I believe an unlikely mix of alleged drug trafficking related politicos and alleged white nationalist related politicos united to elect the infamous “Bloc of Four” in the abysmal voter turnout election of 2005. During their four year term the drug business was good again and white nationalists used Coatesville as an example on white supremacist websites like “Stormfront”. Strong community organization and support from law enforcement, in particular Chester County District Attorney Joseph W. Carroll has begun to turn our community around. The Chester County drug trafficking that I believe centers on Coatesville continues and I believe we still have public officials in place that profit from the drug sales. But the people here are amazing and continue to work against the odds to make Coatesville a good place to live.
November 7, 2022- at USW 1165 – 650 Charles Street Coatesville, PA
Like Bernie Sanders John Fetterman is a populist and old style Franklin Delano Roosevelt progressive.
Like Bernie, John is unencumbered by offers that can’t be refused from pharmaceutical, defense contractors and fossil fuel billionaires. Bernie Sanders & John Fetterman showed Democrats how it’s done.
John is brilliant & charismatic. He can win the presidency.
I expect mob boss president 45 will be on his way to prison by 2024. The Republican Party will implode like leaderless rats.
This election proved to me that the United States of 2022 is not a re-run of Germany in 1938.
The beacon of hope for humanity in New York Harbor is alive and well in the United States of America.
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
"Jon Stewart started as a stand-up comedian, but through the years, he has become a prominent figure in entertainment and media. He is not only a comedian, but he is also a television host, producer, writer, director, actor, singer, and political commentator."
"They are the faces we see every day—from the time we wake up until we go to bed. Sometimes, they join us during meal times through television. Each day, they deliver the news we need to know and the biggest breaking stories all over the world. We trust TV reporters to give us the latest, credible news, whether it’s good or bad. They are people we cannot live without because we simply need to know what is going on around us, from international crises to the economy to sports and entertainment."
“Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, played a key role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He was the “point person” for the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania as lawyers put together fake slates of electors for Trump, according to emails obtained by the New York Times. He also organized an event with Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 election in which speakers spread misinformation about the 2020 election. He hired buses and offered rides to the US Capitol on January 6 and was there himself. He has supported the idea of decertifying the presidential race in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, which is not possible.
If elected, Mastriano would wield considerable power over elections in Pennsylvania. The state is one of a handful where the secretary of state, the chief election official, is appointed by the governor. Mastriano has said he has already picked someone, but hasn’t said who. The Philadelphia Inquirer has speculated he could pick Toni Shuppe, an activist who has spread voting misinformation and false theories linked to the QAnon movement. Mastriano has also said he would decertify election equipment and cause all voters in the state to re-register to vote.”
#amanpourpbsThe White Power Movement: A Direct Line Between Vietnam and Jan. 6 | Amanpour and Company
"The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the history of a movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in Waco and Ruby Ridge and with the Oklahoma City bombing and is resurgent under President Trump.
Returning to an America ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of veterans and active-duty military personnel and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place and put them in charge of brokering alliances and birthing future recruits.
Belew’s disturbing and timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time and space: grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action. Based on years of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right."
#amanpourpbsTracking the Threat: The Trump World’s Assault on U.S. Election Workers | Amanpour and Company:
I was called to break up fighting at Precinct 110 in Coatesville, PA. Bob Saucier was a former high school wrestler who JBS Chapter Leader Pat Sellers used as muscle in elections. I could talk down Bob.
Bob would sit in the path of voters, put out and immediately retract his foot in an apparent effort to make them fall. I witnessed voters walk up to the polls then turn around when they saw Bob. I don’t know if they came back to vote later.
John Birch Society members Pat Sellers & Bob Saucier began their political careers as school board members in the Coatesville Area School District in Pennsylvania.
Pat Sellers influenced elections in Coatesville using Bob Saucier as muscle at the polls with West Chester Attorney Andrew Lehr moving Bob from precinct to precinct.
