Donald Trump’s far-right nominees

This video from the USA says about itself:

Trump Taps Racist For Top Cop Position

18 November 2016

Alabama senator Jeff Sessions is in line to be Trump’s Attorney General. Cenk Uygur, Brett Erlich, Jimmy Dore, and Michael Shure, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.

“WASHINGTON ― The man who President-elect Donald Trump will nominate as the 84th attorney general of the United States was once rejected as a federal judge over allegations he called a black attorney “boy,” suggested a white lawyer working for black clients was a race traitor, joked that the only issue he had with the Ku Klux Klan was their drug use, and referred to civil rights groups as “un-American” organizations trying to “force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), an early Trump supporter who has been playing a major role on the Trump transition team, met with the president-elect in New York on Thursday. In a statement, the Trump team said the president-elect was “unbelievably impressed” with Sessions.

On Friday morning, Trump and Sessions confirmed that Sessions had been offered the attorney general position.

J. Gerald Hebert remembers Sessions’ time as the top federal prosecutor in Mobile, Alabama, well. Speaking to The Huffington Post earlier this month, Hebert said he was stunned that an Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a possibility.”

Read more here.

By Patrick Martin in the USA:

Trump begins selecting ultra-right cabinet

19 November 2016

President-elect Donald Trump announced his first two cabinet nominations Friday, as well as the selection of his national security adviser. The three appointments—Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama for attorney general, retired General Michael Flynn for national security adviser, and Representative Mike Pompeo for CIA director—underscore the ultra-right, militaristic and anti-democratic character of the new Republican administration.

Trump has been encouraged by the response of the Democratic Party to the election to press forward with an extremely right-wing agenda, confident that he will encounter no significant political opposition. In the 10 days since the election, leading Democrats have, in succession, come out to wish Trump well and pledge to work with him in implementing key elements of his nationalist policy.

Trump’s selection for “chief strategist” of Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, which has ties to fascistic and white nationalist organizations, has been largely dropped by the Democrats and the media. Trump’s government appointments, while drawn from the political and military establishment, are generally along the same line.

For attorney general, who supervises both the FBI and the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department, Trump has selected Senator Sessions, an extreme-right figure best known because his nomination as a federal judge was rejected by a Republican-controlled Senate 30 years ago due his racist sympathies.

The foremost qualification for Sessions to be the chief law enforcement officer of the United States is his loyalty to Trump, whose vast business empire is mired in scandal and litigation, making his administration a ripe target for investigations into corruption and conflicts of interest.

Sessions was the first Republican senator to endorse Trump’s campaign for the presidency, and the only one to offer support until Trump had effectively clinched the Republican nomination.

Born in Selma, Alabama in 1946, Sessions was 18 at the time of the famous civil rights march there, led by Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. He graduated from Huntingdon College in 1969, and then the University of Alabama law school in 1973, soon joining the US attorney’s office in Mobile. In 1981, Ronald Reagan named him US attorney for the southern district of Alabama, a position he held for 12 years.

During this period, Sessions carried out a notorious witch-hunting prosecution of three veteran civil rights workers, Albert and Evelyn Turner, and Spencer Pogue, charging them with vote fraud under a section of the Voting Rights Act, because of their efforts to register elderly rural black voters. The three were brought to trial, but a racially mixed jury unanimously acquitted them of all charges after deliberating only three hours. Four months after this legal farce, Reagan nominated Sessions to fill a vacant position on the US District Court.

Four co-workers of Sessions from the Justice Department testified to racist comments, ranging from favorable references to the Ku Klux Klan to calling a black attorney “boy” during an office discussion. Sessions admitted to describing both the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union as “un-American” and “communist.” The political uproar was so strong that a Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee ultimately refused to bring his nomination to the floor of the Senate for a vote.

While denied a judgeship, Sessions continued as US attorney and built a political career on the alleged snub, which became a cause célèbre for southern racists. He ran for Alabama state attorney general in 1994 and won, then ran for a vacant US Senate seat in 1996, winning first the Republican primary and then the general election. He has been reelected three times, in his last campaign, in 2014, running unopposed, without even a token Democratic challenger.

