TRUMP is seriously dangerous

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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 05, 2018 11:15 pm

Does Donald Trump Want to Be Dictator of the United States?

His behavior over the past 12 months lines up alarmingly well with studies of authoritarianism.

Mark Follman

Jan. 19, 2018 6:00 AM



It began the day he was sworn in, with his vow to end “American carnage”—a direct echo of his autocratic pronouncement when accepting the Republican nomination that “I alone can fix it.” Donald Trump has chipped away at the pillars of democracy ever since. According to a new report from Freedom House, an independent watchdog group that has monitored democracy globally for decades, “The past year brought further, faster erosion of America’s own democratic standards than at any other time in memory.” The nation’s core institutions, the report says, have been “attacked by an administration that rejects established norms of ethical conduct across many fields of activity.”

In his first year as president, Trump often appeared driven by his urges for self-aggrandizement, self-enrichment, and revenge against anyone and everyone he perceived to be his political enemies—targets to be punched 10 times harder or screwed 15 times harder than they’ve punched or screwed him. He has used the presidential platform to taunt and threaten, going after federal judges, members of Congress, law enforcement leaders, celebrities, professional athletes, private citizens, and, of course, his greatest bête noire: the “Fake News” media, which he has blasted hundreds of times since taking office.

Trump had already shown America who he was during the 2016 campaign, and at Mother Jones we took Maya Angelou’s advice and believed him. A few weeks into his presidency, as some entertained the illusion of Trump “pivoting” to being more presidential, we began tracking his authoritarian behavior with our “Trumpocracy” project. Sure enough, his demagoguery and lying continued relentlessly.

To what degree that has been by design or chaotic ineptitude is up for debate. But the ominous “firehose” effect it can have on the public is well understood by scholars of modern propaganda-driven dictatorships: a process that includes distraction, confusion, further polarization, and ultimately, complacency.

Another new report assessing Trump’s first year in the White House, “The Republic at Risk,” reaffirms the importance of documenting the daily absurdities: “The turn away from democracy need not be premeditated; an incompetent leader with authoritarian tendencies can pose as much of a threat as one with a systematic plan to dismantle checks and balances.” The bipartisan joint report from Protect Democracy and Stand Up Ideas, two groups comprised of government and legal experts, further warns that if Trump were to follow the path of other emerging authoritarians, “he would first erode the norms and ideals integral to a democratic society, then move into actual institutional changes once the public is sufficiently distracted, exhausted, and cynical.”

The report breaks down the dangers—politicizing independent institutions, spreading disinformation, amassing executive power, quashing dissent, delegitimizing communities, and corrupting elections—in a way that points with alarming accuracy to much that we’ve documented from Trump’s first 365 days in office:

Attacks on national security institutions

Following long-running calls for his 2016 political opponents to be prosecuted and jailed, Trump made a particularly disturbing statement in December, declaring in a New York Times interview that he has an “absolute right” to do whatever he wants with the federal law enforcement system. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation has accelerated, Trump has openly trashed the reputations of the FBI and Justice Department, even accusing a senior FBI agent of “treason.” Since June, he has repeatedly joined partisan supporters in denouncing an alleged “deep state” conspiracy against him, including his belief that “very bad and evil people” in Washington are trying to sabotage his presidency.



Endless war on the media

Where to begin? Beyond his farcical tweets about “fake news trophies” and “fake news awards,” Trump’s campaign against the free press is quite serious. He and his aides have singled out and threatened multiple journalists personally, including author Michael Wolff (“mentally deranged”), CNN’s Don Lemon (“the dumbest man on television!”), ABC News’ Brian Ross (“fraudster”), CNN’s Jim Acosta (a target of bullying tactics), ESPN’s Jemele Hill and the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel (both fingered to be fired), and others. On more than one occasion Trump has promoted social-media imagery depicting violence against CNN, including the network’s logo amid splattered blood on the sole of his shoe. And Trump’s Stalin-esque declaration just weeks into office that the media is “the enemy of the American people” has resonated with brutal regimes worldwide, which have seized the opportunity to pile on Trump’s weaponization of “fake news.”


Corrupt use of the office

On social media and in public remarks, the president has not hesitated to promote the personal financial interests of his family and partisan supporters. Beneficiaries have included Fox News’ Sean Hannity—Trump twice endorsed a film Hannity produced—and “Fox and Friends” host Brian Kilmeade, Sheriff David Clarke, Dr. Robert Jeffress, and former Trump campaign officials Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, all of whose new books Trump specifically touted on Twitter. At an August 2017 press conference in the aftermath of neo-Nazi violence in Virginia, Trump plugged his winery in Charlottesville. And we haven’t begun to plumb the full scope of his potential ethical and financial conflicts of interest.


Targeting minorities

Long before his “shithole” comments made his racism the subject of worldwide headlines, Trump established a clear pattern of singling out African American critics. When three UCLA basketball players were detained and then released by the Chinese government over a shoplifting incident, Trump declared he should’ve left them in jail, slamming one young man’s outspoken father as an “ungrateful fool.” Other targets have included the widow of a US soldier killed in Niger, a Florida congresswoman who defended the widow, the ESPN sportscaster Hill, and various NFL and NBA players who have criticized and peacefully protested against the president.


Undermining confidence in elections

Contrary to the unanimous assessment of US intelligence agencies, Trump has called Russian interference in the 2016 elections a “witch hunt” and a “hoax” so often and in such hyperbolic terms that Americans may well have grown used to the idea (which of course is the point). His wildly false claims that three to five million people voted illegally in 2016 began on Day Four of his presidency and continued into this January, when he reiterated that “the system is rigged” and blamed “Democrat States” for the demise of his so-called voter fraud commission.

Trump has displayed other autocratic impulses that have drawn less attention. He and his administration have urged at least five private businesses to fire employees whose politics enraged Trump (apparently with success in the case of Steve Bannon). Not only has Trump praised and sought closer ties with authoritarian leaders from countries around the world, he has joined several of them in specifically mocking and undermining the free press, including the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Poland’s Andrzej Duda, Kuwait’s Emir Sabah bin Ahmed al-Sabah, Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.


The compilation of transgressions is long, surreal, and chilling. There is no indication that any of it will stop. The authors of “The Republic at Risk” suggest there is ample cause for hope: “Even under threat,” they write, “the United States has strong and durable democratic institutions.” But they also warn that a riven, inwardly focused Congress “has largely recoiled” from the danger, an assessment that clearly rests at the feet of the party controlling both chambers. Unless and until that condition changes, Trump will no doubt continue to push the boundaries of the American presidency in dark and disturbing ways.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... ed-states/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 06, 2018 11:20 am

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Donald Trump Cracks the Seal on Talk of Treason

Trump might not be able to see where this very slippery slope leads, but the political arsonists around him do. Prepare to reap the whirlwind.


You may have noticed by now, but I'm not one to pull any punches on Donald Trump. As a conservative, I see him as a statist abomination, a plump, be-wattled authoritarian-wannabe man-baby with the intellectual horsepower of a toaster oven.

One thing we've learned in the last two years is that no legal, moral or cultural strictures bind Trump and that he is immune to the better angels of human nature. The moral event horizon around him consumes the good in anyone who becomes one of his vassals. There is no better version of Trump, ever. He can only degrade and destroy everything he touches, but today was remarkable, even for him.

Monday's simpering, prissy, self-indulgent performance in Ohio was just another raree-show with our Kentucky Fried Nero fiddling while the stock market burned. Then came the moment where he broke another seal, and cracked another seam in the foundation of our Republic.

That was when Trump, in his typical sneering, sniggling, purse-lipped way said of the Democrats watching his State of the Union speech: “They were like death. And un-American. Un-American. Somebody said ‘treasonous.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not? I mean they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”

Even for Trump, on an endless quest to define American decency down, this was a new low. His followers and Congressional cheering section will love it, of course. A few Republicans in Congress may furrow a brow or intone some anodyne statement like, "I wouldn't have put it that way, but..."

Trump lacks the mental capacity to see where this very slippery slope leads, but the political arsonists around him do. With that, prepare to reap the whirlwind.

Our Founders viewed treason as the most severe crime against the Republic. Treason was an act without shades of gray, without gradiations, without rationalization. It is the one crime we punish by stripping those found guilty of it of their citizenship, or even their lives.