When my wife was judge of elections in Precinct 110 in Coatesville PA at the close of the Election Day Bob came into the polls put his hands on the table and demanded to vote. Many years before Bob lived on Olive St. in Precinct 110 but because Bob abused her (her neighbors witnessed Bob dragging her down the sidewalk by her hair.) she got a divorce. There was a court order for Bob to stay 75 feet away from the house. Bob lived in Downingtown.
There was no state constable available. My wife called Voter Services. They told her to let him vote illegally. His vote would not be counted.
In the 2022 primary election in Precinct 110 where my wife was judge of elections for 10 years Voter Services filled in as judge of elections. Long time election officers are leaving in Chester County just as they are across the nation.
Sellers also ran for the 6th Congressional District twice.
July 20 (Reuters) - A coalition of rightwing “constitutional sheriffs,” who claim legal power in their jurisdictions that exceeds U.S. federal and state authorities, has a new calling: investigating conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged against former President Donald Trump.
The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association has teamed with True the Vote, a Texas nonprofit and purveyor of debunked voter-fraud claims, to recruit like-minded sheriffs nationwide to investigate 2020 stolen-election allegations and to more aggressively police future voting.
On Friday night, two armed and masked men wearing tactical gear surveilled a drop box outside the Maricopa County Juvenile Court building in Mesa. Maricopa County Election Department said that the police had been called, and that the armed individuals departed the scene.
However, in a statement to VICE News, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said that after deputies responded, they “were able to determine that the individuals were not breaking any laws and were more than 75 feet away from the ballot box, as required by law.”
On Saturday night, at least one of the men returned to monitor the drop box again.
This time local sheriffs were captured on camera trying to intervene in a standoff between the armed individuals monitoring the drop boxes and those who came to observe the watchers.
The sheriff’s office did not respond to a request for comment about Saturday night’s incidents.
Maricopa County became ground zero for the efforts to overturn the 2020 election when the Senate sanctioned a bogus recount that eventually determined that President Joe Biden won by more votes than was originally thought. Now, as the midterms loom, Arizona is set to be one of the main flashpoints of the efforts to undermine democracy promoted and popularized by former President Donald Trump over the last two years."
"Election denier Melody Jennings — a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory — has been organizing a national effort harass and intimidate voters by recruiting fellow conspiracy theorists to “monitor” ballot drop boxes, which they falsely claim are susceptible to voter fraud. Jennings has acknowledged that QAnon influencers, who she has partnered with, have been instrumental in her efforts.
Jennings founded the organization behind the effort to monitor drop boxes, Clean Elections USA. According to Jennings, she was inspired by 2000 Mules, conservative figure Dinesh D’Souza’s widely debunked movie claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen via ballot stuffing at drop boxes by so-called “mules.” Jennings said that “teasers about 2000 Mules … stuck with me and I said, ‘You know, why can’t we just go put 10 people around a box, you know, in shifts around boxes?’”
Since then, Jennings has taken credit for people monitoring an Arizona drop box during the state’s primaries — which she called a “dry run” for the midterm general elections — and members of her organization have recently been reported staking out a drop box in Maricopa County, including targeting a supposed “mule” and photographing voters’ license plates. Her efforts have since been promoted by former President Donald Trump on Truth Social.
The Arizona secretary of state’s office has already received multiple complaints of alleged voter intimidation at drop boxes in Arizona, including incidents connected to Clean Elections USA. In one case, armed men in camouflage have reportedly staked out a drop box in Maricopa County wearing tactical gear, which Jennings has defended. As Jennings’ organization continues encouraging people to monitor drop boxes, a temporary restraining order has been sought against the organization."
American Terror: The Military’s Problem With Extremism In the Ranks
AND VIDEO:
American Strategy and the Great War by Douglas Mastriano
If as it now appears, Republicans take control of Congress it will be a QAnon Congress. Margery Taylor Green will be a Congressional leader. The mashup of QAnon & Christian Nationalist could be normalized.
