We're On a Slppery Slope
We’re On a Slippery Slope
Junious Ricardo Stanton
Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles California, Washington D.C. and his threats to do the same in Chicago Illinois and Memphis Tennessee is placing this nation in an untenable predicament. Under the guise of public safety, Trump is using the National Guard for purposes they were not intended to serve. The Natonal Guard is for emergencies: to assist in natural disasters or to quell uprisings and riots. Usually, the governor of the state is the one who calls for the activation of the National Guard units in the state once he or she has declared an emergency, not the president.
The situation
in L.A. with the wildfires was an emergency yet neither the governor nor the
mayor called for the National Guard to be deployed. Trump took the unusual step
of bypassing both of them and calling for the deployment of the California National
Guard. There the guard performed a variety
of tasks from aerial firefighting using their planes and helicopters to try to
contain the blazes, on the ground firefighting, aid distribution, traffic
control and security.
In D.C. Trump’s rational for
deploying the Guard was to boost security, augment policing, and clean-up of squalor.
The Guardsmen and women were deployed around federal property as well as
several neighborhoods in D.C. The mayor of Washington D.C. did not request
assistance from President Trump and was resistant to his activation. Several
Republican governors supplied their Guard Units for deployment in D.C.
With
regards to Chicago and Menphis, Trump is threatening to send in the guard and
use them as law enforcement to supposedly augment those cities’ police
departments. The problem is, just like L.A. and Washington D.C. neither the Chicago
and Memphis mayors nor the governors of those states has requested federal aid!
Trump is literally militarizing the National Guard authorizing them to perform
duties the state and local governments have not requested! His Republican pal
governors are supply the troops to comply with Trump’s activation orders which
is quite unusual!
On the
surface it seems like Trump may be or could be considered well intended, but
upon closer scrutiny he is overstepping his bounds. Using high crime rate data,
Trump is playing on the fears, anxiousness and gullibility of the American
people, something this nation already has an abundance of. These cities are run
by duly elected mayors who just happen to be African-American which plays well
with Trump’s base who believe everything he says no matter how foolish, untrue
and fabricated it may be. Trump is subtly playing the race card insinuating
these elected officials are unable to deal with the problems in their own
cities and states. Meanwhile it is apparent Trump’s policies both domestic and
foreign are ineffective and wishy-washy.
The mayors acknowledge they have crime in their
city; all cities even Red State cities and towns have crime; but these mayors challenge
Trump’s assertions the crime rates in their cities warrant the deployment of
the Natonal Guard. In fact, the mayors say crime is down in their
municipalities. National statistics, even Trump’s FBI’s data, verify violent and
property crimes are down in the US, that homicides despite what the nightly
news says are down across the US!
Nevertheless, Trump is using
contradictory data to justify his actions. Trump ever the showman/circus barker
is using this disinformation to accomplish several objectives: one, he is brazenly
overstepping his constitutional authority, the Posse Comitatus Act
forbids deployment and use of troops in a law enforcement capacity, but Trump
is ignoring this. Second, by mobilizing
the Guard he is getting Americans used to experiencing soldiers on their
streets in a law enforcement capacity, third Trump’s deployment of the Guard is
complimenting the use of surveillance and biometric recognition technology such
as Palantir to spy on Americans and set up a Big Brother police state infrastructure
that would make George Orwell blush with envy. Lastly by calling on Red State
governors to supply and deploy troops in Blue State cities, Trump is exacerbating
the partisan divide in this country.
Whether or not Trump is aware he is
doing all these things is not the point, he could very well be an unwitting tool
of the Deep State. Trump is not the first US president to be used and played by
nefarious forces and interest groups like the Military Industrial Complex, the
banksters or foreign governments.
What does this mean for us? It
means we are already on an extremely slippery slope, one that, along with the
other bone headed moves Trump is making, could take this nation into the abyss
of a technocratic police state, and this is not hyperbole.
-30-
posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 7:50 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home