, will know how and be able, as circumstances change, to pay back to us, in similar forms or worse ones, the consequences of these pernicious inventions.

Bad ‘karma’ indeed. And Douglas Valentine is one of our best chroniclers of this grand ‘karmic’ collapse. Pisces Moon gives ample context to the US’s moral, ethical and material tumble. It is an essential read.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlo Parcelli.

Two dozen House and Senate lawmakers led by Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced legislation Tuesday that would ban members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from trading individual stocks, reprising an effort that gained momentum last year before fizzling out ahead of the November midterms.

"Congressional stock trading is deeply corrupt," Merkley said in a statement. "We are elected to serve the public, not our portfolios. And no member should vote on bills biased by the character of their holdings."

The Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks (ETHICS) Act would require lawmakers who own individual stocks, securities, commodities, or futures to divest entirely, diversify their holdings into mutual funds or other permitted assets, or place their holdings in a blind trust.

The bill also "addresses concerns about Qualified Blind Trusts not being truly blind with new, enhanced provisions requiring divestiture of assets that go into the Qualified Blind Trust," according to Merkley's office.

Members of Congress found to have violated the bill's provisions would be fined an amount that is at least equal to their monthly pay.

"Lawmakers should not be able to profit off the same companies that they are regulating," Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), a Senate cosponsor, said at a press conference introducing the bill. "Lawmakers should be focused on getting results for their constituents—not lining their own pockets."

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who is leading the House version of the bill alongside Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas)—the only Republican co-sponsor of the new legislation—said Tuesday that "when members of Congress trade in securities while making decisions affecting their value, there is an unavoidable potential conflict of interest."

A New York Times investigation published last September found that between 2019 and 2021, nearly 100 members of Congress reported trades in companies that "intersected with their congressional work or reported similar transactions by their spouse or a dependent child."

"The ETHICS Act is the most comprehensive legislation ever proposed to eliminate even the possibility of these conflicts of interest and ensure public servants put their constituents first by banning members and their immediate families from owning or trading stocks," Krishnamoorthi said Tuesday.

Efforts to bar members of Congress from trading stock stalled at the tail-end of last year even after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) publicly dropped her earlier opposition to a proposed ban.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who was the second-ranking Democrat at the time, remained opposed to a stock trading ban throughout the year, and no proposal reached the House floor for a vote.

In the Senate, Merkley faced backlash from watchdog groups and ethics experts who accused him of slow-walking the legislation ahead of the November elections, forcing lawmakers to punt their efforts into 2023.

A number of advocacy groups, including the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, voiced support for the ETHICS Act, calling it "long overdue."

"The fact that members of Congress still trade stocks and other similar investment assets is an ethical travesty that fuels increasing public distrust in government," Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, senior government affairs manager at POGO, said in a statement. "This is why Senator Merkley and his colleagues should be applauded for their leadership in their efforts to solve this problem by introducing the ETHICS Act, the strongest and most comprehensive congressional stock trading legislation to date."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The Department of Justice has released a scathing report accusing the Louisville, Kentucky, police department of unlawfully discriminating against the city’s Black population, as well as against people with behavioral health disabilities. The report concludes an investigation that began after the police killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot dead in her own home during a no-knock police raid on March 13, 2020. The DOJ also announced the establishment of a consent decree with Louisville police and an independent monitor who will oversee police reforms. “What we have are systems that absolutely need to be disrupted,” says Sadiqa Reynolds, longtime attorney and community activist in Louisville.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photograph Source: RegionalQueenslander – CC BY-SA 4.0

There is nothing Gautam Adani will not do for money.  In this sense, he is admirably dedicated to greed, so much so he has become its foremost caricature worthy of permanent enthronement.  Mark this man’s name in the scriptures of eternity: There was nothing he did not do for the filthy lucre.

For the unfamiliar reader, the $218 billion Adani imperium, one specialising in transport, infrastructure, and mining, is vast, with far reaching feelers, prongs and tentacles that have made their mark in a number of countries.  Along the way, Adani’s companies have made quite a name for themselves.  Employment laws have been breached and treated with disdain.  Broader human rights abuses have featured.  Governments and regulators have been lied to.  No environment is ecologically safe from the company’s activities, despite their assertions to the contrary.

The gallivanting, amoral CEO has also made quite a habit of cultivating politicians across the globe.  These representatives, weaklings as they are, have shown themselves amenable to changing their minds in the face of Adani’s overtures.

Despite all their efforts, GA and key members of the group, of which 8 hail from his family, have not been immune from criticism.  A number of reports abound from non-government organisations and activists documenting a most predatory record.  But the evaluation from the short seller Hindenburg Research, whose findings were published last month, approached the conduct of the conglomerate Adani Group a bit differently.

The central claim of the US investment firm is that the group has “engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.”  Having spoken to dozens of individuals, including former senior executives, and conducting a review of thousands of documents and visiting a number of sites across a half-dozen countries, the picture that emerges is even uglier than first thought.

For one, the image of financial security and reliable solvency comes across as a fiction.  In addition to grossly inflated valuations, the Adani companies have taken on substantial debt.  Shares of inflated stock have been pledged in order to secure loans.

A sense of the false accounting picture given by Adani’s accounts can be gathered from the practices of Gautam Adani’s younger brother, Rajesh, who was accused by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) for being a key figure in a diamond import/export trading scheme in 2004-2005.  Rajesh had used a number of offshore shell companies to generate artificial turnover.  Gautam’s brother-in-law, Samir Vota, was also in on the scheme, making a number of false statements to the regulators.

The saga of corrupt behaviour continues through the activities of Vinod Adani, Gautam’s older brother.  This most shady of figures plays a key role in managing dozens of shell entities that serve the functions of stock manipulation and money laundering.  The latter part is achieved through using money from Adani’s private companies to bloat the balance sheets of the listed companies.

Adani’s response to the claims, one running into 413 mostly irrelevant pages, was to accuse the US firm of being in “flagrant breach of applicable securities and foreign exchange laws”, conduct becoming the “Madoffs of Manhattan”.  A nationalist narrative was also injected into the rebuttal: to attack the Adani Group was nothing less than attacking Indian success itself.

Hindenburg Research’s counter to such bluster was chastening.  India, “a vibrant democracy and an emerging superpower with an exciting future”, was being “held back by the Adani Group, which has draped itself in the Indian flag while systematically looting the nation.”

Since January 24, the date chosen by Hindenburg Research to release its findings, Gautam Adani’s unnaturally inflated personal wealth has been pared back.  From being the third richest man, he is now out of the top 20.  Within days, the conglomerate’s market value was wiped to the striking sum of $113.6 billion.  The company has promised to prepay loans with $1.1 billion and call off its secondary share sale.  The collateral used by the companies to secure funds has also suffered a fall in value.

Despite the rich number of allegations directed at Gautam, the family and his associates, another country and its government have fallen under the group’s spell.  On January 31, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Adani shook hands to formally confirm the $1.18 billion sale of the port of Haifa that had been agreed upon earlier in the month.  The Indian billionaire was wistfully nostalgic on the occasion, noting that Indian troops had “led, in 1918, one of the greatest cavalry charges in military history” in Haifa.

Netanyahu hopes to leverage investments made in the Haifa project to create a trade route linking the Mediterranean and the Gulf, thereby bypassing the Suez Canal.  In the words of the overly confident Israeli Prime Minister, Haifa would “become the entry point and exit point for a vast number of goods that will reach the Mediterranean and Europe directly, without having to go around the Arabian peninsula.”

