By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 3, 2018
Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO
The sitting President of the United States, Donald Trump, is actively taunting North Korea on Twitter over who has the bigger, more powerful nuclear button.
On September 23, Trump tweeted: “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!” Little Rocket Man is Trump’s preferred insulting moniker for North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Yesterday, following a New Year’s speech by Kim in which he bragged about his country’s nuclear capability to hit the U.S. mainland, Trump had this to say on Twitter:
“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
These juvenile taunts over a nuclear war in which millions of innocent civilians and children could die ensure that the historically low confidence that Americans have in the Federal government will persist. According to the polling organization, Gallup, “the federal government has the least positive image of any business or industry sector measured, Congress engenders the lowest confidence of any institution that Gallup tests, and Americans rate the honesty and ethics of members of Congress as the lowest among 22 professions in Gallup’s most recent update.”
Is Congress taking any action to stop this reckless nuclear war mongering on Twitter? As you might surmise, this institution, which enjoys a 12 percent confidence rating from Americans according to Gallup, has taken no action to stop the President from destroying the credibility of the United States on Twitter or Tweeting the country into nuclear war. That job has been left up to a grassroots organization in San Francisco called Resistance SF.
Yesterday, following the latest Trump nuclear taunt on Twitter, the group projected the text “@jack is #complicit” onto Twitter’s headquarters building in downtown San Francisco. The projection was a warning to Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, who has justified his failure to take action against Trump’s threats and slurs on Twitter on the basis that they are “newsworthy.”
In a 2017 interview on NBC, Dorsey had this to say about allowing Trump’s dangerous Tweets:
“I believe it’s really important to hear directly from our leadership; and I believe it’s really important to hold them accountable; and I believe it’s really important to have these conversations out in the open, rather than have them behind closed doors. So if we’re all to suddenly take these platforms away, where does it go? What happens? It goes in the dark. And I just don’t think that’s good for anyone.”
Newsweek reports that it has been “estimated that Twitter could lose nearly a fifth of its [stock market] value,” were it to ban Trump from its platform.
Dorsey’s weak justification for his tolerance of Trump’s Twitter rampages, which frequently fly in the face of Twitter rules against making threats on its platform, has resulted in Resistance SF calling for protesters to turn out from 5:30-6:30 PST today at the Twitter headquarters at 10th and Market Street in San Francisco. The group explained the protest as follows on its Facebook page:
“Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, has enabled @realDonaldTrump from his first dog whistles in the birther movement to his latest nuclear pissing contest.
“Twitter is endangering the world and breaking its own terms of service to do it. Trump or Jack must go.
“Bring signs, chants, and perhaps your umbrella. We will protest even if it rains.
“If you’d like to endorse or help organize this action, please reach out.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper told his viewers last evening that “It may be difficult for those of you at home to wrap your minds around a US president who makes statements like this about the use of nuclear weapons, which would, of course, murder millions of people.”
CNN political reporter, Stephen Collinson, also weighed in, writing the following about Trump’s Tweet:
“Trump’s move was remarkable on many levels. It illustrates how he has turned the United States from being a bulwark of stability and sobriety in the international system into an agent of disruption and unpredictability in his own volatile image.
“It also undercuts the idea that his unpredictable instincts are reined in by more experienced administration officials, such as Defense Secretary James Mattis.
“There was no immediate reaction from the White House or elsewhere in the US government about Trump’s shocking tweet on Tuesday night.”
Trump’s Tweet also triggered Congressman Ted Lieu of California to release a November 7, 2017 letter from Jan-Marc Jouas, a retired Lt. General of the U.S. Air Force who was previously the Deputy Commander of US Forces Korea from January 2012 to December 2014. The letter warned that “the 28,500 US Armed Forces personnel in South Korea are vastly outnumbered by North Korean forces” and that “North Korean artillery, rockets, and missiles that threaten the capital will take days to eliminate, even under ideal conditions. During that time an enormous casualty and evacuee crisis will develop and include over a hundred thousand non-combatant Americans, many of who will turn to US forces to get them off the peninsula.”
It’s time for Congress to find a backbone when it comes to this President.