Trump Monday decided he would be the arbiter of what constitutes treason in America. He's mainstreamed the t-word.

Well, then: If you're looking for someone who is betraying this nation, look for a person who would deliberately and systematically wreck the institutions that guarantee the separation of powers and the accountability of the executive and legislative branches. Look for a person who would suborn the rule of law to protect himself, his family, and his cronies from justice.

If you're looking for someone in the act of betraying the glorious vision of our Founders and our Constitution, look no further than the vulgar, prancing, reality-show clown who holds the Presidency.

Look no further than the man who swore to uphold the Constitution and obey the laws of this land, yet ignores them, and attacks those who would carry them out.

We have had presidents in living memory who failed, who strayed from the righteous path, who were venal or paranoid or who fell victim to their lusts and weaknesses. But none came so close to treason as this President.

We can remember men of both parties who no one could even imagine betraying this nation to a hostile foreign power. Not this man. We don't need to imagine it. We can see it.

Set aside the abundant evidence of Trump's campaign connections to the Russians, and his long history of business relationships with people such as Felix Sater, Aras Agalarov, Tevfik Arif and a host of others tied to Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy. Ignore for a moment that Robert Mueller has arrested four senior Trump advisors and is stacking other officials like cordwood.

Just look at his post-election behavior toward Russia, because if we're going to play tag-the-traitor, let's get to it. Trump's abject, boot-licking obedience to Russia and Putin speaks for itself.

If it is treason you seek, look no further than a man who gladly allows Russia's continued attacks on our democracy, our Republic and our institutions. Putin's implacable hostility, aggression and desire to divide and disrupt this nation are not in question by anyone except Trump and his most slavish sycophants. Putin's desire to weaken our standing, diminish our power and to harm our interests in the world is stated Russian policy, not speculations in the fevered minds of Never Trumpers.

When Congress sent Trump veto-proof legislation demanding he impose sanctions on Russia, Comrade Don waited until the last second to impose, well, nothing. When Putin arrested campaign opponent Alexei Navalny on phony charges, Vlad's errand boy in the Oval Office remained silent.

For some reason, this President seems determined to demonstrate that he will do anything, at any time to please the Russian authoritarian. He will tear down the United States government around him to hide from accountability. He will wreck alliances, compromise intelligence sources, and endanger our troops to please Putin. There's a word for that.

There is always a reckoning for treason. There is always a moment where justice and history strip away the excuses and rationalizations, and the betrayer is held to account.

One thing Donald Trump should have considered before launching Monday's attack was just how vulnerable he is to the same accusation, and that reckoning.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-tr ... of-treason
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby 82_28 » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:37 pm

Trump’s ‘marching orders’ to the Pentagon: Plan a grand military parade
President Trump’s vision of soldiers marching and tanks rolling down the boulevards of Washington is moving closer to reality in the Pentagon and White House, where officials say they have begun to plan a grand military parade later this year showcasing the might of America’s armed forces.

Trump has long mused publicly and privately about wanting such a parade, but a Jan. 18 meeting between Trump and top generals in the Pentagon’s tank — a room reserved for top-secret discussions — marked a tipping point, according to two officials briefed on the planning.

Surrounded by the military’s highest-ranking officials, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., Trump’s seemingly abstract desire for a parade was suddenly heard as a presidential directive, the officials said.

“The marching orders were: I want a parade like the one in France,” said a military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the planning discussions are supposed to remain confidential. “This is being worked at the highest levels of the military.”

Shows of military strength are not typical in the United States — and they don’t come cheap. The cost of shipping Abrams tanks and high-tech hardware to Washington could run in the millions, and military officials said it was unclear how they would pay for it.

A White House official familiar with the planning described the discussions as “brainstorming” and said nothing is settled. “Right now, there’s really no meat on the bones,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.

After The Washington Post first published this story, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement confirming that plans are underway.

“President Trump is incredibly supportive of America’s great service members who risk their lives every day to keep our country safe,” Sanders said. “He has asked the Department of Defense to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation.” . . .


continues:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 54531fecad
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 06, 2018 9:16 pm

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby 82_28 » Tue Feb 06, 2018 11:29 pm

'What We Did Was a Scam': The Apprentice Creators Give Behind the Scenes Reveal of Trump's Show

In the recently released Netflix documentary The Confidence Man, two creators of The Apprentice discuss creating the “character” of Donald Trump as a billionaire business tycoon.

“What we did, that was a scam,” says producer Bill Pruitt. “That was an entertainment.”

Pruitt describes Trump’s real office within New York’s Trump Tower as dated, so the show built the boardroom where Trump uttered the now famous line “You’re Fired!” The famous boardroom was a set based on the classy, high-powered office portrayed in the movie Network.

“If you walked around Trump’s actual office in Trump Tower you’d see the wood’s chipped, and what’s that smell?” says Pruitt in the film. “It wasn’t the empire we were going to have to sell to people. We needed to gussy it up a bit. And we did.”

The Confidence Man, directed by Fisher Stevens (Bright Lights), is the final episode of the Alex Gibney-created docuseries Dirty Money. It contends that Trump the tycoon is really a myth created by the infamous self-promoter, his visibility spread wide with continued mentions in articles, TV commercials and network interviews.

But Trump declined to partake in this project. In a statement from the series’ producers, “the producers reached out to The White House last summer, as recommended by the SVP of the Trump Organization, inviting President Trump to participate and allow him to tell his own story for the episode. The White House never responded to their request.”

The New York gossip columnist AJ Benza recalls that Trump gave him dirt on the Manhattan nightlife scene in exchange for labeling him a billionaire.

“He wanted to be paid back in a particular way, regardless of what you mentioned,” says Benza in the film. “He never really cared as long as you said the word ‘billionaire.’ “

The reality, the film contends, is that by the early 1990s, The Trump Organization was facing over $3 billion of debt and its three Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt; in the following years leading to The Apprentice, Trump “was a man in trouble.”

“We wanted to show people that Donald Trump is not a good businessman when it comes to building a company and managing a company,” Stevens tells PEOPLE, “and I wanted to say how how scary it is that he is running the country because he doesn’t do due diligence on any of his deals.”

Timothy O’Brien, a Trump biographer, says in the film that his 2005 book, TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, claimed that Trump was worth between $150 million to $250 million, far from being a billionaire. (Trump sued O’Brien a decade ago for libel, and lost.)

When banks were hesitant to loan Trump money due to multiple bank defaults and bankruptcies, The Confidence Man tells how Trump made licensing deals that put his name on a wide assortment of properties, giving the impression that he was king of a vast empire. On this premise he created the now-defunct Trump University, which in 2016 settled a $25 million fraud case.

“Trump’s brilliance to me is that he has incredible charisma,” Stevens tells PEOPLE. “He is a TV star and knows how to build his brand.”

And that brand, of course, led to his role on The Apprentice, as a real estate “billionaire” — and described by the show’s initial contestants as “practically a god.”

“The Apprentice overnight repositioned him in the American imagination as the embodiment of deal making savvy, capable entrepreneur, and business success,” says O’Brien.

At the time, contends the film, few knew just how much Trump desperately needed the show. In The Confidence Man, Apprentice supervising editor Jonathan Braun asks Pruitt if Trump treated the first season as a joke.

Says Pruitt: “It was one of his many things that day to save his empire.”

“Without The Apprentice, he would never be president, and using reality television as a platform [improved] his image,” Stevens tells PEOPLE. “But that was not who he really is. He is a character, like on a TV show.”

As Braun says in the film, “We didn’t think that so many people would look at it and go, ‘That’s real, this guy’s amazing.’ “


http://people.com/politics/apprentice-c ... rump-scam/
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Feb 07, 2018 12:06 am

I sure hope we see no such thing as a military parade in DC, 82. We certainly do not need to flaunt our military might while actively engaged in undeclared war.