To do so, the Abraham Accords are being touted as the economic centrepiece, enabling rail links to be established in Saudi Arabia, through Jordan and ultimately to Haifa port itself.  But Netanyahu, himself no creature to accusations of corruption, is facing a figure and business partner in freefall.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Ramsay.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday formally blocked Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from serving on the House Intelligence Committee and is expected to hold a floor vote to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from the chamber's foreign affairs panel, moves that the Democratic lawmakers slammed as "political vengeance."

"It's disappointing but not surprising that Kevin McCarthy has capitulated to the right wing of his caucus, undermining the integrity of the Congress, and harming our national security in the process," the Democrats said in a joint statement, calling the push to keep them off committees the product of a "corrupt bargain" that the Republican leader struck "in his desperate, and nearly failed, attempt to win the speakership."

"Despite these efforts, McCarthy won't be successful," the lawmakers added. "We will continue to speak out against extremism and doggedly defend our democracy."

The House speaker has final authority over who sits on the Intelligence Committee, allowing McCarthy (R-Calif.) to unilaterally block Schiff (D-Calif.) and Swalwell (D-Calif.) from the panel even after Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) requested that they be reappointed.

But a floor vote will be required to remove Omar from her spot on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which she has used to grill officials on the sordid history of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, speak out against military intervention, and advocate for global human rights.

Omar has argued that the GOP push to strip her committee assignments is rooted in bigotry.

"I do not actually think that he has a reason outside of me being Muslim and thinking I should not be," Omar said of McCarthy earlier this month.

Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel at Muslim Advocates, a national civil rights group, said in a recent interview with HuffPost that "by stripping Rep. Omar of her committees, McCarthy kills two birds with one stone: He attempts to silence an effective, principled voice on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and he stokes the ugly culture of anti-Muslim hate for cheap political points."

McCarthy and other Republicans have also falsely accused Omar of antisemitism, an allegation that has drawn backlash from progressive Jewish organizations.

"We categorically reject the suggestion that any of her policy positions or statements merit disqualification from her role on the committee," Ameinu, Americans for Peace Now, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, Habonim Dror North America, J Street, New Israel Fund, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and T'ruah said in a statement last month.

"McCarthy's pledge seems especially exploitative in light of the rampant promotion of antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories by him and his top deputies amid a surge in dangerous right-wing antisemitism," the groups added. "He posted (and later deleted) a tweet charging that George Soros and two other billionaires of Jewish descent were seeking to 'buy' an election. His newly elected Whip Tom Emmer said the same people 'essentially bought control of Congress.' Meanwhile, Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik has promoted the deadly antisemitic 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory."

McCarthy has even faced some pushback from members of his caucus who oppose removing Omar and other Democrats from their committee seats.

"Two wrongs do not make a right," Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) said in a statement Tuesday, pointing to House Democrats' decision in 2021 to remove Reps. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from committees for promoting odious conspiracy theories and violence.

Both far-right Republicans have been reinstated to committees under the new House GOP majority.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has also signaled she would vote against removing Omar from committees.

As for Schiff and Swalwell, McCarthy claimed in a letter to Jeffries on Tuesday that the two Democrats participated in the "misuse" of the House Intelligence Committee during the 116th and 117th sessions of Congress.

The Washington Post reported that "McCarthy has argued that both Schiff and Swalwell are unfit to serve on the committee, using Schiff's work conducting the first impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump and Swalwell's alleged ties to a Chinese intelligence operative. There has been no evidence of wrongdoing in relation to the allegation against Swalwell."

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Schiff accused McCarthy of "carrying the dirty water" for the twice-impeached former president.

"This is petty, political payback for investigating Donald Trump," Schiff added on Twitter.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The post A Corrupt and Clueless Supreme Court appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jim Hightower.

Question: How many legs does a dog have if you count the tail as a leg? Answer: Four — calling the tail a leg doesn't make it one.

Likewise, calling a small group of partisan lawyers a "supreme" court doesn't make it one. There's nothing supreme about the six-pack of far-right-wing political activists who are presently soiling our people's ideals of justice by proclaiming their own antidemocratic biases to be the law of the land. On issues of economic fairness, women's rights, racial justice, corporate supremacy, environmental protection, theocratic rule and other fundamentals, these unelected, black-robed extremists are imposing an illegitimate elitist agenda on America that the people do not want and ultimately will not tolerate.

Indeed, the imperiousness of the six ruling judges has already caused the court's public approval rating to plummet, to a mere 38%, an historic low that ranks down there with former President Donald Trump, and threatens to go as low as Congress.

This has led to a flurry of officials attesting to the honesty and political impartiality of the reigning supremes. Unfortunately for the court, these ardent defenders were the six culprits themselves.

The "integrity of the judiciary is in my bones," pontificated Neil Gorsuch, who now stands accused of having lied to senators to win his lifetime appointment.

We don't have to accept rule by an illegitimate court.

"(We are not) a bunch of partisan hacks," wailed Amy Coney Barrett, a partisan extremist jammed onto the court in a partisan ploy by Trump in the last few hours of his presidency.

"Judges are not politicians," protested John Roberts, who became Chief Justice because he was a rabid political lawyer who pushed the Supreme Court in 2000 to reject the rights of voters and install George W. Bush as president.

As many of its own members privately admit, Congress has become a pay-to-play lawmaking casino — closed to commoners but offering full-service access to corporate powers.

But the Supreme Court is another government entity that's even more aloof from workaday people — and it has become a handmaiden to the corporate elites trying to increase their dominance over us. The six-member, right-wing majority on this secretive powerhouse now routinely vetoes efforts by workers, environmentalist, students, local officials, voters and all others who try to rein in corporate greed and abuses.

Appointed for lifetime terms, this autocratic tribune takes pride in being sealed off from democracy, even bragging that they make rulings without being influenced by special interests. But wait — in makeup and ideology, today's court majority is a special interest, for it consists of corporate and right-wing lawyers who've obtained their wealth and position by loyally serving corporate power. And far from now being isolated from moneyed elites, the judges regularly socialize with them and attend their closed-door political meetings.

There's even a special little club, called The Supreme Court Historical Society, that frequently reveals the cozy, symbiotic relationship that exists between today's judicial and corporate cliques. Such giants as Chevron, Goldman Sachs, AT&T and Home Depot pay millions of dollars to this clubby society, gaining notice by and the appreciation of the supremes. And, yes, these special interest gifts to the court are gratefully accepted, even when the corporations have active cases before the court, seeking favorable rulings from the very judges they're glad-handing at Society soirees.

Of course, the judges insist there's no conflict of interest, because this access to them is "open to all." Sure — all who can pay $25,000 and up to get inside! Yet the clueless judges wonder why their credibility is in the ditch. Remember, in America, The People are supreme! We don't have to accept rule by an illegitimate court. For reform, go to FixTheCourt.com.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jim Hightower.

In one of their first acts in the majority, House Republicans on Monday approved a rules package that will dramatically hinder the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent body tasked with investigating complaints about sitting lawmakers.

The change came as a number of House Republicans—including newly elected Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.)—are facing growing scrutiny for alleged ethics violations that range from potentially running afoul of campaign finance laws to defying congressional subpoenas issued as part of the January 6 investigation.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) opposed the establishment of the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) in 2008, and Republicans have repeatedly targeted the body in the years since its creation.

"It speaks volumes that House Republicans' first order of business after electing Kevin McCarthy as speaker is to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics, making it easier for House members—including those complicit in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election—to evade responsibility for misconduct," said Sean Eldridge, the founder and president of Stand Up America.

"This kind of self-serving behavior is why many Americans have lost faith in politics," Eldridge added. "McCarthy and his fellow MAGA Republicans have sent a clear message about their priorities and who is actually in charge in the new House: corrupt politicians."

