| John Young on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 12:42:35 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> why is it so quiet (in the US) |
Currrently with the syzygy of Republican control of the three branches has suspended the checks and balance of the Constitution to limit the warmaking power of the president. He needs only to declare a national security emergency to justify military dominance of the citizenry.
The basis of the declaration is solely up to him as if a war is underway. Eventual Congressional approval of warmaking is required but not in an emergency.
Continuity of Government (COG) regulation allows singular military command by the president instantly by a notification (order) to the military leadership. This established to respond to a national threat of the ICBM type wherein there is no time to consult with Congressional or Supreme Court members, many of whom are dispersed or unreachable.
COG is regularly war-gamed as realistic training, and may be publicized as warning to potential enemies, but the full operation classified and not disclosed. A training session could be used to cloak a real operation underway secretly, that cloaking is a component of the operaton to deceive an enemy.
Mr. Trump is most certainly capable of ordering a national emergency, and he does not have to disclose the basis of it. That is the great fault of the presidency which allows autocracy to be invoked in secrecy to protect the nation.
All this has evolved under the creation and vast institutionalization of "national security" to justify the world's top military force supported by some 16 spy agencies and innumerable federal, state and municipal law enforcement offices which can be commanded in secret by the president under wartime conditions. Internal threats are quite useful for this.
To be sure, autocrats of royalty, theology, ideology and revolution have utilized these same measures to institute a reign of oppression and subjugation. The USA has presented itself as a bastion of opposition to autocracy, leveraging military supremacy to enforce takedowns of tyrants.
As with any supreme power what happens when it becomes excessively self-serving as empires have alway done under control of the few who are sacralized as uniquely qualified to rule, by deity and by weaponry and by law and by the best and brightest willing to sell their souls for kings coin and Nobel dynamite prizes. To wit, nettime and ilk.
At 04:10 AM 11/13/2020, you wrote:
Hi everyone, I must admit, amidst post-terror assault on civil liberties and covid cases spiraling out of control here in Austria, the US election drama has moved a bit lower in my attention, but not that much. >From what I understand, the numbers show that Trump lost. Period. No recount will change that. But, the game of the Republicans is to create so much doubt about the fairness of the elections (without any evidence) to make it impossible to certify them in time. Frivolous lawsuits are great at gumming things up. This would then allow the Republican dominated legislatures in swing states to appoint their own electors which would bring Trump the majority. In the mean time, the minister of defense, who previously refused to send in troops against mostly peaceful protestors, has been fired and replaced with a loyalist. Apparently, similar moves are in the wings for the FBI and CIA. I know, Trump is often portrayed as an incompetent child, and the strategy is totally outlandish, but the Republican party has shown to be a pretty ruthless and successful power machine playing both a short and a long game, and it's exactly the outlandishness of the strategy that is its strongest point. In the mean time, the democrats pretend all of this to be irrelevant (an 'embarrassment' at worst) and happily appoint a transition team full of corporate insiders like it's 1992. Am I totally misreading the situation? Felix -- | |||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com | | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt | # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: