Dispatches From the Culture Wars – Two for One Edition

Kick off; Suing Trump; The laugh track; Kosher/not kosher?; Davos

Portside
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Henry Kissinger at the World Economic Forum in 2008,


Al Sharpton Leads Thousands of Activists In Martin Luther King Jr. Day Civil Rights March Ahead of Trump's Swearing-In

By Ellen Moynihan and Denis Slattery
January 14, 2017
New York Daily News

The “We Shall Not Be Moved” march, led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, kicked off a week of similar protests scheduled around Trump’s inauguration.
The rally included the Hispanic group La Raza, politicians, relatives of African-Americans slain by police, the National Urban League, Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.
Holding umbrellas and homemade signs, the crowd chanted, “No justice, no peace” and “We will not be moved,” but also “We will not be Trumped” and “Love Trumps hate.”

Foreign Payments to Trump Firms Violate Constitution, Suit Will Claim

By Eric Lipton and Adam Liptak
January 22, 2017
New York Times

A team of prominent constitutional scholars, Supreme Court litigators and former White House ethics lawyers intends to file a lawsuit Monday morning alleging that President Trump is violating the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other business operations to accept payments from foreign governments.
The lawsuit is among a barrage of legal actions against the Trump administration that have been initiated or are being planned by major liberal advocacy organizations. Such suits are among the few outlets they have to challenge the administration now that Republicans are in control of the government.
 

This is Psychological Warfare - Trump’s Laugh Track is Tricking America
By Sarah Cooper
January 21, 2017
Medium

“But reporters were clapping and laughing, they loved it.” — a commenter defending Trump’s first press conference.
“But members of the CIA were clearly laughing at his jokes and clapping, so what he was saying couldn’t have been inappropriate.” — CNN pundit defending Trump’s CIA speech where he talked about his war with the media, in front of a memorial to men and women who lost their lives in actual wars.
The clapping and laughing you hear in both instances are Trump’s own people, who initiate and get the crowd to follow. They are sycophants who he brings to cheer him on and make it seem like what he’s saying is being well-received. And it’s working.

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The Alt-Right Eats Its Own: Neo-Nazi Podcaster “Mike Enoch” Quits After Doxxers Reveal His Wife is Jewish

By Matthew Sheffield
January 16, 2017
Salon

The racist alt-right movement that has latched onto Trump is already showing signs that it’s falling apart.
The loosely knit group was shocked to the core Saturday night when one of its most influential leaders — a man known to his online followers as “Mike Enoch,” a virulent racist and anti-Semite — was revealed to be a New York website developer named Mike Peinovich, who has said that his wife is Jewish. Although the motivations behind Peinovich’s apparent deception are not clear, his operation presumably generated some modest cashflow from true believers in the alt-right crusade.


How Barack Obama paved the way for Donald Trump

By Gary Younge
January 16, 2017
Guardian

There is a connection between the “new normal” and the old that must be understood if resistance in the Trump era is going to amount to more than Twitter memes driven by impotent rage and fuelled by flawed nostalgia. This transition is not simply a matter of sequence – one bad president following a good one – but consequence: one horrendous agenda made possible by the failure of its predecessor.
One cannot blame Obama for Trump. It was the Republicans – craven to the mob within their base, which they have always courted but ultimately could not control – that nominated and, for now, indulges him. And yet it would be disingenuous to claim Trump rose from a vacuum that bore no relationship to the previous eight years.

World Economic Forum: A History and Analysis

By Andrew Marshall
January 20, 2015
Transnational Institute

The annual meetings of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, bring together thousands of the world’s top corporate executives, bankers and financiers with leading heads of state, finance and trade ministers, central bankers and policymakers from dozens of the world’s largest economies; the heads of all major international organizations including the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, Bank for International Settlements, UN, OECD and others, as well as hundreds of academics, economists, political scientists, journalists, cultural elites and occasional celebrities.
The WEF has survived by adapting to the times. Following the surge of so-called anti-globalization protests in 1999, the Forum began to invite non-governmental organizations representing constituencies that were more frequently found in the streets protesting against meetings of the WTO, IMF and Group of Seven. In the 2000 meeting at Davos, the Forum invited leaders from 15 NGOs to debate the heads of the WTO and the President of Mexico on the subject of globalization.
The participation of NGOs and non-profit organizations has increased over time, and not without reason. According to a poll conducted on behalf of the WEF just prior to the 2011 meeting, while global trust in bankers, governments and business was significantly low, NGOs had the highest rate of trust among the public.