Sorry I missed wishing you a happy birthday, so happy birthday belatedly!
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby SonicG » Wed Feb 07, 2018 6:23 am

Ha! Words that will live in infamy...
As Braun says in the film, “We didn’t think that so many people would look at it and go, ‘That’s real, this guy’s amazing.’ “
"a poiminint tidal wave in a notion of dynamite"
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 07, 2018 12:59 pm



A guy with five military draft deferments wanting a military parade to honor himself, is a bit like Cruella De Vil wanting an award from the humane society for her treatment of Dalmatians.
- Matthew Dowd

Image

Hair Force One

an aura of presidential grandeur

Donald Trump’s Hair Illusion Came Undone and We All Missed It
By
Jonathan Chait
Image

President Trump ascending the steps up to Air Force One, February 2, 2018.
Last Friday, at the end of one of those frenetic weeks of news that now happen every week, President Trump boarded Air Force One. The wind whipped across the tarmac with unusual force. Trump, who normally has a MAGA hat for such occasions, was unusually unprepared. As he ascended the stairs, cameras had a rear-facing view of the president’s scalp as the howling gusts lifted his combed-over strands straight into the air, and the long-concealed bare scalp below was briefly exposed to the daytime cable audience and to Ashley Feinberg, who spotted the big reveal. It was horrific:


It was the worst hair day of what has been a bad hair life. And it may seem cheap and low to mock Trump’s absurd efforts to conceal his hair loss. But Trump is a man obsessed with image in ways that go beyond the normal human concern with looking presentable. Image is Trump’s moral code. He dismisses his political rivals for being short. He sees his succession of wives as visual testament to his own status. He selects his Cabinet on the basis of their looking the part. He conscripts the military as a prop to bathe himself in an aura of presidential grandeur.

Trump’s absurd hair is of a piece with his lifelong attempt to market himself as a brilliant deal-maker and stable genius. So yes, it is okay to laugh when the ruse is exposed.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... ssion=true



with rob porter’s departure, no one in this photo works for trump anymore....including the little Nazi Gorka
Image
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Wed Feb 07, 2018 6:10 pm

Really, I have to see this stupid fucking hair story at RI too? What a worthless waste of digital ink.

On another topic, fuck the producers of the Apprentice and their faux-shame at reaping what they sowed.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 07, 2018 6:23 pm

PERSONAL HEALTH
Could Trump’s Hair Drug Threaten His Physical and Mental Health?
There can be a downside to a full head of orange hair.
By Martha Rosenberg / AlterNet February 3, 2017, 12:19 PM GMT


This week, President Trump’s doctor disclosed that the president takes finasteride, a drug marketed as Propecia, to treat male pattern baldness. While it is tempting to make jokes about Trump’s hair, and even the sexual side effects that accompany the drug, it also has many disturbing side effects that neither the president—nor any other man—should risk.

In the 19 years since Propecia was approved to treat hair loss from male pattern baldness, side effects have been so concerning that the term post-finasteride syndrome (PFS) has been coined and hundreds of lawsuits have been brought. In addition to its sexual side effects, the drug's effects on cognition, mood and mental states have been documented in the scientific literature.

A 2013 study in Journal of Sexual Medicine noted "changes related to the urogenital system in terms of semen quality and decreased ejaculate volume, reduction in penis size, penile curvature or reduced sensation, fewer spontaneous erections, decreased testicular size, testicular pain, and prostatitis." Many subjects also noted a "disconnection between the mental and physical aspects of sexual function," and changes in mental abilities, sleeping patterns, and/or depressive symptoms.


A 2014 study in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology finds that "altered levels of neuroactive steroids, associated with depression symptoms, are present in androgenic alopecia patients even after discontinuation of the finasteride treatment." In 2010, depression was added to labels as a side effect. In 2011, a woman told CBS news she blamed her 22-year-old son's suicide on Propecia and Men's Journal ran a report called "The (Not So Hard) Truth About Hair Loss Drugs."

Sexual Side Effects, But a Full Head of Hair

Finasteride inhibits a steroid responsible for converting testosterone into 5α-dihydrotestosterone (DHT), the hormone that tells hair follicles on the scalp to stop producing hair. Years before Propecia was approved to grow hair, finasteride was being used in drugs like Proscar, Avodart and Jalyn to treat an enlarged prostate gland (benign prostatic hyperplasia).

Since Propecia was approved, its label has warned about sexual side effects, but termed them temporary. "A small number of men experienced certain sexual side effects, such as less desire for sex, difficulty in achieving an erection, or a decrease in the amount of semen," said the label in 2014. "Each of these side effects occurred in less than 2 percent of men and went away in men who stopped taking Propecia because of them."

But increasingly, users and some doctors say the symptoms sometimes do not go away when men stop taking Propecia and that their lives can be changed permanently. They report impotence, lack of sexual desire, depression and suicidal thoughts and even a reduction in the size of their penis or testicles after using the drug.

In 2011, the Propecia label conceded that sexual dysfunction could continue "after stopping the medication" and that finasteride could pose a "risk of high-grade prostate cancer." In 2012, a warning was added that "other urological conditions" should be considered before taking finasteride. Soon, "male breast cancer" was added under "postmarketing experience." Then the side effect of angioedema was added.

Propecia was not just sold in the U.S. Overseas ads compared twins who did and did not use the product. In the UK, the drugstore chain Boots aggressively marketed Propecia at its 300 stores and still does. One estimate says Propecia was marketed in 120 countries. In 1999 alone, Merck spent $100 million marketing Propecia directly to consumers, when direct-to-consumer advertising was just beginning on TV.
https://www.alternet.org/personal-healt ... de-effects
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 08, 2018 9:46 pm

Seth Abramson‏

ORDER OF EVENTS IN THE PORTER SCANDAL

1. White House discovers serial domestic abuser in West Wing.

2. FBI denies security clearance to said serial domestic abuser.

3. White House promotes serial domestic abuser to top level of government.

4. White House lies about what it knew.

1:09 PM - 8 Feb 2018


2/ Somewhere in there the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States pens a statement lauding the character of the serial domestic abuser with the help of—wait for it—his girlfriend. Only when all this is discovered and starts to inconvenience Trump is the abuser fired.

3/ And finally, some necessary background: the president the serial domestic abuser was working for, who did nothing to ascertain why his Staff Secretary had an improper security clearance—or else knew *exactly* why he did—has himself been accused of sexually assaulting 20 women.

4/ Point of comparison: Bill Clinton lied about an affair and was impeached for it.

5/ Further context:

1. The said serial domestic abuser failed to receive FBI clearance because he was a blackmail (NatSec) risk.
2. We just learned the president was *successfully* blackmailed over his sexual exploits.
3. The president skewered Clinton over alleged NatSec risks.

6/ So if you're wondering why the Porter scandal matters and is actually a *big* deal, there you go. It involves:

* National security risks
* White House lies
* Presidential hypocrisy
* Presidential incompetence
* A possible anti-woman culture in the Oval Office (POTUS and CoS)
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 4521061376
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Feb 08, 2018 11:36 pm

82_28 » Tue Feb 06, 2018 10:29 pm wrote:
In the recently released Netflix documentary The Confidence Man, two creators of The Apprentice discuss creating the “character” of Donald Trump as a billionaire business tycoon.

“What we did, that was a scam,” says producer Bill Pruitt. “That was an entertainment.”

[...]

“But that was not who he really is. He is a character, like on a TV show.”


http://people.com/politics/apprentice-c ... rump-scam/


I think a reality show producer can understand kayfabe. That character is what he is, permanently.

And what they did in helping him to shape and promote that character would not have been morally more excusable if it had not had the unintended consequence of making him into the president. (As if they would have canceled it if anyone had told them, back when it was a top-rated show and they were raking in the cash.) The project in itself, the concerns and values it promoted, was odious enough.

As Braun says in the film, “We didn’t think that so many people would look at it and go, ‘That’s real, this guy’s amazing.’"


They do and they don't believe that. The pleasure derived from the spectacle is more important than assessing its reality, and the pleasure can be derived even while knowing it's not real. Television has done more to create this situation than any other single institution of the last 100 years.