The changes enacted by the House GOP on Monday impose an eight-year term limit on the eight members of the OCE, a change that will force out three of the four Democrats currently sitting on the board.

The new rules will also require OCE to hire all of its staff for the 118th Congress within a period of 30 days, a restriction that outside ethics watchdogs say "essentially limits any hiring for the office, including investigative staffers, to an impossibly brief period that would make it extremely difficult to rigorously assess candidates for these high-stakes jobs."

"Additionally," notes the Campaign Legal Center, "the 30-day hiring period applies to the entire 118th Congress, meaning that regardless of when a vacancy at the OCE occurs under this rule, the position cannot be filled."

Any new hires would require the approval of at least four OCE board members.

"This is about protecting their ethically-challenged members like fraudster George Santos or January 6 subpoena-defying Jim Jordan from accountability."

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) warned the changes enacted by House Republicans late Monday are "a disaster for everyone except corrupt politicians."

Kyle Herrig, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US, said in a statement that "this is about protecting their ethically-challenged members like fraudster George Santos or January 6 subpoena-defying Jim Jordan from accountability—or perhaps in anticipation of a new wave of corruption allegations and ethics violations from other MAGA extremists."

"It's telling that the very first action of the incoming MAGA Republican-led House was to kneecap a bipartisan office that oversees congressional ethics," said Herrig. "There's no good reason to make it easier for members to get away with ethics violations, which only invites problematic behavior. It sends a clear message that the MAGA House is more interested in sweeping any corruption amongst their ranks under the rug and performing political stunts against the Biden administration than they are doing anything constructive."

Santos, who has admitted to lying about numerous aspects of his background and is facing campaign finance complaints, celebrated the OCE changes as "fantastic" and called them "a good thing for transparency."

The Guardiannoted Monday that "as House Republicans moved to shield themselves from potential ethics investigations, they expanded their own investigative ability through the adoption of the rules package that allows for the creation of the special subcommittee to probe the Justice Department and intelligence agencies."

"The text of the resolution creating the subcommittee—scheduled for a vote on Tuesday—on 'the weaponization of the federal government' authorizes it to investigate any part of the federal government, including 'ongoing criminal investigations,' which Republicans have indicated could extend to probes against Trump," the newspaper reported.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Former opposition Sodelpa member Mick Beddoes has appealed to the party’s management board to end the 16-year rule of Voreqe Bainimarama’s FijiFirst government.

In an open letter on his official Facebook page to Sodelpa vice-president Ro Teimumu Kepa, president Ratu Manoa Roragaca, leader Viliame Gavoka and the management board today, Beddoes said: “After many years of inner turmoil, you have the entire country holding their breath to hear your decision, which will either deliver to our people a Christmas gift unlike any we have had for the past 16 years or you will knowingly condemn us all to another four more years of undeserved vindictive, bullying, corrupt, self serving, self enriching and uncaring governance.”

He added that the decision to stay with the people was a “no brainer” to prevent avoid a “hung” parliament.

• READ MORE: Fiji elections: Bainimarama’s FijiFirst party fails to gain parliament majority
• Fiji elections: Rabuka calls for calm after police interrogation
• Fiji elections: Alliance leads early vote tally – Bainimarama heads candidates
• Fiji elections: ‘We have evidence’ People’s Alliance ahead, says Rabuka
• Fiji elections: Rabuka raises concern over results app glitch
• Provisional results in Fiji election show ruling FijiFirst party in the lead
• Other Fiji election reports

The official results indicated that FijiFirst had lost its majority with just 26 members of Parliament — the same combined number as the opposition coalition of the People’s Alliance led by former 1987 coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka (21 members) and the National Federation Party (5 seats).

Soldelpa – the only other party of nine contesting the general elections to get across the 5 percent threshold — hold the balance of power with three seats.

“While the decision to stay with the greater interest of all our people, is a ‘no brainer’ I do appreciate the need for the party to take into account the interests and aspirations of its membership,” Beddoes said.

“However, in doing so it has to be weighed against the greater interest of our nation given we have all witnessed in broad daylight and experienced over the past 16 years the greed and self enrichment by the narrow interests of the favored few and as the voting thus far has very clearly indicated por people want change and we as opposition political leaders are ‘obliged to deliver this’ as this is what we promised.”

‘Theft’ of the Fijian name
“Need I remind you that this is the very same government who raided your home at night and took you in for interrogation because you offered to host the Methodist Church Conference, this is the same government who from 2007 to 2013 imposed more than 17 derogatory decrees against your own people, which among other things included the ‘theft’ of the name Fijian from your people by a stroke of a pen, and they banned the right of educated iTaukei students from attending and supporting their respective provincial councils.

“They have excluded your own people from chair positions and board appointments by a margin of 80 percent from all government entities under the guise of ‘merit based’ appointments.

“When they had the opportunity to remove all these oppressive and discriminatory decrees at the time they drafted and imposed their 2013 constitution prior to the 2014 elections, they did not and it remains the law against your people today and they built in provision into the constitution that makes amendments to the constitution near impossible.

“This government’s policies and deliberate discrimination against your own people has resulted your people accounting for 75 percent of our 208,256 absolute poorest citizens, which means more than 156,192 of your own people live in absolute poverty despite owning 89 percent of all the land and you want to even ‘consider’ talking to them?”

Beddoes said Ro Teimumu led Soldelpa in the first opposition challenge that resulted in their first national platform from which to speak out and he was part of the team then.

“In that first effort in 2014, Sodelpa and its opposition colleagues received 202,650 votes to FijiFirst’s 293,714, we were 91,064 short. In our second effort in 2018, we increased our support level to 227,094 vs FijiFirst’s 227,241 and reduced their advantage to just 147 votes.

“Today while we are all still trying to figure out where all the extra votes came from the latest vote tally show we are at this time 58,635 votes ahead and you, Marama, are once again in a position with Bill and your management board to complete the mission we all started back in 2007 and remove the cruel, vindictive, bullying, arrogant, disrespectful and uncaring government that FijiFirst is.

“I beg you Marama, Ratu Manoa and you Bill and your management board, please do not waiver from our initial promise of change and finish the mission we started 15 years ago and end our 16 years of suffering and please give our people the Christmas gift they all deserve.”

Sodelpa in negotiations with both sides
SBS News reports that Sodelpa is in negotiations with both the FijiFirst government and People’s Alliance over which it will support with its balance of power.

Bainimarama’s FijiFirst party is the largest single party with 42.5 per cent of the vote while People’s Alliance and the NFP — which have already said they would join forces — sit at 36 and nine percent respectively.

Sodelpa holds just over five percent of the vote.

Sodelpa general secretary Lenaitasi Duru said today it would enter a second round of negotiations with both parties.

Talebula Kate is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.

Rabuka says “no deal signed yet. Negotiations are ongoing” with Sodelpa. #FijiVotes2022 https://t.co/yTsVanBO2K pic.twitter.com/lLAb744TbU

— Kelvin Anthony (@kelvinfiji) December 18, 2022

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Three months after their extradition from Thailand to face bribery and money laundering charges in the United States, two naturalised Marshallese citizens pleaded guilty on Friday in a New York court to conspiring to violate the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in connection with a multi-year scheme to bribe government officials in the Marshall Islands to pass legislation to establish a special investment zone in this western Pacific nation.

Cary Yan and Gina Zhou had been charged with three counts each of violating the FCPA and two counts of money laundering.

They pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the FCPA and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York dismissed the other four charges. They are naturalised Marshall Islands citizens originally from the People’s Republic of China.

