Can you explain what you're referring to about Power Forward Communities? As far as I can tell it's a network of established non profits like Habitat for Humanity and Rewiring America, it seems they did more than token work in things like electrification before their grant was rescinded.
The actual org itself acts as an umbrella to coordinate work among the participating non-profits.
Oh don't worry, Trump and his cronies have been growing their wealth just fine.
His net worth has grown over $4 billion since taking office again, and that doesn't count his sons or other insiders that have been taking bribes and making insider trades.
The single most corrupt politician we've ever had, with a family full of criminals.
As always with these losers, the Biden Crime family was purely projection.
Seriously. These monarchists in this thread contort themselves in every which way to make sure their dear leader is always in the clear.
Shall we forget the shitcoin rugpull Trump has used to launder billions from foreign leaders?
The transparent bribes he's taken to his political org that have resulted in pardons for smuggler, drug lords and murderers?
The $200 million dollar contract Kristi Noem funneled to a company an operative of her for "marketing", formed days before the contract was awarded?
The secretary of labor using funds to throw herself a lavish birthday party and travel around the country?
Kash Patel flying himself and his girlfriend around on an FBI jet with an expensive security detail so they can party?
The fact that insiders are openly insider trading in crypto, the stock market, and these betting markets (both the illegal Venezuela and Iran invasions had huge extremely suspicious bets right before actions were taken).
This barely scratched the surface of this term alone. These fascists are so transparently corrupt.
Again and again with the fascists, the accusation of weaponization of government was really a confession of their own crimes.
Same with the Epstein files, same with the accusations of groomer while their ranks are filled with rapists, same with the Jan 6 insurrection, and likely this fall, accusations of election fraud and intimidation.
> I mean even in the west where you can hardly see an ad with a white couple anymore, they don't go that far (at least not yet).
What are you talking about? 1. This is such a strange thing to fixate on and 2. whatever commercials I am seeing that aren't blocked still have white people in them
2015 - 2016 reddit was exploited to hell by the_donald and other associated reddits. Things like coordinated up voting of a pinned post to get it to shoot up the front page, private chats to manipulate voting in a page.
There would be times when you would go to the r/all and half the page would be posts from them.
Not to mention a lot of the organized harassment a lot of the mods/power users of that sub caused in the years after. It was a mess.
Hey quick question, around January 2021, what would happened that caused Trump to be deplatformed? Anything stick out in your mind?
If you were in the market for an resistive electric heat pump, you likely had the service for it already. A heat pump version will almost always require less power.
My bad, read too quickly. I was thinking of the forced change over from gas water heaters, which is already happening in the California Bay Area and will only expand.
In case anyone thinks you're kidding, Kash Patel's embarssing sychophancy includes publishing a election denial children's "book" portraying Trump as a king and himself as a hero.
51 senators voted to confirm this unqualified moron to lead the top law enforcement agency.
It's literally not a joke, probably the most egregious example of a completely unqualified doormat that will do whatever dear leader wants. It's also by design, no roadblocks for the fanta menace.
ICE has been harassing and following legal observers to their houses. They've shot and executed at least two people who were exercising their legal right to record their activity.
The FBI has been showing up at the door of some people who dare to organize protests against ICE.
Stingrays have been deployed to protests, ICE is collecting photos of protestors for their database, and has been querying YCombinator funded Flock to pull automated license plate camera data from around the country. Trump, Vance, Noem and Miller are calling anyone who protests them domestic terrorists.
It's pretty clear this isn't just about immigration, that this is about pooling data for a surveillance state that can quash the constitutional rights of anyone who dares to oppose the current regime. We've seen this story before.
When your whole system works by giving absolutely ridiculous amount of power to a single individual who has nobody above or at least on the side capable of interfering and changing things, this is what you eventually get. Crossing fingers and praying given person isn't a complete psycho or worse is not going to cut it forever, is it. Especially when >50% of population welcomes such person with open arms, knowing well who is coming.
Given what kind of garbage from human gene pool gets and thrives in high politics its more surprising the show lasted as long as it did.
Now the question shouldn't be 'how much outraged we should be' since we get this situation for a year at this point, but rather what to do next, how we can shape future to avoid this. If there will be the time for such correction, which is a huge IF.
I don't disagree with where you're coming from. But to be fair, our system did have separation of powers and rough legal accountability for most of the time it was accruing so much power. The fascists just managed to get enough of the Supreme Council on board to sweep these away under the guises of unitary executive theory and blanket immunity for their new president-king.
So from this perspective it's a matter of a corrupted interpreter, meaning merely adding more legal restrictions won't work. Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them and then have even more foot soldiers to escalate the situation with.
Its every branch of the government. The federal government, largely through congressional legislation, has been amassing more and more power for longer than anyone has been alive, while willingly ceding large chunks of that power to the executive branch, while the executive was grooming and shaping the justice department.