Sessions has been one of the most consistently reactionary figures in the US Senate, particularly in relation to immigration. He once told the publication Roll Call that “nativist” was a perfectly acceptable description of his viewpoint. His hardline opposition to both legal and illegal immigration was apparently the basis for his early enthusiasm for the Trump campaign.

More recently, he criticized the finding by FBI Director James Comey that Hillary Clinton had committed no crime in her use of a private email server while secretary of state. As attorney general, Sessions would be Comey’s direct superior and could order him to reopen the Clinton investigation, or appoint a special prosecutor, as Trump has suggested.

If confirmed, Sessions would be the first Republican attorney general from the Deep South since the Southern segregationists moved en masse into the Republican Party after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s.

This video from the USA says about itself:

Trump Adds Islamophobic General To ‘Cabinet Of Deplorables’

18 November 2016

Trump’s future National Security Advisor has some scary beliefs. Cenk Uygur, Brett Erlich, Jimmy Dore, and Michael Shure, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.

“President-elect Donald Trump has offered the job of national security adviser to Michael Flynn, a former military intelligence chief who has been a vocal critic of the Obama administration, according to a senior Trump official.

Flynn, 57, who served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has advised Trump on national security issues for months. As national security adviser, he would work in the White House shaping foreign and military policy and have frequent access to a president with no national security experience.

The Trump official, who was not authorized to discuss the offer publicly, would not say whether Flynn had accepted the job.

According to photographs released by the Japanese government, he was however present at a meeting on Thursday in New York between Trump and the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, at which the US president-elect’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner were also present.”

Read more here.

The Patrick Martin article continues:

In the person of retired Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn, Trump has put a former military intelligence officer in charge of coordinating foreign and military policy, a clear indication that a Trump administration will engage in even more ferocious military aggression than its Democratic predecessor.

A registered Democrat from a middle-class family in Rhode Island, Flynn entered the military from an ROTC program, not from West Point, and specialized in military intelligence. He was associated particularly with the Special Forces assassination campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 15 years.

Flynn clashed with the Obama administration in 2014 and was fired by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper because of his insistence on portraying the conflict with Al Qaeda and later ISIS as a war against Muslims. According to press reports, his obsession led to espousing what subordinates called “Flynn facts,” assertions that bore no relation to reality but bolstered the concept that the US was engaged in a “world war” against Islamist militants.

Like Sessions, a major qualification for Flynn is unconditional loyalty to Trump. He signed on early as an adviser on national security issues, backing Trump throughout a campaign in which virtually the entire military-intelligence apparatus, including most Republican specialists in this area, supported Hillary Clinton.

He has since evinced a deepening obsession with the conflict with Islam, claiming that sharia, a form of Islamic law, is spreading across the United States, and that the Obama administration has failed to fight the spread of ISIS because it refuses to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” to characterize the threat.

According to one press account, Flynn appeared before a right-wing group in Texas last summer and declared, “I don’t see Islam as a religion. I see it as a political ideology.” He continued, arguing that Islam will “mask itself as a religion globally, especially in the West and especially in the United States… Because it can hide itself and protect itself behind what we call freedom of religion.”

Flynn has backed Trump’s declarations in support of torture, including waterboarding, saying in one interview that he was a “believer in leaving as many options on the table right up until the last possible minute.” Most notoriously, he delivered an anti-Clinton, anti-Obama diatribe at the Republican National Convention, during which delegates began chanting, “Lock her up. Lock her up.” Flynn joined in.

This video from the USA says about itself:

Trump’s CIA Director: Execute Edward Snowden

18 November 2016

Trump’s pick for CIA director wants Edward Snowden to face the death penalty. Cenk Uygur, Brett Erlich, Jimmy Dore, and Michael Shure, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.

“Trump has reportedly picked Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) to run the Central Intelligence Agency. What sort of CIA director would Mike Pompeo be?

