TBR News December 9, 2019

Dec 09 2019

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. December 9, 2019:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for December 9: ” It was in the Spring of 2001 when a young computer expert living in the Mid-West developed a lethal virus intended to do a full-bore global destruction to the international computer/internet system.
The virus is spread from computer to computer system to computer and it is so constructed that it cannot be searched out by any known computer security system. The virus remains placidly dormant until it is triggered and then after a specific lapse of time, is fully activated.
What does this virus do?
Totally obliterates the computer hard drive and expunges it of all memory.
In essence, the hard drive is flat line and cannot be reconstructed.
What sort of a trigger would activate this?
Perhaps a first, middle and last name coupled with a fake social security number.
The probability of this trigger accidentally emerging would be a mathematical impossibility.
Let us say that this was triggered on the computer system of a major bank.
When the activating time arrived, everything on the bank computer would be gone. No one could access the ATM machine, cash checks, or otherwise have access to the bank’s services.
There would be mass panic and the bank’s computer people would install backup systems.
After a frenzied flurry, all would return to normal, that is until the activated triggers would work again.
Official records, social security, food stamps, passport data, criminal rap sheets, and dozens and dozens more of vital services would, in essence, be gone with the wind.
And since this project has been silently contaminating the global systems since 2001, the length and depth of the infections would be immense and all-inclusive.
Of course the Russians would be blamed but the computers would be as dead as a squashed cockroach and the entire societal global informational and business structures would gasp, gurgle and die.
People could not buy food, electrical systems would fail and soon, the woodlands of America, and the world, would be filled with frantic citizens digging caves in the soil, or places to bury their surviving family members.
The motto?
Never put all your eggs in one basket.”

The Table of Contents
• Trump is the natural consequence of our anti-democracy decade
• The War on Immigrants
• Trump and the Numbers Game
• The Bastion of Trump supporters
• The Empire in Collapse
• The Season of Evil

Trump is the natural consequence of our anti-democracy decade
The president knows how the system works: the rich give money and get what they want in return. His defeat is imperative
December 8, 2019
by Robert Reich
The Guardian
We’re coming to the end of what might be called the anti-democracy decade. It began on 21 January 2010 with the supreme court’s shameful decision in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission, opening the floodgates to big money in politics with the absurd claim that the first amendment protects corporate speech.
It ends with Donald Trump in the White House, filling his administration with corporate shills and inviting foreign powers to interfere in American elections.
Trump is the consequence rather than the cause of the anti-democratic decade. By the 2016 election, the richest 100th of 1% of Americans – 24,949 very wealthy people – accounted for a record-breaking 40% of all campaign contributions.
That same year, corporations flooded the presidential, Senate and House elections with $3.4bn in donations. Labor unions no longer provided any countervailing power, contributing only $213m – one union dollar for every 16 corporate.
Big corporations and the super-wealthy lavished their donations on the Republican party because Republicans promised them a giant tax cut. As Lindsey Graham warned his colleagues, “financial contributions will stop” if the GOP didn’t come through.
The investments paid off big. Pfizer, whose 2016 contributions to the GOP totaled $16m, will reap an estimated $39bn in tax savings by 2022. GE contributed $20m and will get back $16bn. Chevron donated $13m and will receive $9bn.
Groups supported by Charles and the late David Koch spent more than $20m promoting the tax cut, which will save them and their heirs between $1bn and $1.4bn every year.
Not even a sizzling economy could match these returns.
The tax cut has contributed to record corporate profits but almost nothing has trickled down. Companies have spent most of their extra cash on stock buybacks and dividends. This has given the stock market a sugar high but left little for average workers.
Such workers have been shafted. Despite the longest economic expansion in modern history, real wages have barely risen. The share of corporate profits going to workers still isn’t back to where it was before the 2008 financial crisis. Never in the history of economic data have corporate profits outgrown employee compensation so clearly and for so long.
The so-called “free market” has been taken over by crony capitalism, corporate bailouts and corporate welfare.
Citizens United itself is a corporate front group, founded by a Washington political consultant and backed by major funding from the Kochs. In 2008 it sought to broadcast TV ads for a film criticizing Hillary Clinton, in direct violation of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, which barred corporations from buying ads mentioning candidates immediately preceding elections.
After the case made it to the supreme court, Justice Anthony Kennedy – defying all logic and reason – declared for the court that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption”.