Not, obviously, that this sort of cheap proudly stupid demagogue riding constructed legends to popularity and power during a crisis period has not happened in times before TV. Fuck, this is what Marx was writing about in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 12, 2018 9:54 am

Trump’s Plan to use Fossil Fuels to dominate the Globe
By contributors | Feb. 12, 2018 |

By Michael T. Klare | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – –
The new U.S. energy policy of the Trump era is, in some ways, the oldest energy policy on Earth. Every great power has sought to mobilize the energy resources at its command, whether those be slaves, wind-power, coal, or oil, to further its hegemonic ambitions. What makes the Trumpian variant — the unfettered exploitation of America’s fossil-fuel reserves — unique lies only in the moment it’s being applied and the likely devastation that will result, thanks not only to the 1950s-style polluting of America’s air, waters, and urban environment, but to the devastating hand it will lend to a globally warming world.
Last month, if you listened to the chatter among elite power brokers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, you would have heard a lot of bragging about the immense progress being made in renewable energy. “My government has planned a major campaign,” said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his address to the group. “By 2022, we want to generate 175 gigawatts of renewable energy; in the last three years, we have already achieved 60 gigawatts, or around one-third of this target.” Other world leaders also boasted of their achievements in speeding the installation of wind and solar energy. Even the energy minister of oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Khalid Al-Falih, announced plans for a $30 billion to $50 billion investment in solar power. Only one major figure defied this trend: U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. The United States, he insisted, is “blessed” with “a substantial ability to deliver the people of the globe a better quality of life through fossil fuels.”


A better quality of life through fossil fuels? On this, he and his Trump administration colleagues now stand essentially alone on planet Earth. Virtually every other country has by now chosen — via the Paris climate accord and efforts like those under way in India — to speed the transition from a carbon-based energy economy to a renewable one.
A possible explanation for this: Donald Trump’s indebtedness to the very fossil fuel interests that helped propel him into office. Think, for example, of his interior secretary’s recent decision to open much of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to offshore drilling (long sought by the oil and gas industry) or his administration’s moves to lift restrictions on coal mining on federal lands (long favored by the coal industry). Both were clearly acts of payback. Still, far more than subservience to oil and coal barons lurks in Trump’s energy policy (and Perry’s words). From the White House perspective, the U.S. is engaged in a momentous struggle for global power with rival nations and, it is claimed, the country’s abundance of fossil fuels affords it a vital edge. The more of those fuels America produces and exports, the greater its stature in a competitive world system, which is precisely why maximizing such output has already become a major pillar of President Trump’s national security policy.
He laid out his dystopian world vision (and that of the generals he’s put in charge of what was once known as American “foreign policy”) in a December 18th address announcing the release of the administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) document. “Whether we like it or not,” he asserted, “we are engaged in a new era of competition.” The U.S. faces “rogue regimes” like Iran and North Korea and “rival powers, Russia and China, that seek to challenge American influence, values, and wealth.” In such an intensely competitive world, he added, “we will stand up for ourselves, and we will stand up for our country like we have never stood up before… Our rivals are tough. They’re tenacious and committed to the long term. But so are we.”
To Trump and his generals, we’ve been plunged into a world that bears little relation to the one faced by the last two administrations, when great-power conflict was rarely the focus of attention and civilian society remained largely insulated from the pressures of the country’s never-ending wars. Today, they believe, the U.S. can no longer afford to distinguish between “the homeland” and foreign battle zones when girding for years of struggle to come. “To succeed,” the president concluded, “we must integrate every dimension of our national strength, and we must compete with every instrument of our national power.”
And that’s where, in the Trumpian worldview, energy enters the picture.
Energy Dominance
From the onset of his presidency, Donald Trump has made it clear that cheap and abundant domestic energy derived from fossil fuels was going to be the crucial factor in his total-mobilization approach to global engagement. In his view and that of his advisers, it’s the essential element in ensuring national economic vitality, military strength, and geopolitical clout, whatever damage it might cause to American life, the global environment, or even the future of human life on this planet. The exploitation and wielding of fossil fuels now sits at the very heart of the Trumpian definition of national security, as the recently released NSS makes all too clear.
“Access to domestic sources of clean, affordable, and reliable energy underpins a prosperous, secure, and powerful America for decades to come,” it states. “Unleashing these abundant energy resources — coal, natural gas, petroleum, renewables, and nuclear — stimulates the economy and builds a foundation for future growth.”
So, yes, the document does pay lip service to the role of renewables, though no one should take that seriously given, for instance, the president’s recent decision to place high tariffs on imported solar panels, an act likely to cripple the domestic solar-installation industry. What really matters to Trump are those domestic reserves of fossil fuels. Only by using them to gain energy self-sufficiency, or what he trumpets not just as “energy independence” but total “energy dominance,” can the U.S. avoid becoming beholden to foreign powers and so protect its sovereignty. That’s why he regularly hails the successes of the “shale revolution,” the use of fracking technology to extract oil and gas from deeply buried shale formations. As he sees it, fracking to the max makes America that much less dependent on foreign imports.
It follows then that the ability to supply fossil fuels to other countries will be a source of geopolitical advantage, a reality made painfully clear early in this century when Russia exploited its status as a major supplier of natural gas to Ukraine, Belarus, and other former Soviet republics to try to extract political concessions from them. Donald Trump absorbed that lesson and incorporated it into his strategic playbook.
“Our country is blessed with extraordinary energy abundance,” he declared at an “Unleashing American Energy Event” last June. “We are a top producer of petroleum and the number-one producer of natural gas… With these incredible resources, my administration will seek not only American energy independence that we’ve been looking for so long, but American energy dominance. And we’re going to be an exporter… We will be dominant. We will export American energy all over the world, all around the globe.”
Attaining Energy Dominance
In energy terms, what does dominant mean in practice? For President Trump and his cohorts, it means above all the “unleashing” of the country’s energy abundance by eliminating every imaginable regulatory impediment to the exploitation of domestic reserves of fossil fuels. After all, America possesses some of the largest reservoirs of oil, coal, and natural gas on the planet and, by applying every technological marvel at its disposal, can maximally extract those reserves to enhance national power.
“The truth is that we have near-limitless supplies of energy in our country,” he declared last June. All that stood in the way of exploiting them when he entered the Oval Office, he insisted, were environmental regulations imposed by the Obama administration. “We cannot have obstruction. Since my very first day in office, I have been moving at record pace to cancel these regulations and to eliminate the barriers to domestic energy production.” He then cited his approval of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, the cancellation of a moratorium on the leasing of federal lands for coal mining, the reversal of an Obama administration rule aimed at preventing methane leakage from natural gas production on federal lands, and the rollback of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which (if implemented) would require sharp cuts in coal usage. And from the recent opening of the pristine Alaskan Arctic Refuge to that of those coastal waters to every kind of drilling, it’s never ended.
Closely related to such actions has been his repudiation of the Paris Agreement, because — as he saw it — that pact, too, stood in the way of his plan to “unleash” domestic energy in the pursuit of international power. By withdrawing from the agreement, he claimed to be preserving American “sovereignty,” while opening the path to a new kind of global energy dominance. “We have so much more [energy] than we ever thought possible,” he asserted. “We are really in the driving seat. And you know what? We don’t want to let other countries take away our sovereignty and tell us what to do and how to do it. That’s not going to happen.”
Never mind that the Paris agreement in no way intruded on American sovereignty. It only obligated its partners — at this point, every country on Earth except the United States — to enact its own greenhouse gas emissions reduction measures aimed at preventing global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above their pre-industrial levels. (That is the biggest increase scientists believe the planet can absorb without experiencing truly catastrophic impacts like a 10-foot rise in global sea levels). In the Obama years, in its own self-designed blueprint for achieving this goal, the United States promised, among other things, to implement the Clean Power Plan to minimize the consumption of coal, itself already a dying industry. This, of course, represented an unacceptable impediment to Trump’s extract-everything policy.
The final step in the president’s strategy to become a major exporter involves facilitating the transport of fossil fuels to the country’s coastal areas for shipment abroad. In this way, he would also turn the government into a major global salesman of fossil fuels (as it already is, for instance, of American weaponry). To do so, he would expedite the approval of permits for the export of LNG, or liquefied natural gas, and even for some new types of “lower emissions” coal plants. The Department of the Treasury, he revealed in that June talk of his, “will address barriers to the financing of highly efficient, overseas coal energy plants.” In addition, he claimed that the Ukrainians tell us “they need millions and millions of metric tons [of coal] right now. There are many other places that need it, too. And we want to sell it to them, and to everyone else all over the globe who need[s] it.” He also announced the approval of expanded LNG exports from a new facility at Lake Charles, Louisiana, and of a new oil pipeline to Mexico, meant to “further boost American energy exports, and that will go right under the [as yet unbuilt] wall.”
Such energy moves have generally been viewed as part of a pro-industry, anti-environmentalist agenda, which they certainly are, but each is also a component in an increasingly militarized strategy to enlist domestic energy in an epic struggle — at least in the minds of the president and his advisers — to ensure America’s global dominance.
Where All This Is Headed
Trump achieved many of these maximal-extraction objectives during his first year in office. Now, with fossil fuels uniquely imbedded in the country’s National Security Strategy, we have a clearer sense of what’s happening. First of all, along with the further funding of the U.S. military (and of the “modernization” of the country’s nuclear arsenal), Donald Trump and his generals are making fossil fuels a crucial ingredient for bulking up our national security. In that way, they will turn anything (or any group) standing in the way of the extraction and exploitation of oil, coal, and natural gas into obstructers of the national interest and, quite literally, of American national security.
In other words, the expansion of the fossil fuel industry and its exports has been transformed into a major component of American foreign and security policy. Of course, such developments and the exports that go with them do generate income and sustain some jobs, but in the Trumpian view they also boost the country’s geopolitical profile by encouraging foreign friends and partners to rely ever more heavily on us for their energy needs, rather than adversaries like Russia or Iran. “As a growing supplier of energy resources, technologies, and services around the world,” the NSS declares without a hint of irony, “the United States will help our allies and partners become more resilient against those that use energy to coerce.”
As the Trump administration moves forward on all this, the key battlefield will undoubtedly be the building and maintaining of energy infrastructure — the pipelines and railroads carrying oil, gas, and coal from the American interior to processing and export facilities on the coasts. Because so many of the country’s large cities and population centers are on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, or the Gulf of Mexico, and because the country has long depended on imports for much of its petroleum supply, a surprising share of existing energy infrastructure — refineries, LNG facilities, pumping stations, and the like — is already located along those same coasts. Yet much of the energy supply Trump seeks to exploit — the shale fields of Texas and North Dakota, the coal fields of Nebraska — is located in the interior of the country. For his strategy to succeed, such resource zones must be connected far more effectively to coastal facilities via a mammoth web of new pipelines and other transport infrastructure. All of this will cost vast sums of money and lead to intense clashes with environmentalists, Native peoples, farmers, ranchers, and others whose lands and way of life will be severely degraded when that kind of construction takes place, and who can be expected to resist.
For Trump, the road ahead is clear: do whatever it takes to install the infrastructure needed to deliver those fossil fuels abroad. Not surprisingly then, the National Security Strategy asserts that “we will streamline the Federal regulatory approval processes for energy infrastructure, from pipeline and export terminals to container shipments and gathering lines.” This is bound to provoke numerous conflicts with environmental groups and other inhabitants of what Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, calls “Blockadia” — places like the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, where thousands of Native people and their supporters camped out last year in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to block construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. Given the administration’s insistence on linking energy extraction to U.S. security, don’t for a moment imagine that attempts to protest such moves won’t be met with harsh treatment from federal law enforcement agencies.
Building all of that infrastructure will also prove expensive, so expect President Trump to make pipeline construction integral to any infrastructure modernization bill he sends to Congress, thereby securing taxpayer dollars for the effort. Indeed, the inclusion of pipeline construction and other kinds of energy build-out in any future infrastructure initiative is already a major objective of influential business groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Rebuilding roads and bridges is fine, commented Thomas Donohue, the Chamber’s influential president, but “we’re also living in the midst of an energy renaissance, yet we don’t have the infrastructure to support it.” As a result, he added, we must “build the pipelines necessary to transport our abundant resources to market.” Given the influence such corporate interests have over this White House and congressional Republicans, it’s reasonable to assume that any bill on infrastructure revitalization will be, at least in part, energy focused.
And keep in mind that for President Trump, with his thoroughly fossil-fuelized view of the world, this is just the beginning. Issues that may be viewed by others as environmental or even land-conservation matters will be seen by him and his associates as so many obstacles to national security and greatness. Facing what will almost certainly be a series of unparalleled potential environmental disasters, those who oppose him will also have to contest his view of the world and the role fossil fuels should play in it.
Selling more of them to foreign buyers, while attempting to stifle the development of renewals (and thereby ceding those true job-creating sectors of the economy to other countries) may be good for giant oil and coal corporations, but it won’t win America any friends abroad at a moment when climate change is becoming a growing concern for ever more people on this planet. With prolonged droughts, increasingly severe storms and hurricanes, and killer heat waves affecting ever-larger swaths of the planet, with sea levels rising and extreme weather becoming the norm, the urge for progress on climate change is only growing stronger, as is the demand for climate-friendly renewables.
Donald Trump and his administration of climate-change deniers are quite literally living in the wrong century. The militarization of energy policy at this late date and the lodging of fossil fuels at the heart of national security policy may seem appealing to them, but it’s an approach that’s obviously doomed. On arrival, it is, in fact, already the definition of obsolescence.
Unfortunately, given the circumstances of this planet at the moment, it also threatens to doom the rest of us. The further we look into the future, the more likely international leadership will fall on the shoulders of those who can effectively and efficiently deliver renewables, not those who can provide climate-poisoning fossil fuels. That being so, no one seeking global prestige would say at Davos or anywhere else that we are blessed with “a substantial ability to deliver the people of the globe a better quality of life through fossil fuels.”
https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/trumps ... inate.html