Well, for one thing, he thinks Edward Snowden should be executed:

That’s Pompeo speaking on C-Span’s Washington Journal this past February. … His comments came in the midst of a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s emails and the Benghazi scandal. Here is a transcript of his Snowden remarks:

It’s absolutely the case that we have not been able to secure all the American information that we needed to, and that we’ve had the traitor Edward Snowden steal that information. He should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence for having put friends of mine, friends of yours, who served in the military today, at enormous risk, because of the information he stole and then released to foreign powers.”

Read more here.

The Patrick Martin article continues:

For CIA director, Trump has chosen Republican Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas, a three-term congressman from Wichita with close ties to the billionaire Koch brothers, whose Koch Industries holding company is headquartered there.

A West Point graduate, Pompeo served in an armored unit of the Army from 1986 to 1991, but was not deployed overseas. After leaving the military, he launched an aerospace components manufacturer in southern California, which eventually relocated to Wichita, Kansas, a center of light aircraft manufacturing. There Pompeo began his political career in 2010, running to succeed an incumbent Republican who stepped down to run for US Senate.

His first campaign was notable because he baited his Democratic opponent, Raj Goyle, the US-born son of Indian immigrant doctors, with billboards urging, “Vote American, Vote Pompeo.” Supporters distributed scurrilous attacks on Goyle as a “turban topper” and non-Christian,

Pompeo wrote: “a turban topper” who “could be a Muslim, a hindy [sic; Hindu], a buddhist etc who knows.”

in area that has long been a hotbed of religious right activity centered on attacks on local abortion providers.

Pompeo supported Senator Marco Rubio in the Republican presidential primaries, only endorsing Trump after Rubio withdrew. Unlike Sessions and Flynn, his political connection to the new administration is vice president-elect Mike Pence, not Trump himself. Pompeo and Pence served in Congress together from 2010 to 2014, and developed a political rapport as part of the most conservative faction of the House Republican majority.

Throughout his six years in the House, Pompeo has stood for the most militaristic and anti-democratic policies, backing the illegal bulk data collection by the National Security Agency when it was exposed by Edward Snowden. He is a member of the House Intelligence Committee and was also chosen to serve on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, set up by the House Republican leadership to undermine the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.

After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Pompeo denounced Muslim clerical leaders for encouraging such attacks. He also stridently denounced the six-nation Iran nuclear deal, claiming that the Obama administration had surrendered to “the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.” On the eve of his nomination to head the CIA, he went on Twitter to declare his determination to terminate the agreement with Teheran.

President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo, an open aficionado of torture practices used in the “war on terror,” to be CIA director shows that Trump was serious when he said he would support “waterboarding and much worse”: here.

In the wake of a television appearance in which a Trump campaign activist said that a registry of Muslim visitors to the United States could be justified under the “precedent” set by the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, a leader of the Trump transition team has revealed that a formal proposal for such a registry is under discussion: here.

Trump in the White House: An Interview With Noam Chomsky: here.

Trump’s election as seen from Europe: here.

India’s ruling elite has enthusiastically welcomed the election of Donald Trump as US president, calculating that his aggressive anti-China and anti-Pakistan positions will boost New Delhi’s geo-political interests against its principal Asian rivals: here.

Every faction of the Sri Lankan ruling elite, including the leaders of the pro-US government and the parliamentary opposition parties, have issued statements voicing their readiness to collaborate with the incoming administration of US President-elect Donald Trump: here.

President-elect Donald Trump, who is just two months away from his inauguration, woke up Saturday morning with a pressing concern on his mind. No, it wasn’t about the violence being carried out in his name, nor did it concern how to deliver his election policies amid a wave of protests across America against some of his most controversial pledges, such as building a wall across the U.S. border with Mexico, deporting millions of immigrants or registering Muslims. What got him worked up was the fact that Mike Pence was booed by the audience during a performance of “Hamilton” on Friday, and that the cast took time to deliver a personal message to the Vice President-elect after the show: here.