• READ MORE: Two defendants plead guilty to conspiring to bribe high-level officials of the Republic of the Marshall Islands

“As they have now admitted, the defendants sought to undermine the democratic processes of the Republic of the Marshall Islands through bribery in order to advance their own financial interests,” US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.

“I commend the career prosecutors of this Office and our law enforcement partners for bringing this corruption to light and ensuring that justice is done.”

Yan, 51, and Zhou, 35, are awaiting sentencing. They have been held without bail pending final disposition of the case.

Yan faces a maximum five-year term in prison and a fine of up to US$200,000, while Zhou faces a maximum prison term of three years and 10 months and a fine of up to US$150,000, according to the plea agreement between their defence attorneys and the SDNY prosecutors.

“Beginning at least in 2016, Yan and Zhou began communicating and meeting with Marshall Islands officials in both New York City and the Marshall Islands concerning the development of a semi-autonomous region within a part of the Marshall Islands known as the Rongelap Atoll,” said the US indictment that was unsealed on September 2 on Yan and Zhou’s arrival in New York following extradition from Thailand.

‘Attracting investors’
“The creation of the proposed semi-autonomous region was intended by Yan, Zhou, and those associated with them to obtain business by, among other things, allowing Yan and Zhou to attract investors to participate in economic and social development projects that Yan, Zhou, and others promised would occur in the semi-autonomous region.”

Their aim was to establish the Rongelap Atoll Special Administrative Region (RASAR). But because it ran afoul of the Marshall Islands constitution and required exemption from multiple Marshall Islands legal oversight and enforcement provisions, President Hilda Heine’s administration refused to introduce the proposed RASAR legislation to Nitijela (parliament) for consideration in 2018.

Yan and leading Marshall Islands officials had officially launched the RASAR plan in Hong Kong in April 2018, but never met legal requirements to move the plan forward in the Marshall Islands.

Starting in early 2018 and “continuing until at least on or about November 1, 2018, Yan and Zhou offered and provided a series of cash bribes and other incentives to obtain the support of Marshall Islands legislators for the RASAR bill,” said the US indictment.

Heine’s administration held off the attempt to push RASAR legislation into parliament in late 2018 and survived an attempt to unseat Heine through a vote of no confidence in November.

After the national election a year later, when Nitijela reconvened in January 2020, Heine lost the presidency to David Kabua.

Shortly after the new government took office in 2020, “Yan and Zhou began emailing and meeting with certain Marshall Islands officials to continue their plan to create the RASAR,” said US prosecutors.

Law consideration
“In or about late February 2020, the Marshall Islands legislature began considering a resolution that would endorse the concept of the RASAR, a preliminary step that would allow the legislature to enact the more detailed RASAR Bill at a later date.”

US prosecutors said that in early March, “Yan and Zhou met with a close relative of a member of the Marshall Islands legislature in the Marshall Islands.

During the meeting, Yan and Zhou gave the relative $7000 in cash to pass on to the official, specifying that this money would be used to induce and influence other Marshall Islands legislators to support the RASAR Resolution.

“Yan and Zhou further stated, in sum, that they knew that the official needed more than $7000 for this purpose and that (they) would soon obtain additional cash for the official.”

US prosecutors said that at this meeting in early March 2020, Yan and Zhou “also discussed having previously brought larger sums of cash into the Marshall Islands through the United States and that they planned to do so again in the future”.

By the third week of March 2020, the Nitijela passed the RASAR Resolution “with the support of legislators to whom Zhou and Yan had provided bribes and other incentives,” said the prosecutors.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photo by Darren Halstead

According to Axis Research, since 2000, at least 76 countries have jailed or prosecuted their former leaders. Many were democracies, including established functioning ones such as Brazil, Israel, France, and South Korea. America is the exception; no former president has been indicted for a crime.

Has our image of exceptionalism, seeing ourselves as the most democratic and free republic, enthralled us from applying the law to our former leaders? Prosecuting former President Donald Trump may break that spell.

In a democratic republic, after their term in office ends, the person who was the executive returns to the same status as everyone else; being a citizen of that nation—a nation where all citizens have the same legal rights and responsibilities. Consequently, a former executive must obey the laws, no matter how long they served as the executive or how popular they were while in office. This is the second important characteristic of a democratic republic.

This adherence to the laws is not true of countries that label themselves as “republics” where the executive obtains or remains in office without being freely elected. As a result, the law never applies to the executive, e.g., the Republic of Cuba, Republic of China, Republic of Belarus, etc., Or a “banana republic,” which some Republicans accuse our government of becoming when the FBI began investigating Trump for violating the law.

A test measuring a democratic republic’s durability is when a former executive must submit to the law. It not only stresses that nation’s institutions but also that society’s culture of accepting the democratic process.

If former President Donald Trump is charged with a crime that the FBI is investigating, we will face that test. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon accused former Vice President Mike Pence of being “Just a disgusting coward” when Pence asked Republicans to stop attacking the FBI over searching Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence, and private clubhouse. In describing the search, Bannon said, “We’re talking about a police state.”

Senator Lindsay Graham followed up with a similar attitude, cautioning that there could be “rioting in the streets” if Trump were indicted. Who was Graham warning? The entire nation? The courts? Anyone who would testify that Trump had broken the law?

MAGA Republicans have said our nation would have violence on the streets if Trump was prosecuted on corruption charges. However, that has not been the case in other democracies where the former executive has either been indicted, tried in court, or found guilty and sentenced to prison.

In Brazil, former President Lula da Silva spent a year and a half in prison

Brazil offers an example where a popular president from the largest political party was arrested and convicted after leaving office. However, there was no rioting in the streets by his supporters.

Former President Luiz Inaction Lula da Silva (aka Lula) was arrested and convicted years after he left office. However, after his Presidency in 2010, BBC reported that he left “as the most popular president in Brazilian history, boasting approval ratings of about 80%.”

In April 2015, the Public Ministry of Brazil opened an investigation into allegations of influence peddling by Lula. A police report stated he had taken illegal bribes from an oil company to benefit his political party and a new presidential campaign.

In July 2017, Lula was convicted on money laundering and corruption charges. A federal judge sentenced him to nine-and-a-half years in prison. However, he only served a year and a half because the sentencing judge was found to be politically biased.

When Lula was arrested, indicted, or sentenced, there was no rioting in the nation’s streets. Sao Paulo did see several street demonstrations in 2017 when Lula was sentenced. But that was it. As the leader of Brazil’s largest party, the social democratic Workers Party, and a popular figure, Lula did not call on his followers to storm the capital or attack the credibility of the court system.

Lula is now running again for president and has a good chance of beating the current far-right president and friend of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro. Trump’s son, Trump Jr., traveled to Brazilia to support Bolsonaro’s reelection. But, without providing evidence, Trump Jr. played the family tune of casting doubt that the electoral process would allow Bolsonaro to win.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted for bribery and fraud

Benjamin Netanyahu served twice as Israel’s Prime Minister, most recently ending in 2021. During his last two terms, there had been an ongoing investigation into alleged bribery, fraud, and breach of trust by him and his close political allies. The police began investigating him at the end of 2016. Netanyahu, like his closest ally Donald Trump, claims to be a victim of a “witch hunt.”

Nevertheless, the police recommended indictments against him, which were officially made in November 2019. Netanyahu remains as Prime Minister but has been on trial at the Jerusalem District Court since May 2020.

His strategy outside the courtroom is to accuse the media of being part of a left-wing coalition and plotting against him and the entire right wing. Although, he appointed the Chief of the Israeli Police and the Attorney General in charge of the investigation. He is pursuing a plea deal within the court system that would put him under house arrest but not in prison.