Tell that to most Americans. Confidence in political institutions has plummeted. In 1964, just 29% of Americans believed government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves”. By 2013, 79% believed it. In Rasmussen polls in autumn 2014, 63% thought most members of Congress were willing to sell their vote for either cash or a campaign contribution and 59% thought it likely their representative already had.
Enter Trump.
“Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place,” he charged at the Republican convention in 2016.
He then rode the rigging all the way into the Oval Office.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Even if Citizens United isn’t reversed by the supreme court or defanged by a constitutional amendment, a principled Congress and decent president could still rescue our democracy.
House Democrats have begun with their For the People Act, the first legislation they introduced when they gained a majority. It expands voting rights, limits partisan gerrymandering, strengthens ethics rules and limits the influence of private donor money by providing $6 of public financing for every $1 of small donations, up to $200, raised by participating candidates.
On the other hand, a second Trump term could make the anti-democracy decade a mere prelude to the wholesale destruction of American democracy.
Trump couldn’t care less. As he said in 2016: “I give money to everybody, even the Clintons, because that’s how the system works.”
These might have been the most honest words ever to come out of his mouth.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. He is also a columnist for Guardian US

The War on Immigrants
The Government Has Taken At Least 1,100 Children From Their Parents Since Family Separations Officially Ended
December 9, 2019
by John Washington
The Intercept
“You can’t imagine the pain,” Dennis said. “If you’re not a dad, you don’t know what it’s like.” I reached Dennis by phone in a small town in the Copán Department of Honduras, where he lives with his wife and three children. For five months this year, the family was fractured across borders. Sonia, age 11, had been separated from Dennis after they crossed into the United States and turned themselves in to the Border Patrol to ask for asylum. Dennis was deported from Texas, and Sonia sent to a shelter in New York.
The U.S. government is still taking children from their parents after they cross the border. Since the supposed end of family separation — in the summer of 2018, after a federal judge’s injunction and President Donald Trump’s executive order reversing the deeply controversial policy — more than 1,100 children have been taken from their parents, according to the government’s own data. There may be more, since that data has been plagued by bad record keeping and inconsistencies. The government alleges that separations now only happen when a parent has a criminal history or is unfit to care for a child, but an ongoing lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union argues that the current policy still violates the rights of children and families. Border Patrol agents, untrained in child welfare, make decisions that some parents are unfit to stay with their children based solely on brief interactions with them while they are held in custody.
Dennis picks coffee during the harvest season and works other basic jobs when he can, but he struggles to put food on the table and pay for his kids’ school supplies. In April, unable to find steady work in the coffee fields and receiving regular threats from a creditor, he headed north, hoping to find safety and opportunity in the United States. “We were barely eating. I couldn’t give my kids a life,” Dennis told me. (He preferred that I only use first names for him and his family due to safety concerns.) Thinking that his two boys — ages 2 1/2 and 7 — were too young to travel, Dennis took Sonia and together they left Honduras. They trekked through Guatemala and Mexico by bus, train, and on foot. They were robbed once, terrified the whole way, and had to beg for food. They slept wherever they could — sometimes in the woods, along the tracks, or, when they could scrounge enough money together, in migrant flophouses.
After about a month of travel, Dennis and Sonia crossed the Rio Grande in a small raft outside of McAllen, Texas, on the morning of May 17. They walked for hours before they turned themselves in to a Border Patrol agent and were taken to a processing center, where they were locked up in one of the freezing-cold temporary holding centers known as hieleras, or iceboxes. Only a few hours later, a Border Patrol agent took Dennis and Sonia and locked them in separate rooms. It was the last time he would see his daughter for five months.
For the next 11 days, Dennis remained in the hielera, asking repeatedly to see his daughter. Border Patrol officers tried to get him to sign papers that were in English, which he couldn’t read. He refused. “You can’t see her,” a Border Patrol agent told him about his daughter. The agent said that she was fine, but wouldn’t tell him where she was. Border Patrol transferred Dennis to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Port Isabel, Texas. They told him that because of a previous deportation and a felony — a 10-year-old charge for using false work authorization papers — he was ineligible for asylum. For the next 30 days of his detention, he knew nothing of his daughter or her whereabouts. Finally, an agent called him over and told him that she was on the phone. The call was brief. They both cried. He told her to be strong. He told her that they were going to send him away. Two weeks later, without talking to his daughter again, he was deported back to Honduras. “I’m a man, but I cried. I cried,” he told me. “Oh, it was so hard.”