Just the abuses of the commerce clause alone should show our government is full of corrupt power mongers.
And it goes down the list too. States taking power from counties, counties taking power from cities, judges, cops, and prosecutors claiming authority over more and more issues despite a lack of sound legal precedence or public approval.
Sure. I agree, but I don't really get what larger point you're making. A "unitary executive-king" is still a drastic departure from the bureaucratic structures that had been accreting power. How I categorize the old system is bureaucratic authoritarianism - there was (/is) still arbitrary authoritarian (anti- Individual Liberty) power over our lives, but its exercise is bound up in bureaucracy that at least claims to be impartial and nominally answers to the courts. Whereas now we're dealing with autocratic authoritarianism - that same power is arbitrarily and capriciously wielded by the whims of a single demented career criminal.
> Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them
We tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Then half the country tried it again 70 years later. It didn’t work out either time.
Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.
One failing of framing it as "just ... since television became widespread" is that it ignores the actual power "television" (really, mass media, and now individually-tailored mass media) has to exert effective population control. The worrying thing here isn't so much the specific draconian actions themselves, but how much of the population is actively and gleefully cheering for them. And as it's obvious that none of these policies are going to make our country materially better (eg economically or social cohesion), this performative vice signalling stands to get worse and worse as this goes on.
I'm certainly not a slavery apologist, but the Civil War was a terrible precedent that we are now paying the price for. Like always, power always gets agglomerated because the hero (Lincoln) desires to to good. But once it's been agglomerated, it tends to attract evil.
One of the clear underlying pillars of support for Trumpism is China/Russia trying to break up the United States so that it is less able to project power over the world. In this sense, supporting the paradigm of a weakened federal government is helping fulfill that goal. But it would be one way to stop the hemorrhaging and at least get us some breathing room in the short term. The current opposition party has trouble even mustering the will to avoid voting to fund the out of control executive, so whatever reforms we push for have to be simple and leverage existing centers of power. We can't let the national Democrats simply do another stint of business-as-usual phoning it in as the less-bad option, or we'll be right back here just like we are now from last time.
Convincing the Federal government to voluntarily relinquish power, or forcing them to do so is probably the hardest and least likely possible change we could make to our system of government. Positing that as some kind of easier more realistic stopgap vs essentially any other reform is bordering on madness.
Probably easier than convincing individual senators/reps and the part(ies) as a whole to give up their own personal power with things like Ranked Pairs voting, no?
And probably easier to have Congress pass such legislation to draw a new line in the sand, even if it could be undone later, than doing things that would inescapably require a Constitutional amendment.
The problem with the other reforms I have thought of is that we're so far gone it will take more than one reform. Like campaign finance reform would have been great a decade ago. But now that kind of relies on getting back a non-pwnt and even trustworthy law enforcement apparatus, too. Same with a US GDPR / tech antitrust enforcement - would have been great a decade or two ago, but it won't particularly change much now that half the pop culture is already enamored with fascism.
But I agree that we need to be brainstorming and discussing many approaches to reform. So what specifically are you thinking of as the reforms we need?
My initial comment stated the goal very strongly. I don't see that an initial stopgap version of it would require a Constitutional amendment. The President's power to federalize the Guard comes from legislation passed by Congress ("Insurrection Act", etc), which Congress could straightforwardly undo. Congress could also reaffirm Posse Comitatus, tighten up any loopholes in the President's ability to divert funding from the state-controlled National Guards. Congress could also include a bit indicating that state courts are the appropriate jurisdiction for claims over control of the guard. The Supreme Council might try to go against that last bit under the guise of "Constitutionality", but the goal would be to give the chain of command stronger grounds to refuse illegal orders.
I'm eager to discuss other avenues of reform, though. What do you see as a minimum viable path to reform?
The President's power to control the national guard comes from the constitution not acts of congress.
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”
But ignoring all that, if a governor used the national guard against federal agents, that’s open civil war. The military gets deployed, and death and destruction follow.
The reform needed is that congress takes back constitutional powers they’ve delegated to the President, and removes a President who violates their will.
Congress has the power to control the President right now. If they aren’t willing to do exercise that authority, there’s nothing we can do.
Let’s say you got Congress to grant states the ability to make war on the federal government in order to provide an extra-congressional check on Presidential power (which I don’t think you can do, but just pretend you can). That’s only useful in a situation where the President has effectively captured Congress. Otherwise an extra-congressional check isn’t needed. But in the case Congress will just remove that power from the states.
This only works even a little bit as a Constitutional amendment—even if you could pass legislation to do it.
The President's power to command the Guard, when called into "actual service of the United States", by Congress. Being called up by a state governor would be in service of that state and would not qualify, right? Hence the constant threat of invoking the "Insurrection" Act.
> if a governor used the national guard against federal agents, that’s open civil war
When state police arrest a fedgov employee for breaking state law, is that a "civil war" ? I would call that enforcing the rule of law under a system of shared sovereignty.