His attempts to denigrate the court system, the police, and the media, have followed the same pattern as Trump’s, with the exception that he has not questioned the legitimacy of the government to hold elections. Moreover, while there have been demonstrations in his favor and against him, Netanyahu has not called upon his supporters to invade parliament. Consequently, the Israeli Republic is not facing an existential crisis even though Netanyahu is facing criminal charges and possible prison time.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to prison

Donald Trump is not the first former president to have his home searched by the police. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s got that home visit after he completed his term in 2012. Since then, he has been in court for several charges.
In March of last year, Sarkozy received a three-year prison sentence on the specific charge of corruption and influence peddling for trying to obtain information illegally from a judge on a legal case against him.

Then in October of last year, he was found guilty of illegally financing his 2012 presidential bid by exceeding France’s strict electoral rules and sentenced to a year of house arrest. Prosecutors found that his campaign had spent almost twice the legal limit.

He is appealing both convictions. However, even if found guilty in both cases, his punishment may be limited to house arrest and for a limited time.

As expected, his attorney and supporters have dismissed the entire legal process as political. His attorneys initially declared that searching his home would prove “futile” and told reporters that the court’s ruling was “totally baseless and unjustified.” Then, Christian Jacob, the head of Sarkozy’s party, gave his “unfailing support” to Mr. Sarkozy and tweeted, “The severity of the sentence is absolutely disproportionate.”

However, there were no noticeable demonstrations in support of Sarkozy. The only democratic crisis that could be brewing was suggested by Pascal Perrineau, a political science professor at the Sciences Po university. He opined that the convictions of high-level politicians “heighten the mistrust, the impression that they are all corrupt.”

South Korean President Park Geun-hye served five years in prison for corruption 

South Korea’s first female President Park Geun-hye ruled from 2013 to 2017 until she was impeached and convicted on related corruption charges. As the conservative party leader that had ruled South Korea for a decade, Park became president, winning 51.6 percent of the votes.

Unlike the leaders in the three other countries mentioned, she was unpopular while in office. In November 2016, more than one million citizens demonstrated and demanded that she resign or be impeached. She was impeached the following March for leaking government secrets to her confidante, bribery, abuse of power, and coercion.

Interestingly she lost the support of her party. The impeachment easily exceeded the required a two-thirds threshold in their National Assembly. Although it was a secret ballot vote, Washington Post concluded that nearly half of the 128 lawmakers in Park’s party Saenuri had supported the impeachment to remove her from office. They apparently recognized that supporting their accused party’s leader in a public manner would discredit their candidates in elections.

No longer holding office, she lost her immunity, and the court found her guilty on 16 of 18 charges. She was sentenced to 24 years. Her successor pardoned her after serving five years in prison. Korea’s democracy functioned through the entire investigation, impeachment, court trial, and sentencing without accusations of Korea becoming a police state or threatened with street riots.

The Issue of Immunity

Rick Noack of the Washington Post points out that “democratic governments around the world have various safeguards to prevent politically motivated investigations into their elected leadership.” However, they are not an “absolute immunity” that Trump has claimed in his legal battles.

In two cases, Nixon v. Fitzgerald and Clinton v. Jones, the Supreme Court has defined absolute immunity for a president as being confined to his official responsibilities. SCOTUS declared in the Clinton case that absolute immunity does not apply “for unofficial acts grounded purely in the identity of his office.” Consequently, it allowed a civil lawsuit against Bill Clinton to proceed while he was president.

Donald Trump claiming absolute immunity for his unofficial removal of government files from the White House would not be covered. His actions on January 6 may not be as well. In both situations, his plea for absolute immunity could likely end up being decided by SCOTUS. Since the current six reactionary justices have overturned decisions of prior Supreme Courts, Trump may be granted immunity.

Democracies can handle prosecuting former leaders 

America was not the first nation to allow women to vote or ban slavery, but it is still an exceptional republic. It has maintained an orderly transition of governance for over 230 years. America is both a representative democracy and a constitutional republic, i.e., a democratic republic. Based on the date of the constitution, it is the oldest democracy in the world.

It is crucial to treat Donald Trump not as a hero, a villain, or a victim but as a fellow citizen. And he, like the rest of us, must acknowledge that, despite the faults in our governance, laws alone do not keep America stable. Like all societies, ours is held together through norms, the perceived informal rules defining acceptable and appropriate actions that apply to all citizens. If they are abandoned, so will our institutions, as brute power will decide our nation’s fate.

A final footnote: 

MAGA was coined by Donald Trump as Make America Great Again. Some folks see the movement as enabling a more nefarious outcome. Two young people, Joe and Whitney, rechristened MAGA as Make American Government Authoritarian. Their view reflects a growing division in seeing where our country’s future could be headed.

One dire warning came from the International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy. Their 2021 report said, “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Licata.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas faced fresh calls to step down Thursday after new reporting revealed that his wife's involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election was broader than previously known, extending to the battleground state of Wisconsin as well as Arizona.

"Reminder that Clarence Thomas heard election cases while his wife conspired to overthrow democracy."

Emails obtained by the Washington Post and the organization Documented show that Ginni Thomas, a longtime far-right activist with close ties to the conservative dark money network, "messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen," the newspaper reported.

"Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on November 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas," the Post added. "Ginni Thomas' political activism is highly unusual for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, and for years it has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for her husband. She has said that the two of them keep their professional lives separate."

But watchdog groups and Democratic lawmakers have questioned that claim and demanded that Thomas, at the very least, recuse himself from election-related cases—something he notably didn't do while his wife was engaged in attempts to keep former President Donald Trump in power.

"Reminder that Clarence Thomas heard election cases while his wife conspired to overthrow democracy," Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted Thursday. "Clarence Thomas is corrupt as hell and should resign from the Supreme Court."

House Democrats have also called on the party leadership to launch impeachment proceedings against the right-wing justice, a demand backed by more than 1.2 million people across the U.S.

Christina Harvey, executive director of Stand Up America, said in a statement Thursday that "if Clarence Thomas had any shame, he would resign immediately."

"But he doesn't," Harvey continued, "so Congress must act immediately to pass a code of ethics for the Supreme Court that would require justices to recuse themselves in cases where they have an actual or apparent conflict of interest."

The latest revelations from the Post add to the newspaper's previous reporting about Ginni Thomas' messages to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Arizona Republicans in the wake of Trump's election loss.

"Ginni Thomas didn't just push Mark Meadows to overturn the election or urge lawmakers in Arizona to ignore the popular vote," tweeted the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "She also pushed Wisconsin lawmakers to ignore Biden's victory in the state."

"Despite all this, she's still on a federal board," the group added, referring to Thomas' spot on the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board. Trump appointed her to a five-year term on the board in May 2020.

Thomas' actions in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest have drawn the scrutiny of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, an attack fueled by Trump's lies about the presidential election.

The Post reported Thursday that the House panel "asked Thomas to sit for a voluntary interview in June."

"The committee also sought a broad range of documents from her, including any related to plans to overturn the election and all communications with members of Congress and their staff and Justice Department employees," the Post noted. "At the time, Thomas indicated she would comply. 'I can't wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them,' Thomas told the Daily Caller, her former employer."

"Less than two weeks later, on June 28, Paoletta told the committee that while Thomas remained willing to sit for an interview, he did not believe there was 'sufficient basis' for her to do so," the Post added.

The House committee is expected to kick off a new series of hearings on the January 6 attack this month.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Military prosecutors on Thursday asked for prison sentences up to 17 years for two former commanders of Vietnam’s Coast Guard in the latest corruption cases that an analyst said could damage the force’s combat readiness in the South China Sea.