Sonia was in New York in an Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, shelter, where she was living with a number of other children. In Honduras, after Dennis’s deportation, the rest of the family waited in agony for nearly 5 months, until October 9, when Sonia was released and then flown home. “My wife,” Dennis said, “she didn’t eat, didn’t sleep. You can’t imagine the suffering. And, don’t forget,” he reminded me, “she had two other kids to raise.”
In 2018, much of the world looked on aghast as U.S. immigration agents separated thousands of children from their parents in an unprecedented anti-immigrant crackdown. In one notorious instance captured on audio, Border Patrol agents laughed and joked at desperate children crying for their parents. The separations, part of a series of policy changes to limit total immigration and effectively shutter refugee and asylum programs, stemmed from the so-called zero-tolerance policy that began in El Paso in 2017 and was rolled out border-wide in the spring of 2018. The administration had announced that it would seek to prosecute all people who illegally crossed the border (despite the fact that, according to U.S. law, it is not illegal for an asylum-seeker to cross the border), but it later emerged that the government had specifically targeted families. A strict zero tolerance policy — prosecuting every individual who was apprehended — was always beyond capacity. The focus on families was part of a distinct effort by the Department of Homeland Security and the White House to try and dissuade — by subjecting parents and children to the terror of separation — more people from coming to the United States.
After widespread uproar and international condemnation, Trump issued an executive order to halt the separations on June 20, 2018. Six days later, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw issued an injunction, demanding the reunification of parents with their children within 30 days. For children under the age of 5, the deadline was 14 days. For some, however, it was too late. Parents had already lost custody, been deported, or even lost track of their children. Even for those who were reunified, trauma had set in. In 2018, the number of publicly known separations was 2,800. In fact, as the government revealed this October after pressure from the ACLU lawsuit, that original count was over 1,500 children short. Furthermore, the government has admitted that more than 1,100 additional families have been separated since the executive order and injunction — bringing the total number of children impacted to at least 5,446. That number may still be an undercount and will continue to rise if immigration officials’ current practices continue.
The grounds for the ongoing separations — the 1,100 new cases — stem from a carve-out in Sabraw’s injunction: that children should not be separated “absent a determination that the parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child.” That language, the ACLU and others allege in an ongoing lawsuit, is being interpreted too broadly by the government, resulting in unwarranted separations. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who has been litigating against the government on behalf of a class of separated families, called the ongoing separation policy “as shocking as it is unlawful.”
The reason that Dennis and Sonia were separated, for example, goes back to 2008, when Dennis’s wife was pregnant with Sonia, and Dennis came to the U.S. to find work and support his family. He made it to Minnesota and was loaned false papers to get a job, but he was quickly picked up and charged with forgery. He spent three months in a federal prison before being deported. Eleven years later, that conviction led to Sonia being taken from him. “You could call any child expert from anywhere in the country, and they would tell you that these parents are not a danger to the child,” Gelernt said in a September 20 hearing. “The government is simply saying, ‘We are going to take away children because the court said we could.’”
In a brief filed to the court in July, ACLU attorneys pointed out cases in which children were taken from their parents for “the most minor or nonviolent criminal history.” The reasons for separation cited in those cases included marijuana possession convictions, a 27-year-old drug possession charge, and a charge of “malicious destruction of property value” over a total of $5. An 8-month-old was separated from his father for a “fictitious or fraudulent statement.” A mother who broke her leg at the border had her 5-year-old taken from her while she was in emergency surgery, and ORR did not release the child for 79 days.
In an example of a dubious determination made by the Border Patrol of a father being “unfit” to care for his 1-year-old daughter, an agent separated the two because the father left his daughter in a wet diaper while she was sleeping. She had been sick and, after caring for her and taking her to the hospital on two separate occasions for a high fever, the father “wanted to let her sleep instead of waking her to change her diaper,” according to the ACLU brief. Nonetheless, a female guard took his daughter from his arms, criticized him for not changing the diaper, and even called him a bad father. The government’s own documents show that the father has no other criminal history.
In another instance, a 3-year-old girl was separated from her father due to Customs and Border Protection’s allegation that he was not actually her parent. Although the father’s name does not appear on the child’s birth certificate, he presented other documentation showing parentage and requested a DNA test as proof. Officials ignored his request and separated the family. After an attorney intervened, the family took a DNA test and confirmed paternity. Meanwhile, the daughter was sexually abused while in ORR care and, according to the brief, “appears to be severely regressing in development.”
CBP did not respond to a request for comment.