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oiAcu7TJF4


Rob Porter Is the Illumination Flare of Trumpist Rot
By Josh Marshall | February 12, 2018 9:31 am


At the outset of the Rob Porter scandal, I was baffled by the way this scandal seemed to be hamstringing and damaging the White House in ways few others have. This is not to say the Porter story isn’t bad enough. It’s plenty bad. It’s egregiously bad. But this President has had a lot of scandals that are egregiously bad. Set aside for the moment that there is every reason to believe that the President himself is a chronic sexual predator – a fact that now seems more or less accepted as part of the political firmament. This is a President who literally stood up for Nazis against anti-Nazi protestors. There’s a lot of competition for bad. Individual wrongdoing should largely be centered on the person in question. It doesn’t naturally attach to their coworkers or employers. But from the start, in this case, everyone around Rob Porter seemed compromised by his offenses – and not in random ways. His story, this ignored and covered up offense, has managed to expose and highlight all the failings of the President and his coterie – not simply their indifference to racism or gender violence but interwoven factors like indifference to the rule of law and personal loyalty to leader as the highest, indeed singular, value.

We can start with the simple fact that this President surrounds himself with men who abuse women. Abuse and predation may know no party. But abusers seek out and run together. Trump’s politics are rooted in grievance, both gendered and racial. Trump is consistent if nothing else. He is an embodiment of his politics. It’s no surprise that this isn’t theoretical or merely expressed in political terms but is interpersonal and personally violent as well. Abusers know the President is one of them. They seek him out and he protects them in turn. Few men in the President’s coterie have multiple wives who’ve been willing to take the step of describing their former husband’s violence on the record. But it’s remarkable the number of Trump’s top advisors who have a history of abuse, whether it’s accusations of harassment or sexual assault or chronic physical violence against former spouses or girlfriends.

It unsurprising and yet still remarkable that the President’s first public comments on the Porter story were expressions of condolence to Porter and what he was suffering, paired with suggestions that Porter was probably wrongly accused. What strikes me most about these Trump moments is how simple a more cynical response would be. A pro-forma nod to the gravity of domestic violence and a generic expression of sympathy to the alleged victims would be so simple. Yet President is unwilling and perhaps unable to do so. He says what he feels and what he feels is not pretty.

Then there’s the President’s Chief of Staff, once held up as a professional and an adult accepting the burden of service to a transgressive President out of a sense of duty. That false impression has been whittled away until we arrive at the present moment where we can see unmistakably that John Kelly is an expositor of what we might call Total Quality Trumpism, a more disciplined and professionalized version of the President’s desire to rebuild traditional gender, racial hierarchies and seek revenge against a world he believes is spinning out of control. Such a traditionalist manifesto was the centerpiece of his broadside last fall against Florida Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D).

The key lines are worth remembering.

