*The Dictator's Playbook*: Will Enough Americans Show Up To Stop Trump From Using It?
Last edited Thu Aug 13, 2020, 11:49 AM - Edit history (2)
'Will Enough Americans Show Up to Stop Trump From Using the Dictator's Playbook?'
*The question we will see answered over the next 6 months is whether Trump has taken America so far down the road to oligarchy and fascism that we can't recover.* By Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams, Aug. 11, 2020. - Ed.:
The single most consistent defining characteristic of an emerging dictatorship in a country that started as a democracy is that the dictator regularly holds elections and always wins, because he uses the instruments of government to make sure he wins. Trump has now done this with the Justice Department, the Post Office, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Reserve, and our intelligence agencies. At Justice, Attorney General Bill Barr has already said that he intends to investigate Joe Biden and his son's activities in Ukraine and may report on that just before the election.
Trump has seized control of the Post Office, decapitated it's senior management, and has already begun slowing down the mail and more than doubling the cost to states for mailing ballots just before we conduct an election that’ll probably be more than half mail-in. Trump has gotten the Department of Homeland Security and various factions within their immigration police to challenge protesters for a test run in Portland, and plans to bring this crew to other cities just in time for a massive display of police power during the elections.
Trump has redirected all reporting on coronavirus statistics away from the Centers for Disease Control to HHS, run by his toady, Alex Azar. Now hospitals and public health officials, as well as news agencies, can no longer get accurate data on the severity of the pandemic in the U.S. At the Fed, Trump has installed Jerome Powell, a multimillionaire bankster who is not an economist and was on the board of the Carlyle Group. Powell has created about $7 trillion out of thin air, and is using it to buy corporate stocks and bonds to maintain the stock market, making it appear that the economy is not as bad as it is.
And when our intelligence agencies first reported that Russia, the source of much of Trump’s wealth cording to his own children, was already actively interfering in the 2020 election, Trump got them to change their assessment to downplay Russia and highlight that China and Iran had a "preference" for Biden..
In a further tip of the hat to his racist white supporters, Trump wants to declare his candidacy while simultaneously symbolically declaring victory for the white supremacist Confederacy at Gettysburg.. "Often referred to as the 'High Water Mark of the Rebellion,' Gettysburg was the Civil War's bloodiest battle..."
More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/11/will-enough-americans-show-stop-trump-using-dictators-playbook
PBS, “THE DICTATOR’S PLAYBOOK”: 6 of the deadliest dictators of the 20th century are examined in a new PBS mini-series. We have your preview. 2019.
*PBS, 'Meet The Dictators: 6 Episodes, https://www.pbs.org/tpt/dictators-playbook/episodes/
PBS, 'MUSSOLINI IN ITALY,' Preview, 'The Dictator's Playbook. Under pressure from Hitler, Mussolini deported thousands of Jews to concentration camps. But years earlier, Mussolini’s regime was already passing anti-Semitic laws. Italian Fascism glorified the notion of a "pure Italian," evoking an ideal world where men were warriors and women were devoted mothers. This vision was used to justify a series of racial laws, begun in 1938, that mostly targeted the Jewish population. Jews were prohibited from owning property, banned from professions like medicine and law, and prohibited from joining the army.
They were not allowed to marry non-Jews or enroll in schools or universities. The Fascist government even revoked citizenship from Jews who had been in the country for a short time, endangering thousands of refugees who had fled to Italy from Nazi Germany. In 1943, arrests and deportations began. And ultimately, around 10,000 Jews were deported from Italy to Nazi concentration camps..https://www.pbs.org/tpt/dictators-playbook/episodes/benito-mussolini/
PBS, 'FRANCO IN SPAIN 1939-1975': Preview, 'The Dictator's Playbook,' 2019.
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/francisco-franco