The ACLU’s brief received some coverage this summer, but many of the most egregious stories it collected went unmentioned. Overall, even as the separations have continued, media attention has flagged. From a high of 2,000 stories a month in the summer of 2018, this fall has seen an average of only 50 to 100 stories a month that mention family separation, according to an analysis by Pamela Mejia, head of research at Berkeley Media Studies Group. Mejia told me that the issue had “reached a saturation point” for many people: “The overwhelming number of stories that generate outrage has made it harder to keep anything in the headlines.”
At first, the child victims of the government’s actions were easy to empathize with. There was no “crime frame,” as Mejia put it, to explain away the children’s suffering, in contrast to the way that immigration is often covered. Whether denominating migrants as “illegals,” seeing them as “hordes” or “invaders,” or using a broad brush to associate them with crime or terrorism, politicians and the media alike often wield anti-immigrant or dehumanizing language when discussing immigration. Young children, however, are something different. The broad consensus in 2018 was that the family separation policy was an outrageous and unnecessary cruelty.
But, despite the outrage, the policy continued and now there’s a sense of “futility that this is going to keep happening,” Mejia said. Gelernt likewise attributed the lack of ongoing coverage to “media burnout,” noting especially that there are more than 200 kids under the age of 5 who have been separated from their families. It’s hard to cover so many heartrending stories, Gelernt said. And now, simply, “People think it’s over.”
But it’s not. Sabraw, the southern California judge who issued the injunction in 2018, is expected to rule soon on the ACLU’s challenge to the continued separations. But even if he again orders the government to reunify families, or narrows immigration officials’ latitude in carrying out separations, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the government can, or will, comply. CBP, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, has already proven negligent in keeping track of the separated children — calling families who had undergone separation, for example, “deleted family units.” Some children still remain unaccounted for.
“At this point, no government official can plausibly claim that they are unaware of the damage these separations are doing to the children,” Gelernt told me, “yet they continue to do it.”
In late November, back in Copán, Sonia graduated from sixth grade. One of her favorite things to do, Dennis told me, is to draw with her younger brothers. She is also teaching the older of the two boys to read, practicing his letters with him. She’ll go into seventh grade soon, but her father worries about her growing up in what he described as a gang-ridden town. Honduras has one of the highest incidence rates of violence against women in the world. He also doesn’t know how he’ll be able to pay for her high school. “I know it’s desperate,” he said, “but I’m thinking of heading north again. I can’t see how else to do it.”
Sonia doesn’t talk much about her time separated from her family, but Dennis notices that she’s changed, and he and his wife are worried: “She told me she didn’t feel good. She was just crying at first [while in the ORR facility]; that’s all she did.” Now when she goes quiet sometimes, her parents wonder if she’s still affected by the trauma. As Dennis contemplated aloud another potential trip north in search of personal and financial security, he reflected, “I just ask that we have enough food to eat every day. I just want my family to be safe.

Trump and the Numbers Game
There were 56.5 million Hispanics in the United States in 2015, accounting for 17.6% of the total U.S. population.
The Hispanic Mexican population of the United States is projected to grow to 107 million by 2065.
The share of the U.S. population that is Hispanic has been steadily rising over the past half century. In 2015, Hispanics made up 17.6% of the total U.S. population, up from 3.5% in 1960, the origins of the nation’s Hispanic population have diversified as growing numbers of immigrants from other Latin American nations and Puerto Rico settled in the U.S.
For example, between 1930 and 1980, Hispanics from places other than Mexico nearly doubled their representation among U.S. Hispanics, from 22.4% to 40.6%. But with the arrival of large numbers of Mexican immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s, the Mexican share among Hispanics grew, rising to a recent peak of 65.7%.
California has the largest legal poplation of Mexicans, 14,013,719. And California is also home to almost 25% of the country’s undocumented population. California is followed by Texas where 31.14%,(8,500,000) are Mexican, Florida has 4,223,806 Mexicans, Illinois 2,153,000, Arizona,1,895,149, Colorado, 1,136,000 Georgia, 923,000, North Carolina, 890,000, and Washington, 858,000 Mexicans.
Given the fact that President Trump has strong personal dislikes for both Blacks and Latinos, manifest in his recent vicious treatment of Mexican immigrants in their legal attempts to immigrate to the United States, the sheer number of Mexicans now resident in the United States ought to give him, and his far-right Republican Congressional supporters serious pause in their denial of entrance for legal immigrant attempts and the subsequent brutal maltreatment of small children of these immigrants.
