Voting into a Banana Republic: Autocracy 101

 

Voting into a Banana Republic: Autocracy 101

You Vil Follow Orders, Ja?!

Yet no matter how many times he orders or wills it, the Epstein Whisperer has been a big bust, among so many other arenas, in trying to bend statistical realities and the laws of nature (read physics) to his will. Like his September 5, 2019, insistence that Hurricane Dorian was about to strike Alabama, when he added his own hand-drawn extension to the official National Weather Service projection (which was correct). Or recently, when he insisted that he had restored the economy, which he claimed was in full-on growth mode, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics released seasonally revised non-farm labor numbers a significantly lower than earlier estimates.

The BLS has traditionally released such unemployment numbers for the preceding month, based on preliminary polling and business surveys – the effort of hundreds of data-gathering staffers – which is later tested against additional information (e.g., local unemployment statistics which take more time to accumulate) and then corrected. Non-partisan number gatherers doing what have been doing for decades. Trump hated the revised numbers and shot the messenger (a statistician heading the BLS), and too many Republicans, followed the standing rule: thou shalt support the President even when he is obviously wrong.

“White House officials are rushing to defend President Donald Trump's decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, arguing that the fact-finding agency's revisions to recent jobs numbers were too staggering to be credible. Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, described the revisions—which showed 258,000 fewer jobs created in May and June than previously reported—as ‘hard evidence’ of statistical tampering by the BLS.” Newsweek, August 4th.

But the gathering storm of missteps, including what appears to be an Epstein coverup and a breach of the DOJ’s Bureau of Prisons policy of never transferring sex traffickers to serve their sentences in minimum security prisons, by transferring convicted Epstein partner, Ghislane Maxwell, from a more restrictive federal penitentiary to a very low security federal facility in Texas… coincidentally, immediately after an unrecorded interview of Ms Maxwell by former Trump attorney and current Deputy AG Todd Blanche. Combining this suspicious move with the hard number results from TACO Trump’s chaotic tariff policies and the slam to everyday Americans in his Big Beautiful Bill, it was clear GOP candidates in future elections were now facing an uphill battle.

In apparent violation of the Hatch Act, Trump still ordered red state governors, particularly in already over-gerrymandered Texas, immediately to redistrict their congressional districts so as to make impossible any potential loss of GOP control of the House of Representatives. Unable to save a failing power grid or prepare emergency state forces for inevitable flooding – keeping taxes low for the mega-wealthy business community – mini-Trump Governor Greg Abbott immediately called a special session of the Texas legislature to deliver a new redistricted map that eliminated five Democratic districts. To avoid a quorum, the 52 Texas house democrats fled to Illinois under the aegis of that state’s Democratic governor, as Abbott swore to arrest them or expel them from their elected positions to be replaced in a “special election.”

But haphazard ability of Trump to control the nation as he directs, rewrite history and remove opponents and protestors at will, was inefficient. And so Donald Trump has secured $170 billion in his Big Beautiful Bill to fund a personal army of ultra-loyal ICE agents quite willing to ignore judicial orders and constitutional limitations to conduct warrantless arrests unencumbered by any notion of due process. Yet even that effort was not enough for the Epstein Whisperer. In a classic banana republic move, it appears that Trump is hellbent on removing statutory restrictions against the use of the military to maintain more MAGA domestic control than on foreign enemies:

“A leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security suggests that the Trump administration is considering using the U.S. military to boost its ongoing mass deportation agenda, while acknowledging the deployment of troops in Los Angeles earlier this year wasn’t ‘perfect,’ according to a new report… The memo was allegedly written by DHS senior adviser Phil Hegseth, the brother of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The New Republic published the texts on Saturday [8/2].

The result of using federalized National Guardsmen and US Marines against California protestors (hardly “rioters” as Trump declared) not only raised the ire of an increasing number of Americans, but the soldiers themselves felt dirty and used in a way they never expected. “Ever since President Trump seized control of the California National Guard and deployed thousands of troops to Los Angeles, calls from distressed service members and their families have been pouring in to the GI Rights Hotline.

“Some National Guard troops and their loved ones have called to say they were agonizing over the legality of the deployment, which is being litigated in federal court, according to Steve Woolford, a resource counselor for the hotline, which provides confidential counseling for service members… Others phoned in to say the Guard should play no part in federal immigration raids and that they worried about immigrant family members who might get swept up… ‘They don’t want to deport their uncle or their wife or their brother-in-law,’ Woolford said. ‘Some of the language people have used is: ‘I joined to defend my country, and that’s really important to me — but No. 1 is family, and this is actually a threat to my family.’ ” Los Angeles Times, June 27th.

Investors, federal agencies and foreign nations’ setting national policies over the efficacy of investing in and supporting the US economy, have felt secure in our rule of law and the accuracy of economic performance statistics released by our federal agencies. But as Greece, China and Argentina have found, when there is an autocratic effort to censor those performance numbers to suit the will of the dictator, the economic consequences to those nations have been consistently catastrophic, often resulting in economic chaos if not collapse.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as I watch the President of the United States do his best to undermine democracy, replacing with a dire and horrific autocracy totally defined by him and only him, I can only hope that finally, Trump may have set in motion a powerful national sentiment that just may save American democracy… that even his election interference cannot stop.