"Last month, Greene sat directly behind the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, as he unveiled his agenda for the midterm elections. Republican candidates often ask Greene to campaign for them. She has become a major fund-raiser within the party. And Greene told Robert she had talked with Donald Trump about being his running mate if he were to run for president in 2024."
"Doug Mastriano is running an unconventional campaign for governor. He’s not raising a lot of money. He prefers to attend closed-door events with his base or campaign at public events where reporters are often kept at arm's length.
But the Republican nominee’s campaign is also notable for another reason: Mastriano has surrounded himself with a non-professional, armed security team whose members include at least one person with direct ties to a militia group.
Mastriano’s detail includes several members of a relatively new evangelical church near Elizabethtown, LifeGate, whose leaders have spoken openly about electing Christians to office to advance biblical principles in government.
Scott Nagle
Perhaps the most visible member of the security team is James Emery, an Elizabethtown Area School Board member who has been photographed providing security to Mastriano at numerous events over the past year, sometimes armed. Earlier this month, Emery blocked members of the news media from entering a room in Erie where Mastriano was scheduled to speak to local business leaders.”
American Terror: The Military’s Problem With Extremism In the Ranks
“After the events of January 6, it became clear many of the key players in extremist groups who organized the attacks were either veterans or active-duty servicemen. Since then, the Pentagon has scrambled to try and address the present-day problem of extremism in the ranks, which stretches back to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War. But a politically divided Congress and a polarized nation, are getting in the way of finding a solution.”
***
“Belew’s book helps explain how we got to today’s alt right.”―Terry Gross, Fresh Air
The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the history of a movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in Waco and Ruby Ridge and with the Oklahoma City bombing and is resurgent under President Trump.
Returning to an America ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of veterans and active-duty military personnel and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place and put them in charge of brokering alliances and birthing future recruits.
Belew’s disturbing and timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time and space: grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action. Based on years of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.
American Strategy and the Great War by Douglas Mastriano
The second presentation at the Teaching Military History Institute entitled "America’s
Entry into World War I." This History Institute was sponsored by FPRI's Madeleine and W.W. Keen Butcher History Institute, the First Division Museum at Cantigny (a division of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation), Carthage College, and FPRI's Center for the Study of America and the West. These remarks were made at the First Division Museum at Cantigny in Wheaton, IL, on April 9, 2016.
“Extract of Michael Winterbottom´s documentary "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" (2009), based on the book written by Naomi Klein. This extract talks about the imposition of the free market model in Chile from 1970 and forward, how the CIA assisted and funded the military coup of 1973, and the formulas used to implemet free market economy as opposed to Allende´s "marxism", drafted by the called "Chicago Boys", chilean students sent to University of Chicago to study free market economics under Milton Friedman”
"Shock Doctrine and Economic Policies
As the key economic advisors of the Pinochet dictatorship, the Chicago Boys were the forerunners of the economic policies of that government. They sponsored state run policies to decrease national spending, end inflation and promote economic growth. They promoted a policy of strict austerity and cut government expenditures substantially. Free trade agreements and the breakdown of barriers to trade were also promoted to help Chile compete in the world market. They also privatized public companies, and utilized the free market rather than government rule to promote their economic policies.[9] This was part of the neoliberal economic views espoused by Milton Friedman, the ideological backer for their views. Friedman and his connections to the Chicago Boys was highly politicized especially after he received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976. The policies are also sometimes referred to as shock therapy based on the fact that they were projected to hurt the economy but overall be beneficial in the long run.[13] These policies influenced future governments and organizations tied to the neoliberal economic viewpoint such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other International Organizations and governments. However, the relations between these organizations were not always close, and rivalry between neoliberal organizations still existed.[14] The ideology of free market capitalism and laissez faire economics in conjunction with a strong military rule and total political control is the cornerstone of Pinochetism, in conjunction with a strong anti-communist political platform. These policies and their effects are both highly controversial in Chile and around the World, and represent a major divide in Chilean politics to this day.[15]
International Influence
The economic success of the Chicago boys was a critical part of bolstering the Pinochet regime abroad. The Chilean miracle as it was called attracted a lot of necessary positive attention for the Pinochet government, and allowed Pinochet to exercise political repression without condemnation by economic allies. New policies such as structural adjustment, free trade, and tax cuts became incredibly popular with conservative political groups throughout the western world. These policies eventually spread into the United States and United Kingdom via their conservative leaders. Chile was one of the first countries to embrace these policies and they have since spread in part due to the initial success Chile experienced.[3]"
The other side of Liz Truss extreme economic failure is “populism.” The main stream press is still politely naming racist Jew, Muslim, brown people, nationalistic hate “populism.”