“When I was a kid growing up a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred and looked upon with great honor. That’s obviously not the case anymore as we’ve seen from recent cases. Life, the dignity of life, was sacred. That’s gone. Religion. That seems to be gone as well. Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer.”

Unsurprisingly, it has also become clear that Kelly’s attitudes toward immigrants are deeply aligned with President Trump’s. This was clear by implication in his time running the Department of Homeland Security and more vivid in his own ravenous words. We now have ample evidence of what should have been predictable from the start: Almost everyone who signed up to serve President Trump was in a critical way like him, either ideologically or in personal character. The notion that more than a handful were dedicated, non-extremist professionals serving in spite of Trump’s failings rather than because of them has simply failed the test of evidence.

Kelly knew for months about Porter’s abuse. He didn’t think it merited his dismissal. It didn’t change his opinion of him as a man of the highest honor and integrity. He even kept him on in the face of his failure to gain a proper security clearance – a major problem even if you don’t care about the underlying issue of domestic violence. Kelly’s role in the Porter drama (along with other evidence over the last year) leaves little question that his vision of honor and integrity is one in which habitual violence against wives and girlfriends plays no significant role. Because of that he took no action when he learned about Porter’s past. Because of that he first delivered a paean to Porter’s virtue in response to the revelations and asked him not to resign. All the actions make sense with that predicate in mind. These things don’t matter, a minor personal vice – akin to smoking or perhaps a minor gambling habit – against a record of dedication and integrity.

Porter apparently lacked a security clearance in part because his background check was hung up over his previous abuse allegations. But this story has highlighted the fact that a large number of key White House staffers also lack clearances. This doesn’t mean they all did bad things. Some of it is tied to backlogs in the massive clearance process itself. What it seems to show is a more general problem. A large percentage of the people in the Trump White House either lack government experience or carry significant personal baggage. Some cases are like the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, someone who is wildly unqualified for the work he’s doing and has business ties to all kinds of questionable entities. In other cases it may simply be that lots of people have never been in government before. So they lack pre-existing clearances and have business backgrounds which take some time to examine. The point is that at least in theory – and one would hope in some cases in practice – these are people who have skills and temperament that merit making a contribution to government service. But the fact that they haven’t been in government before creates delays in getting them cleared.

But there seems to be a deeper issue as well. We’re familiar with the mix of toadies and cranks who surround Trump – the Omarosas and Gorkas and Scaramuccis. Many of them got jobs in the White House and many have already lost them. What’s become clear over time is that even the people with experience, the ‘good’ people, tend to come with less experience or more baggage than usual. There seems to be a process of mutual selection or rather de-selection in the Trump universe. The most experienced people stay away and more credible and principled people get blackballed. The most credible explanation to Rachel Brand’s inexplicable departure for Walmart after eight months is that she believed she would be professionally damaged by continued association with Donald Trump.

Let’s go back to the situation around Porter himself. Three players in the mix dealing with his departure were Kelly, Hope Hicks and White House Counsel Don McGahn. Kelly rose to the pinnacle of the Marine Corps. But he has little to no political experience, which was at least relevant in handling the situation once it was exposed. Hicks is a 29 year old who has virtually no relevant experience whatsoever for her current position. Her only professional experience is with the Trump family and before signing on to the campaign that was all doing PR work for Ivanka’s clothing line. Her ability to manage the current situation started out limited and was inevitably compromised by her dating the accused abuser. McGahn is the most experienced player in the mix. But he must have his hands full with the all-encompassing Russia investigation in which not only his client but he personally may face significant legal jeopardy. It is no excuse. But it would be no surprise if lots of things are falling by the wayside as McGahn grapples with what is reasonably seen as an existential threat to the Presidency. Not surprisingly, according to this yesterday morning report from Mike Allen, Kelly is now caught out in his own lies by Porter himself. Porter is impeaching Kelly’s lies to friends and reporters. All Cretans are liars, says the Cretan. The wife beater is our fact witness against the liar who protected him.

All of it starts to feed on itself. The President is defined by his predation. He attracts these people to him or they are the only options available and he in turn protects them. He’s staffed by the inexperienced, the incompetent and the reprobate. They are unable to hide his nature even when it would be in his interest to allow them to do so. The rush of crises and incapacity yields desperation and lying, in part because of the nature of the situation but even more because these behaviors are validated from the top. Did John Kelly start out as a liar? We don’t know. He seems to be one and a not terribly good one now. Porter’s exposure is like a brief but sustained flash of light amidst the moral darkness and squalor of Trump White House, briefly illuminating all the dreck and rot of the rough beast of Trumpism.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ro ... umpist-rot
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 12, 2018 1:24 pm

The Next Recession Is Really Gonna Suck
The extra help unemployed people got during the Great Recession has emboldened states to mistreat them.
By Arthur Delaney

WASHINGTON ― When the next recession comes, many people who lose their jobs will have a harder time getting unemployment insurance, an important lifeline for most Americans. In several states, these people could have to pee in cups just to qualify.

Those who don’t get benefits will have to settle for the sort of fake jobs our economy produces in abundance — a contract job in an Amazon fulfillment center, say, or a gig delivering groceries to people who still have careers.

Talk of a recession is in the air again after the recent wobble in the stock market. It’s highly likely the next recession will occur in the coming three years, while President Donald Trump is still in office. Maybe it’ll happen as a result of his inflation-baiting tax bill. Maybe it’ll have something to do with excessive consumer debt. We don’t know what the cause will be, but we do have some idea of how Americans will experience the next sustained economic slump. Since the Great Recession, during which the GOP repeatedly if grudgingly went along with former President Barack Obama to extend unemployment insurance, Republicans on both the state and federal level have pushed to make benefits less generous and harder to get.

Meanwhile, the holes they’ve created in the safety net will be filled by so-called “alternative work arrangements” — gigs — which offer fewer protections for workers than full-time jobs.

By design, America is ill-prepared for its next recession, and it’s going to suck.


YURI GRIPAS / REUTERS
The president of the United States will deny that the bad jobs numbers are real.
It’s the U.S. government that measures economic growth and the unemployment rate, but it’s actually up to a private nonprofit organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research to tell us when a recession has begun. Since the 1920s, this organization has had a committee of eggheads looking at a variety of indicators, especially personal income levels, unemployment rates and the gross domestic product, to determine when a recession has started.

A recession starts after economic activity has reached its peak. Right when things are better than ever is when they’re about to get worse. The decline in business conditions has to affect the whole economy; it can’t just be a single-sector slump, like the one Amazon has wrought among retailers. But you won’t know the recession has started until later, because the NBER waits until the government has finished its data revisions, which happens over a period of months. It wasn’t until 2008 that the organization announced that the last recession had begun in 2007.

There have been 11 recessions since World War II. The current economic expansion began in mid-2009, making it the third longest in history, and it can’t last forever.

Expansions don’t just die of old age. One thing that can trigger recessions is the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates to quell inflation. The Federal Reserve is currently in the process of raising rates, but inflation is still low and most economists see no cause for concern in the immediate future ― though economists are not exactly great at predicting what will happen.

“When wage and price pressures develop, that’s when the clock starts to tick,” said Mark Zandi, an economist with Moody’s Analytics, a financial analysis provider.

Upward pressure on wages has begun to develop. The official unemployment rate is still falling, and it has been at or below 5 percent for about two years ― a level that has traditionally triggered inflation fears. But economists can point to a range of other measures, such as reduced labor force participation, that suggests the labor market is still out of whack. With interest rates already very low, the Fed has wanted to bring them up partly to ward off phantom inflation and partly just so it can lower them again when the next recession comes around. Because it will.

One possible table-setter for a recession, Zandi said, is a huge tax cut that increases the size of the federal budget deficit — something very much like the contents of the Republican tax bill that Trump signed in December. In such a scenario all the extra money in taxpayer’s hands could cause the economy to overheat, leading the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates faster in an effort to stave off inflation.

“If the tax cuts are deficit financed, that is going to juice the economy and it will overheat, significantly raising the odds of a recession early in the next decade,” Zandi said.

Most economists are less confident the tax cuts will juice the economy quite so much, but they generally do anticipate an aggressive Fed response. “Interest rates are projected to rise in the short term because the legislation would boost aggregate demand and output, leading the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates to avoid a surge in inflation,” the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said in its December 2017 analysis of the economic effects of the new law.