If the Mexican voting population of the United States were to organize, like the recent organizing of the black voting population of Alabma in opposition to the fanatical Judge Moore, the results in the November elections could well prove to be a stunning disaster for both Trump and the Republicans.
Numbers certainly count but Trump is obviously unaware of their potential danger, both to him and his right-wing radical supporters.

The Bastion of Trump supporters
The policy of the supporters of the far right groups is to exacerbate latent racism in the United States to the point where public violence erupts and the political polarization of the public becomes manifest. By encouraging and arming the far right and neo nazi groups, the Scavenius group is laying the groundwork for an acceptable and militant government reaction, the institution of draconian control over the entire population and the rationale for national and official government control, all in the name of law and order. It is planned that the far right and neo nazi groups be taken into the law enforcement structure and used to put down any public demonstrations that the government deems to be a potential threat to their policies.
Who are these groups? Here is a listing of only some of them:
• ACT for America
• Alliance Defending Freedom
• America’s Promise Ministries
• American Border Patrol/American Patrol
• American Family Association
• American Freedom Party
• American Renaissance
• Aryan Brotherhood
• Aryan Brotherhood of Texas
• Aryan Nations
• Blood & Honor
• Brotherhood of Klans
• Center for Security Policy
• Church of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
• The Creativity Movement
• The Sovereign Citizen Movement of the US and Canada
• The Dominonist Movement of America
• National Alliance
• National Coalition for Immigration Reform
• National Socialist Movement
• National Vanguard
• Oath Keepers
• Stormfront
• The Aryan Terror Brigade.
• The neo-Confederate League of the South.
• Traditionalist Worker Party
• White Revolution

The Empire in Collapse
Because of the growing, and serious, public discontent that had been manifested during the course of the Vietnamese War from 1950 through 1973, the American governmental establishment resolved to take steps to recognize, infiltrate and neutralize any significant future national anti-government actions.
Once the most powerful nation, the United States is rapidly losing its premier position in the international sphere while at the same time facing a potential serious anti-government political movement developing in that country. The number of unemployed in the United States today is approximately 97,000,000. Official American sources claim that employment is always improving but in fact it is not. Most official governmental releases reflect wishful thinking or are designed to placate the public
This situation is caused by the movement, by management, of manufacturing businesses to foreign labor markets. While these removals can indeed save the companies a great deal of expenditure on domestic labor, by sharply reducing their former worker bodies to a small number, the companies have reduced the number of prospective purchasers of expensive items like automobiles.
The U.S. government’s total revenue is estimated to be $3.654 trillion for fiscal year 2018.
•Personal income taxes contribute $1.836 trillion, half of the total.
•Another third ($1.224 trillion) comes from payroll taxes.
This includes $892 billion for Social Security, $270 billion for Medicare and $50 billion for unemployment insurance.
•Corporate taxes add $355 billion, only 10 percent.
•Customs excise taxes and tariffs on imports contribute $146 billion, just 4 percent
•The Federal Reserve’s net income adds $70 billion.
•The remaining $23 billion of federal income comes from estate taxes and miscellaneous receipts.
•The use of secret offshore accounts by US citizens to evade U.S. federal taxes costs the U.S. Department of the Treasury well over $100 billion annually.
By moving from a producing to an importing entity, the United States has developed, and is developing, serious sociological and economic problems in a significant number of its citizens, and many suffer from serious health problems that are not treated.
It is estimated that over 500,000 American citizens are without any form of housing. Many of these people either are living on the streets, in public parks, living in cars or in charity shelters. There are at present over 200,000 family groups in America with over 300,000 individuals involved and 25% of the total are minor children.
Over 80,000 individuals are permanently without any residence. Many of these have physical disabilities such as chronic alcoholism or drug addiction. Many are classified as having severe mental disorders.
About 50,000 of these homeless individuals are military veterans, many of whom have serious physical or mental problems. One of the most common mental disorders is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Governmental treatment for these individuals is virtually non-existent. Approximately half of this number are either black or Latin American (“Hispanics” in official designation.)
Of the total number of the homeless individuals, approximately 10% are female.
Official but private, estimates are that there over 500,000 youths below the age of 24 in current American society that find themselves homeless for periods lasting from one week to a permanent status.
Over 100,000 of this class are young people who are defined as being homosexual. Those in this class find themselves persecuted to a considerable degree by society in general and their peer groups in specific.