Maj. Gen. Le Van Minh, Commander of the Coast Guard Zone 4 and Maj. Gen. Le Xuan Thanh, Commander of Coast Guard Zone 3, are charged with taking bribes of VND8.7 billion (U.S. $372,000) from a gasoline smuggling ring in exchange of information about law enforcement ships’ coordinates.

The two coast guard zones cover the waters from Binh Dinh to Ca Mau in Southern Vietnam.

As a result, the ring smuggled more than 204 million liters of gasoline from Singapore to Vietnam between March 2020 and February 2021, making large profits.

In April, Defense Ministry investigators arrested five other coast guard generals including the force’s top commander, Lt. Gen. Nguyen Van Son, and the political commissar Lt. Gen. Hoang Van Dong, in an embezzlement case that shocked the country.

The generals were sacked last October for “serious violations of the Communist Party's regulations, the laws of the State and Ministry of National Defense in finance, capital construction investment projects and purchase of technical equipment and materials, causing serious consequences,” according to the military prosecution.

The five generals are awaiting trials which could bring hefty penalties.

“These corruption cases, to be honest, are not surprising,” said Nguyen The Phuong, a lecturer from Ho Chi Minh City University of Economics and Finance (UEF) and a defense analyst who has just authored new research on the Vietnamese coast guard force for the Korea Institute for Maritime Strategy.

“They reflect a deeper culture and structural problems of the whole Vietnam military,” he said.

‘Structural problems’

“This damages the reputation of the force, and its combat readiness. It is also slowing down the modernization plan and makes structural changes more complicated.”

“This problem cannot be solved easily, because it stems from inherent civil-military relationships, and other structural deficiencies,” the analyst said.

In recent years, the Vietnamese government made large investments in the coast guard force in order to turn it into an internationally recognized force, capable of protecting the country’s maritime rights and interests as territorial disputes intensified in the South China Sea.

Vietnam’s military spending increased seven-fold between 2003 and 2018 and is now the largest amongst Southeast Asian countries, according to data provided by the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI).

The latest figure in 2020 shows that total spending could reach nearly $U.S. 5 billion but “the exact amount of money allocated to the VCG has always been shrouded in mystery, as well as those budgets for other services,” said Nguyen The Phuong.

“Analysts and experts, even inside Vietnam, are facing immense difficulties in trying to figure out those data,” he added.

So far, no maritime security strategy or doctrine has been publicized, according to the defense analyst, who said that the “thick fog of secrecy and lack of transparency” hampers the efforts to build a more modern and efficient military through a more transparent process of procurement and strategy building.

The Vietnamese coast guard force, now under the authority of the Ministry of Defense as a military service, was created in 1998 as Vietnam Maritime Police.

In 2013, the Marine Police was renamed Vietnam Coast Guard (VCG) and upgraded to the level of a full-fledged uniformed military service on a par with the Navy. 

The VCG’s establishment is a direct response to increasingly “hybrid and sophisticated” maritime disputes including the so-called “gray zone” tactics that China deployed in the South China Sea, Phuong said.

“Gray zone” is the terminology applied to activities by a state that are harmful to another state, but are not legally acts of war.

The analyst urged that a transparent and coherent national maritime security strategy be carefully created, and missions and objectives of the Navy and the VCG clearly defined in order to “counter against any tactics and strategies that aim to undermine Vietnam’s sovereignty over the South China Sea.”

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

With abortion rights, the franchise, and the prospect of meaningful climate action under increasingly dire threat, grassroots progressives in West Virginia and Arizona are planning to hold a day of nonviolent direct action later this month to pressure Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to drop their support for the legislative filibuster.

"On May 23rd, Arizonans and West Virginians will come together in our states to say, 'No more!'" reads a statement released by the event's organizers, a diverse alliance that includes the West Virginia Poor People's Campaign, the Arizona Coalition to End the Filibuster, and the West Virginia Working Families Party.

"Arizonans and West Virginians are coming together to take on our obstructionist senators."

"We will join in peaceful protest and nonviolent direct action," the statement continues, "to demand that Sinema and Manchin stop their corrupt obstruction and end the filibuster so the majority can finally pass legislation to deal with the urgent crises that plague our nation."

For months, Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sinema (D-Ariz.) have been the Senate Democratic caucus' foremost supporters of the 60-vote legislative filibuster, a rule that—in a closely divided upper chamber—effectively gives the minority party veto power over most legislation.

Senate Republicans have readily wielded that power over the past year to tank legislation aimed at protecting the franchise from state-level voter suppression efforts and enshrining the right to abortion care into federal law. In late February, Manchin was the only Democrat to join Senate Republicans in filibustering the Women's Health Protection Act.

"Senator Manchin's obstructionism and support of fossil fuels are perilous to preserving our democracy, as well as our planet, and we cannot be silent about it. We must confront it," said Sharon Helman, president of the Eastern Panhandle Green Coalition and coordinating committee member of the West Virginia Poor People's Campaign.

Following the explosive leak of conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion in a high-profile abortion rights case, Manchin and Sinema both openly defended the legislative filibuster, characterizing it as a key tool for preserving democracy.

But organizers of the upcoming "Sit-In for the Soul of America"—which is set to take place at Manchin and Sinema's offices in Charleston and Tucson—expressed the opposite view, describing the filibuster as an anti-democratic relic of the Jim Crow era that is hindering progress on broadly popular and necessary legislation.

"Arizonans and West Virginians are coming together to take on our obstructionist senators," Karina Ruiz, executive director of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, said in a statement. "And we have to bring together people from all of our different movements that are being blocked by the filibuster to fight as one—that's how we can bring down this Jim Crow barrier that's hurting all of us."

Kai Newkirk, an Arizona-based activist who grew up in West Virginia, added that "there is far too much at stake for our nation and planet not to draw on the nonviolent civil resistance lessons of victorious movements worldwide and put our bodies on the line together to try to make the political costs for Sinema, Manchin, and all who continue to block the will of the American majority unbearable."

Just 50 votes plus a tie-breaker from the vice president are needed to weaken or abolish the filibuster, but Senate Democrats' attempt earlier this year to create a filibuster carveout for voting rights fell short, with Manchin and Sinema joining every Republican in opposition.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats are expected to attempt another vote on the Women's Health Protection Act, a bill that would codify the right to abortion care into federal law. But the effort is doomed to fail as long as the filibuster remains intact.

"To break the Manchin-Sinema blockade on progress, we believe that people across our country will need to take bold action. But they're our senators, so we are going to lead the charge and re-ignite this existential fight," said the organizers of the May 23 march and sit-in, during which some participants will risk arrest.

"Too much is at stake for our democracy, our planet, and working families to give up or back down now—we must escalate instead," they continued. "We must bring together all of the movements that are being blocked by the filibuster... Not only the voting rights and democracy movement but labor, climate, immigrant rights, the fight for $15, pro-choice, LGBTQ rights, public education, gun violence prevention, criminal justice reform, healthcare, and more. And together we must use mass nonviolent action to create a political crisis that forces change."

Read the organizers' full statement:

We stand at a crossroads in the history of our nation and the world. Our climate is in chaos, democracy is under assault at home and abroad, fundamental rights are at risk, and working families of every color and creed whose sacrifice carried our nation through the pandemic struggle still while the fortunes of the wealthy few explode.