Outgoing Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, for her part, kept the Fed’s plans cryptic in the wake of the tax bill. “I think my colleagues and I are in line with the general expectation among most economists that the type of tax changes that are likely to be enacted would tend to provide some modest lift to GDP growth in the coming years,” she said.


AARON BERNSTEIN / REUTERS
Republicans on both the state and federal level have pushed to make benefits less generous and harder to get.
While federal and state governments run an array of programs that respond to economic need, nothing is more important when mass layoffs roll around than unemployment insurance, which is not handed out to just anyone. Only people who are laid off through no fault of their own, and who have well-established work histories over the previous year, are eligible. Benefits are designed to replace about 46 percent of the person’s lost wages.

The average unemployment benefit ranged from $330 to $350 per week since 2016, according to The Department of Labor, making it more valuable than other programs responding to economic need. Food stamps, for instance, might provide that much money over the course of a month. The generosity of the benefit serves two purposes: one is to protect layoff victims themselves, and the other is to prevent a broader deflationary spiral caused by desperate people accepting terrible wages at jobs for which they’re not really suited.

After the Great Recession got underway, while hundreds of thousands of people were losing their jobs each month, Congress started increasing the duration of unemployment insurance for people who’d used up the standard 26 weeks of benefits that states provide. Republican foot-dragging over the cost of the benefits led to a huge fight in 2010, with former Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) infamously responding to Democratic pleas by saying “tough shit” on the Senate floor.

Since then, Congress has quietly allowed those benefits to expire while statehouse Republicans ― aghast that Barack Obama gave their constituents up to 99 weeks of combined state and federal unemployment insurance ― have hacked away at their own unemployment programs. Nine states reduced benefit duration from the usual 26 weeks, and many others have apparently gotten more aggressive in checking up on claimants to make sure they’re continuing to look for work, which has always been an eligibility requirement.

As a result, the rate at which unemployed Americans receive layoff compensation overall has fallen from about 36 percent in 2007 to about 28 percent in 2017, according to data from The Department of Labor. Wayne Vroman, an associate with the Urban Institute, said a big reason for the decline is that states are finding ways to kick unemployed people off benefits after they’ve already been deemed eligible. His research shows a big increase in “nonseparation determinations.” These are instances of states investigating whether someone is continuing to meet eligibility requirements by doing things like writing down the names and addresses of businesses where they’ve applied for work on forms to state work agencies.

“When agencies have undertaken nonseparation determinations in recent years, the outcome has become much more likely to be a denial than in 1989 or 1999,” Vroman wrote in a paper that will be published this year. For instance, denial rates for determinations examining a person’s availability for work ― their willingness to take a job ― which is a requirement of benefit receipt, were 64 percent in 1989 and 83 percent in 2016.

Unemployment compensation is a state-federal program financed by payroll taxes on employers. When a lot of people lose their jobs and state unemployment trust funds run dry, states have to borrow money and sometimes increase payroll taxes ― something that makes Republican lawmakers enthusiastic about trimming benefits. (Most extra weeks of federal benefits are fully funded by the federal government and created by Congress on an ad-hoc basis.)

States are still smarting from the Great Recession. At the beginning of last year, only 21 state trust funds had achieved what the Labor Department considers a minimum level of solvency. If they can’t catch up before layoffs hit, there will be political pressure to follow the new path that other states have taken to reduce benefits. Lawmakers in Kentucky, which has a poor solvency rating, are currently considering proposals to make the state’s unemployment system more like Florida’s, currently one of the worst.

It’s an old pattern. After the recession of the early 1980s, changes in state benefits helped reduce the proportion of unemployed workers receiving compensation from 50 percent in 1980 to 37 percent in 1990, according to political scientist Paul Pierson’s 1994 book Dismantling the Welfare State?

Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, said the country isn’t well prepared for the next recession.

“We have managed to make UI incredibly non-protective,” Bivens said. “If we want the UI system to not be a complete joke in the next recession, it’s going to depend on Congress and the president.”

But Congress and the president might be more interested in urine tests than UI. Since about 2011, Republicans at the state and federal level have been trying to make drug tests a requirement for welfare, food stamps and unemployment insurance. In 2012, Congress passed a law giving states the right to drug test some unemployment claimants, but the measure let the Obama Labor Department decide who would be subjected to the test, resulting in a narrowly written regulation that Republicans said wouldn’t catch anybody.

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Republicans scrapped the regulation last year, and the Trump administration has said it will release a new one sometime soon. Wisconsin, Texas and Mississippi have already passed drug test laws and are just waiting for a green light from the Labor Department.


TERO VESALAINEN VIA GETTY IMAGES
Republicans at the state and federal level have been trying to make drug tests a requirement for welfare, food stamps and unemployment insurance.
How will a new recession play out under this new unemployment benefits regime? The recent hurricanes offer a preview. Storms that battered Texas and Florida threw tens of thousands of people out of work. Storm victims are supposed to be eligible for unemployment benefits and can file through the regular process.

In Florida, it’s not an easy process. The state overhauled its unemployment system in 2011, requiring layoff victims to file claims online and even (for a time) take a math and reading test. Since 2007, before the last recession started, the percentage of unemployed Floridians who receive compensation plunged from 32 percent to 9 percent, almost the lowest rate of coverage in the nation.

Anthony Di Biagio is the co-owner of a residential and commercial cleaning service in Cape Coral, Florida. In the aftermath of Hurricane Irma he was unable to work because some of his clients’ homes and businesses were inaccessible. As a business owner, Di Biagio was ineligible for regular unemployment compensation, but perfectly eligible for the special disaster assistance provided through the state unemployment system.

After spending 40 minutes initiating his application online, Di Biagio learned it would take some real vigilance to actually receive the benefits. He’d have to request payments every two weeks and register with an online service called “Employ Florida Marketplace” as though he were looking for a job ― which, as a business owner, he was not.

“Unfortunately, this is counterproductive for me because I know that my unemployment is temporary and I’ll most likely only need benefits for 1-2 months,” he said in a Facebook message. “Even if I found a job with EFM, I couldn’t commit to it because I already own a company which plans to be fully operational as soon as possible.”

The problems stem partly from the state’s apparent desire to discourage people from obtaining benefits and partly from plain old private sector incompetence. Florida hired Deloitte Consulting to overhaul the website and complained loudly about the contractor’s work, which in 2013 and 2014 the state blamed for claimants being unable to receive benefits in timely fashion. Handling claims through an automated system is supposed to save money on staff, but two other states that hired the firm to overhaul electronic benefits delivery have also encountered massive benefits delays and other problems.

(A Deloitte Consulting spokesman said unemployment system in all three states have been fully functional since 2014. “Unemployed workers in all of the states in which we have worked are receiving the unemployment benefits for which they’re eligible, in a timely fashion and in accordance with state and federal laws,” he said.)

“The states that run these really threadbare programs, it’s not the economic stabilizer you would want for a family facing job loss for their main wage earner,” George Wentworth, a senior staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project, said in an interview. “It’s the most important program for the average American who loses their job. That’s why there are standards [in federal law] saying as soon as you’re eligible you should be getting payment within three weeks of filing that claim.”

The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity declined to comment.

***

One thing that could actually make the next recession less miserable than its predecessor is “work sharing.” Thirty states currently offer work-sharing or “short-time compensation” programs that allow companies to reduce a group of employees’ hours instead of doing layoffs. The state then uses its unemployment insurance trust fund to compensate the workers for the missing hours.

Congress doled out $100 million for states to set up work-sharing programs in 2012, and several states designed new programs as a result. A Labor Department-commissioned study released in 2016 found that of the more than 2,000 businesses that enrolled in a state work-sharing program from 2008 through 2013, most had a favorable experience and more than 80 percent said they would sign up again.

It’s such a good idea that of course nobody has heard of it.

Economists who are familiar with work sharing say it’s ridiculous how unfamiliar the concept is to most people considering its bipartisan backing. One flaw of the policy is that it’s entirely up to employers to sign up for the state-sponsored programs, even though its workers whose livelihoods are at stake.