Approximately 50% of this homeless population are over the age of 50, many of whom suffer from chronic, debilitating physical illnesses that are not treated.
Drug deaths in the U.S. in 2017 exceeded 60,000. Nearly half of all opioid overdose deaths involved prescriptions. Opioids are a class of strong painkillers drugs and include Percocet, Vicodin and OxyContin which are synthetic drugs designed to resemble opiates such as opium derived morphine and heroin. The most dangerous opioid is Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid painkiller 50-100 times more powerful than morphine. The increasing demand for these drugs is causing them to be manufactured outside the United States.
Suicide is the primary cause of “injury death” in the United States and more U.S. military personnel on active duty have killed themselves than were killed in combat last year.
The growing instability of American families is manifested by the fact that:
• One out of every three children in America lives in a home without a father.
• More than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock for women under the age of 30 living in the United States
• The United States has the highest child abuse death rate in the developed world.
• The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the world although the numbers have declined in recent years due to the use of contraceptives.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prison population in the entire world. The criminal justice system in the United States holds more than 4,166,000 people in 1,719 state prisons, 102,000 in federal prisons, 901,000 in juvenile correctional facilities, and 3,163,000 in local jails. Additionally, 5,203,400 adults are on probation or on parole.
The number of people on probation or parole has increased the population of the American corrections system to more than 9,369,400 in 2017. Corrections costs the American taxpayer $69 billion a year.
There are a huge number of American domestic and business mortgages, (67 million by conservative estimate) which have been sliced up, put into so-called “investment packages” and sold to customers both domestic and foreign. This problem has been covered up by American authorities by cloaking the facts in something called MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration System)
This results in the fact that the holders of mortgages, so chopped and packed, are not possible to identify by MERS or anyone else, at any time and by any agency. This means that any property holder, be they a domestic home owner or a business owner, is paying their monthly fees for property they can never own.
Another festering problem consists of the official loans made to students in colleges and universities in the U.S. the predatory nature of the $90 billion student loan industry. These so-called student loans are the most serious economic problem faced today by American university students.
This problem arose due to federal legislation originating in the mid-1990s which effectively removed basic consumer protections from student loans, thus permitting extensive penalties and the methodology for enforced collection.
Because of the highly inflated cost of higher American education, very few students from high school can afford university education. The new college graduate has, on average, a student loan in excess of $20,000 and students attending graduate programs have average debts of over $40,000.
America today has seriously failing public school systems. Upper economic class Americans are able to send their children to expensive private schools and avoid the exceedingly incompetent public systems. The average American lower school graduates are only a step above illiteracy and their lack of knowledge of world affairs is quite unbelievable.
A small number of extremely wealthy men control and operate all of the major American print and television media.
Each of the few very powerful, rich men have their own reasons for deciding what qualifies as news.
But the public in America now gets its news, without cost, from various internet sites and the circulation number of major print news has dropped dramatically. This has forced the internet editions of the print news media to erect what they call “paywalls.” This permits a very limited number of articles to be read or downloaded before the system demands money for the use of additional material.
The major print media in America is faced with imminent bankruptcy and are making frantic efforts at attempts to prevent free news sites from being aired on the internet.
Government surveillance of the American public is very widespread and at the present time, almost every aspect of an American citizen, or resident, is available for official surveillance. This includes mail, television viewing, telephone conversations, computer communications, travel, ownership of property, medical and school records, banking and credit card transactions, inheritances and other aspects of a citizen’s daily life.
This is done to circumvent any possible organization that could contravene official government policy and has its roots in massive civil resistance to governmental policy during the war in Vietnam. The government does not want a reprise of that problem and its growing surveillance is designed to carefully watch any citizen, or groups of citizens, who might, present or future, pose a threat to government policy.
Another factor to be considered is the current American attitudes towards racial issues. There has always been prejudice in the United States against blacks. In 1943 there were bloody riots in Detroit and Los Angeles, the former aimed at blacks and the latter against Mexicans. Since then, there has been chronic racial prejudice but it has been relatively small and very local. Also, there is growing anti-Semitic prejudice in American but this is officially ignored and never is mentioned in the American media. Much of this growing problem is directed at the brutal actions of Israel against Palestinians. Israelis have an undue influence in the American political scene. The very far right so-called neo-cons are almost all Jewish and most are Israeli citizens. Also, the middle-level ranks of American CIA personnel are heavily infiltrated by Israelis and it is said that any secret the CIA has is at once passed to Israel and that countries needs are assuming importance in CIA actions.