A majority of American voters elected a Democratic President, House, and Senate to solve these crises. But the senior Senators of our states, Arizona and West Virginia—just two members of a 50-seat majority—are standing with the party of January 6th to block the change we so desperately need. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are protecting an abused, outdated Senate rule—the filibuster—and the profits of their corporate donors over our people, our democracy, and our planet.

On May 23rd, Arizonans and West Virginians will come together in our states to say, "No more!" We will join in peaceful protest and nonviolent direct action to demand that Sinema and Manchin stop their corrupt obstruction and end the filibuster so the majority can finally pass legislation to deal with the urgent crises that plague our nation.

Majorities elect legislatures that pass laws by majority vote. That's democracy. That's how it works in our state legislatures in Arizona and West Virginia. That's how it works in almost every state in the union and nearly every democratic republic on the planet. It’s time for the U.S. Senate to work the same so it can deliver for the people.

We cannot wait. As Sinema, Manchin, and their filibuster are blocking the change we need, now we will block business as usual to demand it. In the great American tradition of Dr. King, John Lewis, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, the suffragettes, the sit-down strikers, and other freedom struggles, we will use the tool of nonviolent direct action—the most powerful means of political action available to everyday people every day—to dramatize this emergency and make it impossible to ignore.

In West Virginia, we will take action in the capital city of Charleston where Manchin hides his office in the state lottery building. In Arizona we will take action in Tucson, where Sinema was born and has a Senate office that has never once been staffed or open to the public. These actions will include a family-friendly rally and march before the nonviolent direct action. Even if you can't risk arrest at this time, we need you with us to rally and march and be counted! This is a time for all who believe in our just demand to stand together.

To break the Manchin-Sinema blockade on progress we believe that people across our country will need to take bold action. But they're our senators, so we are going to lead the charge and re-ignite this existential fight.

Too much is at stake for our democracy, our planet, and working families to give up or back down now—we must escalate instead. We must bring together all of the movements that are being blocked by the filibuster to fight in unity to bring down the common barrier to achieving all of our missions. Not only the voting rights and democracy movement but labor, climate, immigrant rights, the fight for $15, pro-choice, LGBTQ rights, gun violence prevention, public education, criminal justice reform, healthcare, and more. And together we must use mass nonviolent action to create a political crisis that forces change.

As a coalition of movement leaders in the Mountain State and the Grand Canyon State, we call on our fellow West Virginians and Arizonans to join us in Charleston and Tucson on the 23rd. And we call on Americans who love freedom, democracy, justice, and life on earth to join us and act in your states in the weeks after. It's time to Sit In to Save America! Like the generations of Americans who rose to meet the challenges of their time, now we must take the baton of freedom and rise to meet this test.

Forward together to liberty and justice for all.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

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So now, as expected after decades of taking big bucks for her rightwing work on behalf of America's oligarchs, we learn that the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, was in Trump's January 6th "rally" up to her eyeballs.

Let's just say it right out loud: the US Supreme Court is corrupt. And Americans know it.

No other federal court in the nation would allow a defendant in a case before them to fly a judge on a private Gulfstream luxury jet to a luxury hunting retreat in Louisiana and then, a week later, watch as that judge rules in that defendant's favor.  

But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did exactly that when Dick Cheney was sued for allegedly lying about his secret "energy group" that was planning the seizure and sale of Iraq's oil fields as he and Bush lied us into the war that opened those oil fields up to exploitation.

No other federal court would allow a judge to give a speech before a group that was funding a case before them and then rule in favor of that group's openly stated goal, but that's exactly what Neal Gorsuch did when he addressed the Fund for American Studies, itself funded by the Bradley Foundation that was helping fund the Janus v AFSCME case that gutted union protections for government workers.

No other federal court would allow a judge to swear revenge against a particular nonprofit corporation (in this case the Democratic Party), saying in his confirmation hearings that, "What goes around comes around," and then rule in cases directly affecting that organization (like voting rights) but Brett "Beerbong" Kavanaugh did just that.

No other federal court would allow a judge to rule on a case where he owned a half-million dollars worth of stock in the company presenting amicus arguments before the court—it's illegal in many states—but John Roberts did just that in the ABC v Aereo case.  As did Roberts, Bryer and Alito in 25 of 37 other cases where they owned stock, according to the good-government group Fix The Court.

No other federal court would allow a judge's wife to openly interact with and advocate for the interests of dozens of litigants before the court over decades, and take nearly a million dollars from a group regularly helping bring cases before his court but Clarence Thomas and his wife have done both, as recently revealed in a shocking New York Times profile.

And now the Court is on the verge of gutting the EPA—the agency Justice Gorsuch's mother infamously ran into the ground before resigning in disgrace during the Reagan administration—using Gorsuch's own BS "textualist" rationale to go after the agency today.

In addition, these Republican appointees are openly shooting down Democratic efforts to fight gerrymandered maps while supporting GOP efforts to impose them on states.

Is there no way, to paraphrase Shakespeare, to rid ourselves of this Court's corrupt behavior? Turns out, Congress has that power—although they haven't used it since Ulysses Grant was president and reorganized the Court.

Article III of the Constitution establishes the federal court system, and gives to Congress itself the power to create the lower federal courts.  It also says that Supreme Court judges may only serve on the court if they behave themselves:

"The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour…."

It also requires Congress to regulate the Supreme Court.  Article III, Section 2 says:

"[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."

The issue of the Supreme Court needing regulation from the "first among equals" legislative branch (Congress), as specified by the Founders and Framers of the Constitution, has been with us for 101 years. 

Most people remember William Howard Taft as the one-term progressive Republican president who followed Teddy Roosevelt into the White House in 1909 and was beaten for re-election by Woodrow Wilson in 1912. 

But after his retirement from the presidency, Taft became the first former president to serve as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in 1921.  He was our 27th president and 10th Chief Justice.

In 1921, it came to the attention of the nation and to Chief Justice Taft that US District Judge Kenesaw Landis was taking five times his annual salary as a judge from what was then called "Organized Baseball"—five years after ruling in their favor.

The scandal provoked Congress to pass, in 1922, a law creating a body that would provide advice and oversight to the federal judiciary.  It came to be known as the Judicial Conference of the United States.

The scandal also prompted Chief Justice Taft to accept the unpaid chairmanship of The American Bar Association's (ABA) newly formed commission to write ethics rules for federal judges. 

Taft's commission wrote, in 1923, the first Canons of Judicial Ethics, which included 34 categories of judicial conflicts and misbehavior that would either disqualify a judge or require their recusal from cases before them.  They included conflicts of interest, personal financial investments, and even behavior in the courtroom itself. 

Taft, in delivering the Canons, made it clear they should apply to all federal courts, including his own Supreme Court.  Within a decade, every state in the union had adopted the Canons for their own courts.

The Canons, however, had no enforcement mechanism, particularly when it came to the Supreme Court.  After all, who would judge the highest court in the land?  That opened the door for literally a century of the Supreme Court ignoring Taft's work.

The issue came to the fore again in 1969 when Republicans went nuts when it was revealed that Justice Abe Fortas—a very liberal (Republicans called him a communist) LBJ appointee—had taken $15,000 for a summer teaching post, was receiving time-delayed payments from a law former client, and, worse of all, was secretly advising President Johnson. 

Under massive incoming fire from Republicans and their friendly media, Fortas resigned from the Supreme Court on May 14, 1969. Over the next three years, the ABA put together a new commission to update Taft's original Canon on judicial ethics.

That commission released their new Code of Judicial Conduct in 1972, and it was adopted by the Judicial Conference of the United States, in 1973.  The Supreme Court, however, chose to ignore it, arguing that they were above such considerations. 

By that time the Supreme Court had made itself, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, the most powerful of the three branches of government, asserting the power to second-guess both Congress and the President.