> The reform needed is that congress takes back constitutional powers they’ve delegated to the President
If wishes were horses... Congress failing to exercise their powers for the past several decades is a big part of how we got into this situation. And sure, at any point technically they could retake them. Except it seems that the Republican congresscritters are content with the plausible deniability, while they would be more hesitant to stick their own necks out and positively affirm what's going on.
But the context of reform I am talking about is if the Democrats regain control of the Presidency and Congress. What can be done to make it so that after 4 years of relative sanity regarding separation of powers, people won't just get frustrated and start craving the simplistic answers of fascism again?
A big part of this is the many broken and unjust things about our society, but trying to fix a sizeable number of those in 4 or even 2 years is a tall task. Hence why I'm trying to focus on a kernel of the least possible required to stop the hemorrhaging, so that it might have a chance of getting done before the buntings change again.
> That’s only useful in a situation where the President has effectively captured Congress
Look at the current state of things - Congress doesn't appear to be fully captured, just immobilized.
> Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.
They are putting people in interment camps right now, people are dying in them. You can find stories on a daily basis about discovered deaths in camps in texas being determined to be homicides, and those are just the ones we know about.
> Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.
Give Trump time. Also the deaths as a result of just the destruction of USAID, millions of children will and are dying; it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country
Andrew Jackson did it 1 year into has fist term. Trump is already in his 2nd.
> it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country
It’s horrible to be clear. But ending assistance to other countries is in no way morally worse than genocide, slavery, and war.
>detention camps
The last year of the Biden administration, there were about 40k people in ICE detention facilities. The number has gone up under Trump, but it has less than doubled.
Any preventable deaths of people in ICE custody are unacceptable, but the number of deaths are a little higher proportionally than under Biden.
This is all horrible and condemnable. But detaining undocumented immigrants temporarily is something every administration does (even if this administration is ramping it up) and is in no way comparable to rounding up 100k innocent US citizens for a 4 year term.
Trump is an awful, greedy, morally corrupt human being, and a terrible President. But we’ve seen and survived much worse.
When was the ideal time for RBG to retire? Was it when Mitch McConnell was refusing to even hold hearings for any Obama nominee in the last years of his presidency? There is no indication that RBG retiring would have resulting in a confirmed Obama selected justice, it could have just resulted in Trump getting his picks earlier.
I would point out that even had RBG retired early enough for Obama to appoint a replacement, the court would still have Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh in the majority.
Sure, there may be a case here or there that would go the other way, but the vast majority of cases before this hypothetical court would be decided the same way as they have been, merely with a thinner majority.
Yes, RBG retiring would not have switched the court.
But 6-3 is meaningfully different than 5-4. 6-3 means you can lose one from your coalition, enabling more extreme majority opinions. You can see this even in the very highest profile cases like Dobbs and Trump v US, where one of the conservatives didn't join the entire majority.
It also makes flipping the court enormously more difficult. 5-4 means that one conservative dying and an inopportune time and you flip it. 6-3 makes this statistically unlikely.
I very strongly suspect that we will see Alito and Thomas retire this year. Everybody knows how this goes now.
People do realize that Republicans have agency right? It’s more fun to blame democrats but it’s fairly striking to blame them while hand waving away that the right wing fascist project has been ongoing since at least 2010. They could have also stopped the fascist corruption.
I mean, sure. The problem is that ignoring Republican agency is seemingly incubated by both parties' philosophies (such as they are). It's a common "conservative" vice to blame problems on those you identify less with (right now, Democrats). It's a common "liberal" vice to put the onus to fix a problem on those you identify more with (also Democrats). Therefore, most people's solution to any given problem involves putting pressure on Democrats. Putting pressure on Republicans "doesn't help", either because they have nothing to do with the problem or because they obviously will never fix it.
Part of me thinks this is fundamental to the human condition, but most of me thinks it isn't. This doesn't seem to have happened in the FDR era, or the Nixon era, for example. I think it's just fallout from the post-Reagan coalitions in the US political system.
RBG had cancer twice, and she refused to step down and let Obama replace her. More should have been done to convince her. McConnell blocking Obama from filling Scalia's vacancy probably didn't have to happen the way it did, if Democrats stood up and forced it - the Republican reasoning was absolutely stupid and not based on any lawful reason.
Yes, the Democrats fumbled this and it led to the problems we have now. I'm still a lifelong Democrat voter and always will be, but goddamnit did we shoot ourselves in the foot.
Trump had no problem convincing Kennedy to step down and be replaced. Republicans know the game, the Democrats we elect don't seem to know how to play it.
Renee Good blocked half the [small, suburban, low traffic, no lane markings] road and told the officers they were free to drive around her. I don't know what the blockage was about the but she seemingly wasn't trying to get in anyone's way.
The actual org itself acts as an umbrella to coordinate work among the participating non-profits.
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