The attitudes of the working class Americans were inflamed during the last presidential elections by Mr. Trump who catered to them and encouraged rebellious attitudes. By speaking against Central American illegal immigrants, Mr. Trump has caused a polarization of attitudes and the militant right wing in America, currently small in number but well-organized and potentially very dangerous, has begun to make its views very well known in public demonstrations.
This movement has played into the hands of far-right American political manipulators.
It is their intention to clandestinely arm these groups and use them to cause violent public confrontations with the far left groups.
By causing this potential violence, the manipulators intend to use the American military to move into unstable area to, as they say, ‘establish law and order’ while in reality, they will use martial law to firm up their basic control of a potentially fractious public.
It is then intended, according to information, to incorporate organized, para-military groups into a sort of domestic Federal police force. These people will not be punished for their actions but rewarded and utilized to ensure further right-wing control of the country.

The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas

Preface
This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.
To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccurate.

Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019

Chapter 22

The next morning, he spent a good deal of his time observing the pool to either see the arrival of the pool repairman or to watch as Connie and her friend surfaced like basking whales.
Lars and his current interest had tapered off their lovemaking and now were camped in the living room, watching old movies on television. Chuck had a fleeting idea that if he slipped one of Lars’ terrible tapes into the VCR, there might be a good deal of comment but he fought the impulse and spent most of the day in his room..
Finally, towards the end of the second day, there were various forms of activity in the complex. A number of irate tenants, wishing to use the pool, had gone to the office and there discovered that Connie had apparently fled the country.
Several people knocked on the door of the apartment wondering if anyone had seen Connie and why had she gone to Mexico when she promised to have the toilet seat in 221 fixed and why was the pool out of order?
Chuck was now becoming very nervous so later that night, he went out and took down the sign on the pool gate.
The dinner that evening consisted of filet, baked potatoes with sour cream and fresh chives, creamed spinach and a torte for dessert. The conversation at the table consisted of a good deal of yawning and unfinished sentences coupled with a discussion about the spinach.
“What is this?” said Gwen.
“Grass clippings,” replied Eric who hated vegetables with a passion.
“Are you kidding me? Grass? Eric, you’re putting me on.”
“No, it’s grass and the white stuff on it is from the blackbirds.”
“That’s enough of that, Eric,” Chuck said sternly, “If you don’t eat your veggies, you’ll have to go to bed without dessert.”
“Oh good,” said the girl, “then I can get two desserts. Can’t I, Chuck?”
“I should have left the creeps to give you both a good whipping. Just eat the dinner and stop being so….mindless. OK?”
There was hurt silence that lasted about three minutes and then the conversation turned to swimming, a subject that Chuck personally did not wish to discuss.
It was decided that everyone would go over to the other pool, the one that was not shaped like a heart, and try to cool off. Gwen had erotic by-play in mind, Eric was still tired and Chuck was becoming extremely concerned about the status of the late manager and famous author.
The other pool was full of tenants so Gwen had to forego her foreplay, Lars banged his leg on the pool ladder and said something terrible in Norwegian and Chuck sat down on what he thought was an empty pool chair and quickly discovered he was sitting on a small dog wrapped in a towel. The owner shrieked from the shallow end, the dog yelped in terror and Chuck took refuge from the uproar by diving into the pool and very narrowly missing a fat little girl wedged into a pool float.
All in all, he thought as they made their way back to the apartment, it was not a good day. Except, of course, for the money he had stolen. On the other hand, he reasoned, how can one steal from the dead?
Gwen was now wearing a decent but cheap dress and Chuck decided that if she wore better clothes and had her hair done properly, she might be more attractive.
In spite of her fears, she was not flat chested and gave promise of future growth. Lars, on the other hand, was coming to the conclusion that the young lady was longer in the tooth than he liked and he went to bed early, leaving the others in the living room.
It was too early to go to bed and Chuck was too preoccupied to want to watch television so he talked instead.
The girl started the conversation.
“Are you OK? I mean you’re acting kind of nervous or something.”
A surprisingly perceptive young nymphet Chuck thought while chewing on the inside of his cheek.
“No, no, I’m just thinking about the trip, that’s all.”
“You’re not mad at me, are you?”
“No, I’m not mad at you. If I were mad at you, Gwen, you’d know it very quickly.”
“Eric says you’re a nice guy but you have to know you for a long time to find it out.”
“Eric talks too much. Do you like him?”
“Sure I do. That’s a funny question considering what we do all the time.”
Please, Chuck thought, I don’t want to see you naked again. Not just now.
“Well, whatever you do is your business, dear. I was thinking that when we go on our trip, you ought to get some new clothes.”
This was a subject that almost any woman would leap at and Gwen was no exception.
“I’d really love that but I don’t have any money. And Connie told me she wasn’t going to spend any more money on me than she had to.”
Chuck grunted and got up out of his chair.
“Yes, well Connie is not a nice person but when I got your clothes, I found some money in the apartment that I am sure she would want you to have.”
And he gave her five one hundred dollar bills from his wallet.
She stared at him.
“Christ, what’s this for? Do you want to have sex with me or something?”
“No, you’re Lars’ girlfriend, dear. Get some clothes with this and have a nice time.”
She looked very hard at Chuck while she was putting the folded money in her dress pocket.
“Chuck, where is Connie?”
He sat back in the chair and stuck out his feet. At this point, he really had stopped worrying about the girl who seemed to be less stupid than he initially thought. Why not tell her? She would be certain to find out in a day or so anyway and he could judge her reactions with greater safety now rather than later.
“Connie? Connie and her friend are at the bottom of the pool out there. I hit both of them too hard when I rescued you and Lars from their clutches and I threw them into the pool.”
She stared at him and put her hand over her mouth. Chuck was afraid that she was going to cry but she started laughing instead.
“That’s really neat, Chuck! Connie was a real bitch and that freak kept feeling me up. God, I hated him. Did you really dump them in the pool?”
“Yes, dear, I did. And they are still in the pool until someone finds them and we can’t go on our trip until someone does.”
“Why? You mean if the cops come and you’re gone. I mean…if we’re not here, they might think we did it. Right?”
Chuck sat up and looked sharply at her.
“Right. Gwen, how old are you? I know you’re not sixteen but how old?”
“I’ll be eighteen in two weeks. Connie said the creep liked young girls so she told everyone I was just sixteen. How old are you?”
“Twenty seven.”
“You’re an old man, Chuck. How old is Lars?”
“Lars is two years younger than I am. He’s more your age.”
“I like old men.”
“Question here. Were you intact when Lars banged you the other night?”
“Was I what?”
“A virgin?”
“Yes. I didn’t want to be anymore. Does that bother you?”
“Not if you’ll be of age in two weeks. You’ve never told Lars this startling fact, have you?”
“No. He likes young girls, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he does.”
There was a long silence. Chuck had put the ends of his fingers together and was watching the girl.
“Well, he’s been a lot of fun. You aren’t going to tell him about my age, are you?”
“No, it’s none of his business. You aren’t shocked about Connie’s ascension to heaven?”
“I thought you said she was at the bottom of the pool, Chuck.”
He laughed for the first time in several days.
“Yes, dear, that’s what I said. And what will you say if the police should happen to question you?”
She ran her hand through her long, damp hair.
“I don’t like the police, I hated my aunt and you and Eric are nice. You’re actually nicer than he is, you know. I mean, he’s good in bed but you’re good to talk to. I won’t see the cops if I don’t want to. Are they going to come in here and arrest you?”
“They have to find the bodies first.”
“Maybe they’ll float.”
Chuck burst into loud laughter. The trip might be entertaining after all.
“Want something to drink?”
“Coke. I don’t like booze. Some friend of my mother’s tried to get me drunk one time so he could fuck me but I wasn’t going for it.”
“You had something the other night. I found Mexican vodka and orange juice in the kitchen when I cleaned up the blood.”
“The creep wanted to get us drunk so he could take pictures with his camera. If Lars wasn’t so neat looking, I wouldn’t have drunk anything.”
“Someone said that wine was fine but liquor was quicker. Do you drink wine?”
“I like it better than vodka.”
Chuck got up and went into the kitchen, returning with a wine bottle wrapped in a towel in one hand and two glasses in the other.
“A first class vintage, my dear, take my word for it. Can I pour you a glass?”
She shrugged.
“Sure. I mean, you’re not trying to get me drunk so you can screw me, are you? Because if you are, you don’t need the wine.”
“Not now, dear, I have too much on my mind. Try the wine.”
She sipped it.
“I don’t know what’s good and what isn’t but it tastes OK.”
He raised his glass.
“Cheers, as they say. To a good trip and maybe you can get your hair worked on.”
They touched rims.
“My hair? When?”
“When Connie floats.”
(Continued)

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