Ironically, in his 2011 annual report about the state of the judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts made lengthy and effusive reference to former Chief Justice Taft and his work with the ABA's commission on judicial ethics.  His report, however, conveniently omitted the fact that Taft had loudly and publicly asserted it should apply to the Supreme Court. 

Instead, Roberts noted rhetorically, "Some observers have recently questioned whether the Judicial Conference's Code of Conduct for United States Judges should apply to the Supreme Court."

I'll spare you extended quotes from Roberts' report, which you can read here, but the bottom line is that in his opinion the Court can tell the 1923 ethics recommendations, and the subsequent ones from 1973, to go screw themselves.  The Supreme Court, in his mind, is answerable to nobody but itself.

As Sam Alito said, "I'm not aware of problems on the Supreme Court itself…we would not sit back. We would take action that's appropriate."  

Back when Roberts was a young lawyer working for Reagan and trying to come up with a way to overturn Brown v Board and Roe v Wade, he was fond of quoting Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution.

This gave Congress the power, Roberts wrote, to simply overturn both Brown and Roe by passing a law creating an "exception" that the Supreme Court couldn't rule on issues of race or abortion (his lengthy writings for Reagan are in my book on the Court).

But now that he, himself, is in charge of the Court there's nary a peep from Roberts—in his 2011 Report or anywhere else—about Congress' power to regulate the Court. 

In recent years multiple laws have been proposed to pick up the slack Roberts left to his fellow justices.  Louise Slaughter proposed legislation in the house in 2015 that would require the Court itself to come up with its own code of ethics. 

It went nowhere, and, besides, it would violate the basic premise of law dating back to Publius Syrus in 50 BC, cited by John Locke in the 17th century, and finally quoted by Madison in Federalist 10 that "no man shall be the judge in his own case."

President Biden's commission on the Courts recently recommended that the Supreme Court adopt an "advisory" code of behavior, but Roberts didn't even bother to comment. 

Most recently, Senator Chris Murphy introduced the Supreme Court Ethics Act that would seek to regulate the Court's out-of-control politicking and conflicts-of-interest. Predictably, it was blocked by Republicans in the Senate.

Public outrage is building: the Court's approval rating is now around 40 percent, an historic low. Congress needs to act, requiring them to adopt and conform to the federal code of judicial ethics at the very least, and expand the Court at best, before an entire branch of government sinks into an irredeemable partisan muck of corruption.

This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

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It has been interesting to watch media and public commentators come to the realisation — sometimes slowly — that the siege of Parliament was not simply an anti-vaccine mandate “protest” but something with more sinister elements.

While researchers and journalists have noted the toxicity of some of the politics on display, as well as the presence of extreme fringe activists and groups, it should have come as little surprise.

These politics have been developing for some time, heavily influenced by the rise of a particular form of conspiratorial populism out of Donald Trump’s America, and by the networking and misinformation possibilities of social media.

• READ MORE: What are the rights of children at the parliament protest – and who protects them?
• The NZ anti-vax movement’s exploitation of Holocaust imagery is part of a long and sorry history
• The occupation of NZ’s parliament grounds is a tactical challenge for police, but mass arrests are not an option

Internationally, researchers noted a decisive shift in 2015-16 and the subsequent exponential growth of extremist and vitriolic content online.

This intensified with the arrival of conspiracy movement QAnon in 2017 and the appearance of a number of alt-tech platforms that were designed to spread mis- and disinformation, conspiracy theories (old and new), and ultranationalism and racist views.

While local manifestations developed slowly, there was evidence that some groups and activists were beginning to realise the potential.

The Dominion Movement and Action Zealandia embraced these new politics — white nationalism, distrust of perceived corrupt elites and media — along with the relatively sophisticated use of social media to influence and recruit.

Covid and conspiracy theory
These anti-authority, conspiratorial views have been around in New Zealand for some time within the anti-1080, anti-5G and anti-UN movements.

But we began to see the formation of a loose political community around the 2020 general election. It was notable, for instance, that online material from the Advance NZ party had 30,000 followers and their anti-covid material was viewed 200,000 times.

Covid gave new impetus to these movements, partly because the pandemic fed many of the now well-established tropes of those inclined to believe in conspiracies — the role of China, government “overreach”, the influence of international organisations like the UN or WHO, or the “malign” influence of experts or institutions.

Covid not only encouraged others to be convinced that conspiracies were at work, the lockdowns also meant more were online and more were likely to engage. QAnon proved to be a key influence.

The election saw Advance NZ (and the NZ Public Party), along with the New Conservatives, the Outdoor Party and Vision NZ all peddle versions of covid scepticism, the distrust of elites or of ethnic and religious “others”.

Combined, they received 2.73 percent of the party vote and 3.01 percent of electorate votes. Not large, but related online activity was still troubling.

Slight cross-pollination of causes occurring at the Parly protest now pic.twitter.com/P0iF5MdwDA

— Sam Sachdeva (@SamSachdevaNZ) February 28, 2022

The alt-right in NZ
By mid-2021, when the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD, a UK-based research organisation) undertook a study for the Department of Internal Affairs of New Zealand’s extreme online activity, things had ramped up yet again.

The ISD looked at 300 local extremist accounts and 600,000 posts. In any given week, 192 extremist accounts were active, with 20,059 posts, 203,807 likes or up-votes and 38,033 reposts/retweets.

When it came to far-right Facebook pages, there were 750 followers per 100,000 internet users in New Zealand, compared to 399 in Australia, 252 in Canada and 233 in the USA.

Those numbers should give us all pause for thought. The volumes, the relatively high density, the extensive use of QAnon and the mobilisation of a not insignificant part of the New Zealand community indicate the alt-right and its fellow travellers were now well and truly established here.

‘So many rabbit holes’: Even in trusting New Zealand, protests show fringe beliefs can flourish https://t.co/tN4Zd6KO4m

— The Guardian (@guardian) February 25, 2022

The ‘sovereign citizens’ at Parliament
This is reinforced by the Department of Internal Affairs’ digital harm log. Not only are the numbers growing, but the level of hate and threats directed at individuals and institutions remains high.

In this context, it’s not surprising to see these ideologies surface at the occupation of Parliament grounds, or the fractious and divided nature of those attending, and that their demands are so diverse and inchoate.

Nor should it come as a surprise that the protesters display a complete unwillingness to trust authorities such as the police or Parliament.

For some time, the so-called “sovereign citizens” movement has been apparent in New Zealand, again heavily influenced by similar American politics. Laws and regulations are regarded as irrelevant and illegal, as are the institutions that create or enforce them.

What’s perhaps more surprising is that New Zealanders have generally not known more about these politics and the possibility they would produce the ugly scenes at parliament.

Information and action needed
While there has been some excellent media coverage, there has been a sense of playing catch-up. The degree of extremism fuelling the protests and the various demands appeared to catch parliament and the police off guard.

Our security and intelligence agencies are devoting more resources to tracking these politics – but they need to be more public about it. The Combined Threat Assessment Group and the SIS provide updates and risk assessments, but these often lack detailed information about local activists and actions. We need to be better informed.

The police are enhancing existing systems to better record hate crimes and activities (Te Raranga), which should become an important source of information.

And the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet will be announcing some of the details of the new centre of excellence, He Whenua Taurika, that will provide evidence of local developments.

If many New Zealanders have been surprised and saddened about the extremist politics visible at the parliament protest, there is now little excuse for not understanding their background and momentum. The challenge now is to ensure further hate crimes or violence do not follow.

Dr Paul Spoonley is distinguished professor of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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