LibertyVoter.Org

By Alex Henderson

Before Joe Biden received the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, many liberals and progressives were expressing strong reservations about the former vice president. His most enthusiastic support, at that point, came from centrist Blue Dog Democrats and Never Trump conservatives.

Progressive pundit Mehdi Hasan was among Biden’s outspoken critics during much of the primary. But in an op-ed published by MSNBC’s website this week, Hasan stresses that so far, he has been pleasantly surprised by Biden’s presidency.

“During the Democratic presidential primaries,” Hasan recalls. “I was one of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s fiercest critics on the left. I reminded readers how he was the architect of the 1994 crime bill. I reminded listeners how he was the champion of the credit card industry. I reminded viewers how he had misled us over Iraq.”

Hasan even went so far as to say that Biden, “would be a disaster” if elected. But unlike the far-right pundits at Fox News, Newsmax or Breitbart, Hasan didn’t believe that Biden would turn the U.S. into Venezuela under Hugo Chávez — he viewed Biden as much too conservative.

Early signs from the White house show Mehdi he was probably wrong, the pundit readily admitted.

“The new president has been far from a disaster,” Hasan writes. “His first ten days were as smooth as any in modern presidential history — and that despite, perhaps, the worst presidential inheritance in all of American history. He has signed more than 40 executive orders — an ‘opening-days blitz…. essentially compressing 100 days into ten,’ to quote the New York Times. ‘Biden has outlined the most liberal agenda in a generation,’ Axios observed Sunday…. What’s not to like for progressives?”

Originally from the U.K., Hasan stands out in the U.S. media not only because of his British accent, but also, because he aggressively critiques Democrats from the left and points out how conservative parts of the Democratic Party can be. And any right-wing pundit who described former President Barack Obama as a “leftist” or a “socialist” during an interview with Hasan would be in for a tongue-lashing and a long list of reasons why Obama was very much a centrist during his eight …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By The New Civil Rights Movement

The U.S. Dept. of Justice is weighing the use of “RICO” laws, designed to prosecute Mafia bosses behind racketeering crimes, to charge far right group members who had a part in Donald Trump’s January 6 attempted coup at the Capitol, Reuters reports.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) law “was crafted to help prosecutors convict top Mafia leaders who ordered others to commit crimes. RICO cases are complex, often take years to develop, and require approval from Justice Department leadership.”

“RICO was designed to address the Godfather – the person who doesn’t get their hands bloody,” said Jeffrey Grell, an attorney who specializes in RICO law. “You would really only use RICO to go after the kingpins or the leaders.”

Disgraced former president Donald Trump will be on trial in the U.S. Senate next week after the House of Representatives impeached him for inciting the January 6 insurrection.

“Obstructing an official government proceeding, the charge some Oath Keepers and Proud Boy members are currently facing, is considered a ‘racketeering activity,’” Reuters adds.

Trump infamously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and later, they were part of the insurrection, according to multiple reports. The group’s leader, Enrique Tarrio, for years worked undercover as a “prolific” informant, Reuters has also reported.

Read Reuters’ full RICO report here.

…read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Alex Henderson

Rachel Powell is a 40-year-old mother of eight from Western Pennsylvania who is being pursued by the FBI for her role in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building. An article by journalist Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker, published this week, describes Powell’s path to far-right radicalization and includes an interview with Powell herself — who spoke from an undisclosed location.

“In her first public comments since the riot, Powell acknowledged her role in the events at the Capitol,” Farrow reports. “During a two-hour telephone interview, she claimed that her conduct had been spontaneous, contrary to widespread speculation that she had acted in coordination with an organized group.”

Powell, Farrow notes, isn’t a native Pennsylvanian. She was born in Anaheim, California — which is in Orange County south of Los Angeles — and lived in what she describes as “the really bad side” of Fresno in Central California before moving to West Sunbury, Pennsylvania with her family. In some respects, Powell sounds very middle-of-the-road; she’s into yoga and organic food and sold yogurt at local farmer’s markets. But her politics became increasingly radicalized in 2020, when she was drawn to conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Infowars’ Alex Jones and then-President Donald Trump, according to Farrow, were major influences on her thinking.

Videos taken at the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, Farrow notes, “show her, wearing a pink hat and sunglasses, using a battering ram to smash a window and a bullhorn to issue orders.” Using a bullhorn, Powell told fellow rioters, “People should probably coordinate together if you’re going to take this building. We got another window to break to make in-and-out easy.”

Farrow notes, “In recent weeks, as journalists and law enforcement officials tried to identify participants in the assault, she came to be known as ‘Bullhorn Lady’ and ‘Pink Hat Lady.’ She appeared on an FBI ‘Wanted’ poster, was featured in cable-television news segments, and became an obsessive focus of crowdsourced investigative efforts by laypeople and experts.”

During her phone interview with Farrow, Powell said that breaking into the Capitol Building wasn’t something she planned to …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Medea Benjamin

In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind quoted a Bush White House advisor, reportedly Karl Rove, as boasting, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” He dismissed Suskind’s assumption that public policy must be rooted in “the reality-based community.”

“We’re history’s actors,” the advisor told him, “…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Sixteen years later, the American wars and war crimes launched by the Bush administration have only spread chaos and violence far and wide, and this historic conjunction of criminality and failure has predictably undermined America’s international power and authority. Back in the imperial heartland, the political marketing industry that Rove and his colleagues were part of has had more success dividing and ruling the hearts and minds of Americans than of Iraqis, Russians or Chinese.

The irony of the Bush administration’s imperial pretensions was that America has been an empire from its very founding, and that a White House staffer’s political use of the term “empire” in 2004 was not emblematic of a new and rising empire as he claimed, but of a decadent, declining empire stumbling blindly into an agonizing death spiral.

Americans were not always so ignorant of the imperial nature of their country’s ambitions. George Washington described New York as “the seat of an empire,” and his military campaign against British forces there as the “pathway to empire.” New Yorkers eagerly embraced their state’s identity as the Empire State, which is still enshrined in the Empire State Building and on New York State license plates.

The expansion of America’s territorial sovereignty over Native American lands, the Louisiana Purchase and the annexation of northern Mexico in the Mexican-American War built an empire that far outstripped the one that George Washington built. But that imperial expansion was more controversial than most Americans realize. Fourteen out of fifty-two U.S. senators voted against the 1848 treaty to annex most of Mexico, without which Americans might still be visiting California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, Utah and most of Colorado as exotic Mexican travel spots.

In the full flowering of the American empire after the Second World War, its leaders understood the skill and subtlety required to exercise imperial power in a post-colonial world. No country fighting for independence from the U.K. or France was going to welcome imperial invaders from …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By The New Civil Rights Movement

MAGA nationalist Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has offered to resign his House seat (video below) so he can defend disgraced former president Donald Trump during his Senate impeachment trial for inciting the deadly January 6 insurrection.

Far right political activist and Editor-in-Chief of The National Pulse, Raheem Kassam, says Gaetz made the offer Wednesday.

“I would leave my House seat, I would leave my home,” Gaetz told former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. He called it “the greatest priority in my life.”

“I view this cancellation of the Trump presidency and the Trump movement as one of the major risks to my people,” Gaetz said.

Gaetz, who has wholly aligned himself with Trump, apparently has made the decision serving the former president is more beneficial to his career than serving his Florida constituents.

He was quickly mocked on Twitter.

…read more

Source: ALTERNET