“I am a fighter and not a quitter!” British Prime Minister Liz Truss thundered Wednesday in the House of Commons. “I am resigning,” she said Thursday, in a less bombastic tone of voice. Let’s hope conservatives here and around the world learn a lesson about both policy and populism (racist Jew, Muslim, brown people, nationalistic hate).
In a larger sense, however, even if you leave aside her political ineptitude and her embrace of voodoo economics, Truss was in an impossible position. So was Johnson before her, and so will be her successor. The Conservative Party is in power because it embraced populism ( racist Jew, Muslim, brown people, nationalistic hate), which turns out to be a good way to win elections but an impossible way to govern.
Populist is a broad term that can be applied to Hitler and to Roosevelt, Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Hitler was "of the people." but used antisemitism to become an elite. FDR was of the elite but was called "a traitor to his class."
Wealthy elitist Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave me, the son of a steelworker, prosperity. Then Reagan took prosperity away from children of steelworkers and following the economic principles of Milton Friedman gave it to the elite.
But we lump Hitler, Roosevelt, Trump, Sanders & now Liz Truss & Boris Johnson into populist. See Populismbelow.
“Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite". It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment. The term developed in the late 19th century and has been applied to various politicians, parties and movements since that time, often as a pejorative. Within political science and other social sciences, several different definitions of populism have been employed, with some scholars proposing that the term be rejected altogether.
A common framework for interpreting populism is known as the ideational approach: this defines populism as an ideology which presents "the people" as a morally good force and contrasts them against "the elite", who are portrayed as corrupt and self-serving. Populists differ in how "the people" are defined, but it can be based along class, ethnic, or national lines. Populists typically present "the elite" as comprising the political, economic, cultural, and media establishment, depicted as a homogeneous entity and accused of placing their own interests, and often the interests of other groups—such as large corporations, foreign countries, or immigrants—above the interests of "the people". Populist parties and social movements are often led by charismatic or dominant figures who present themselves as "the voice of the people". According to the ideational approach, populism is often combined with other ideologies, such as nationalism, liberalism, or socialism. Thus, populists can be found at different locations along the left–right political spectrum, and there exist both left-wing populism and right-wing populism.
Other scholars of the social sciences have defined the term populism differently. According to the popular agency definition used by some historians of United States history, populism refers to popular engagement of the population in political decision making. An approach associated with the political scientist Ernesto Laclau presents populism as an emancipatory social force through which marginalised groups challenge dominant power structures. Some economists have used the term in reference to governments which engage in substantial public spending financed by foreign loans, resulting in hyperinflation and emergency measures. In popular discourse—where the term has often been used pejoratively—it has sometimes been used synonymously with demagogy, to describe politicians who present overly simplistic answers to complex questions in a highly emotional manner, or with opportunism, to characterise politicians who seek to please voters without rational consideration as to the best course of action.
In the 1960s the term became increasingly popular among social scientists in Western countries, and later in the 20th century it was applied to various political parties active in liberal democracies. In the 21st century, the struggle over the term intensified in political discourse, particularly in the Americas and Europe, with it being used to describe a range of left-wing, right-wing, and centrist groups that challenged the established parties.[1]”
"In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries."