“It would be neat if employees could initiate this as well,” economist Lonnie Golden of Penn State Abington said. “The information is just not out there.”


CHARLES PLATIAU / REUTERS
Alternative work arrangements are more commonly along the lines of those Amazon warehouse jobs than they are for online platforms.
Another distinguishing feature of the next recession will be the prevalence of fake jobs with no benefits. Since 2005, the percentage of the workforce toiling in “alternative work arrangements,” such as freelance or subcontractor gigs, has risen from 10 to almost 16 percent, according to 2016 research by Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger, economists at Harvard and Princeton, respectively. Less than 1 percent of jobs are for online platforms like Uber or TaskRabbit; alternative work arrangements are more commonly along the lines of those Amazon warehouse jobs where you don’t actually work for Amazon.

This kind of work accounted for all of the net employment growth from 2010 to 2015 and has spread throughout occupations. The advantage is that these jobs are easier to get. The disadvantages are that they’re less likely to come with benefits; they’re less secure; and the schedules are more erratic.

And people working in such jobs may be ineligible for unemployment, since if they’re not actual employees of the firm they work for their state won’t have W2 forms on file reflecting their earnings. For people who don’t have benefits, the “flexibility” of contract work may be their only lifeline.

Katz and Krueger found in a follow-up paper that people who’d suffered unemployment were significantly more likely to find themselves in an alternative work arrangement after the Great Recession ― something that will happen even more next time the economy tanks.

“We would certainly expect a jump in people, as they lose out on possibilities of more traditional jobs, moving into alternative work,” Katz said.

I haven’t believed a word they told me in years.
Donald Witkowski, former paper mill worker
Then there’s the Trump factor. When the mass layoffs return and the unemployment rate rises the newly jobless will discover that not only have they lost their livelihoods, but they have also become fake news.

The president of the United States will deny that the bad jobs numbers are real. Just as candidate Trump insisted the official unemployment rate was 10 times higher than the Obama administration said, President Trump won’t hesitate to cast doubt on his own government’s rate when it starts rising.

Who cares? Well, the tens of millions of Americans who will churn through the unemployment system are going to care. One of the worst things about being unemployed, aside from the fact that you have no money, is that you lose a routine that essentially connects you to society through daily interactions with other people. And since American culture closely links your value as a human to your career, it can be difficult to maintain self respect ― which helps explain the link between joblessness and suicide. Massive numbers of alienated and vulnerable people already living a surreal existence will be explicitly told they’re not even real.

Ask anyone who suffered more than a brief spell of joblessness in the wake of the Great Recession, which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, how it felt to keep hearing that the economy was improving. Ask Donald Witkowski.

“I haven’t believed a word they told me in years,” Witkowski told HuffPost. And that’s how he felt even though the president at the time took pains to say that, despite economic progress, many people had been left behind ― a kind of nuance Trump doesn’t do.

Witkowski, 59, lost his job in 2011 when the paper mill in Whiting, Wisconsin, closed down. He’d worked there for decades. Now, still unemployed and receiving disability benefits, he’s alienated from his government even after having gotten nearly a year of unemployment insurance thanks to a series of federal extensions. Whatever goes wrong with the next recession, he said, will be worse than whatever the statistics say. He has a prediction for the next downturn, and it’s based less on economics than on his experience of the last one.

“It won’t be a recession,” he said. “I think it will be a total collapse.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/th ... fc93040b5e





THE RIGHT WING
Thom Hartmann: How the GOP Used a Two Santa Clauses Tactic to Con America for Nearly 40 Years
This scam has been killing wages and enriching billionaires for decades.

By Thom Hartmann / AlterNet February 10, 2018, 8:35 AM GMT

The only thing wrong with the U.S. economy is the failure of the Republican Party to play Santa Claus.
-Jude Wanniski, March 6, 1976

The Republican Party has been running a long con on America since Reagan’s inauguration, and somehow our nation’s media has missed it – even though it was announced in The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s and the GOP has clung tenaciously to it ever since.

In fact, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski’s 1974 “Two Santa Clauses Theory” has been the main reason why the GOP has succeeded in producing our last two Republican presidents, Bush and Trump (despite losing the popular vote both times). It’s also why Reagan’s economy seemed to be “good.”

Here’s how it works, laid it out in simple summary:

First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results – it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the “tax-cut Santa Claus.”

Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!” This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus.

Think back to Ronald Reagan, who more than tripled the US debt from a mere $800 billion to $2.6 trillion in his 8 years. That spending produced a massive stimulus to the economy, and the biggest non-wartime increase in the debt in history. Nary a peep from Republicans about that 218% increase in our debt; they were just fine with it.

And then along came Bill Clinton. The screams and squeals from the GOP about the “unsustainable debt” of nearly $3 trillion were loud, constant, and echoed incessantly by media from CBS to NPR. Newt Gingrich rode the wave of “unsustainable debt” hysteria into power, as the GOP took control of the House for the first time lasting more than a term since 1930, even though the increase in our national debt under Clinton was only about 37%.

The GOP “debt freakout” was so widely and effectively amplified by the media that Clinton himself bought into it and began to cut spending, taking the axe to numerous welfare programs (“It’s the end of welfare as we know it” he famously said, and “The era of big government is over”). Clinton also did something no Republican has done in our lifetimes: he supported several balanced budgets and handed a budget surplus to George W. Bush.

When George W. Bush was given the White House by the Supreme Court (Gore won the popular vote by over a half-million votes) he reverted to Reagan’s strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding a trillion in borrowed money to pay for his tax cut for GOP-funding billionaires, and tossing in two unfunded wars for good measure, which also added at least (long term) another $5 to $7 trillion.

There was not a peep about the debt from any high-profile in-the-know Republicans then; in fact, Dick Cheney famously said, essentially ratifying Wanniski’s strategy, “Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms [because of those tax cuts]. This is our due.” Bush and Cheney raised the debt by 86% to over $10 trillion (although the war debt wasn’t put on the books until Obama entered office).

Then comes Democratic President Barack Obama, and suddenly the GOP is hysterical about the debt again. So much so that they convinced a sitting Democratic president to propose a cut to Social Security (the “chained CPI”). Obama nearly shot the Democrats biggest Santa Claus program. And, Republican squeals notwithstanding, Obama only raised the debt by 34%.

Now we’re back to a Republican president, and once again deficits be damned. Between their tax cut and the nearly-trillion dollar spending increase passed on February 8th, in the first year-and-a-month of Trump’s administration they’ve spent more stimulating the economy (and driving up debt by more than $2 trillion, when you include interest) than the entire Obama presidency.


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Consider the amazing story of where this strategy came from, and how the GOP has successfully kept their strategy from getting into the news; even generally well-informed writers for media like the Times and the Post – and producers, pundits and reporters for TV news – don’t know the history of what’s been happening right in front of us all for 37 years.

Republican strategist Jude Wanniski first proposed his Two Santa Clauses strategy in 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the future of the Republican Party was so dim that books and articles were widely suggesting the GOP was about to go the way of the Whigs. There was genuine despair across the Party, particularly when Jerry Ford began stumbling as he climbed the steps to Air Force One and couldn’t even beat an unknown peanut farmer from rural Georgia for the presidency.

Wanniski was tired of the GOP failing to win elections. And, he reasoned, it was happening because the Democrats had been viewed since the New Deal as the Santa Claus party (taking care of people’s needs and the General Welfare), while the GOP, opposing everything from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, was widely seen as the party of Scrooge.

The Democrats, he noted, got to play Santa Claus when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks – both programs of the New Deal – as well as when their "big government" projects like roads, bridges, and highways were built, giving a healthy union paycheck to construction workers and making our country shine.

Democrats kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for things, which didn't seem to have much effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up, in fact), and that added to the perception that the Democrats were a party of Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class.

Americans loved the Democrats back then. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections.

Wanniski decided that the GOP had to become a Santa Claus party, too. But because the Republicans hated the idea of helping working people, they had to figure out a way to convince people that they, too, could have the Santa spirit. But what?

“Tax cuts!” said Wanniski.

To make this work, the Republicans would first have to turn the classical world of economics – which had operated on a simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years – on its head. (Everybody understood that demand – aka “wages” – drove economies because working people spent most of their money in the marketplace, producing demand for factory output and services.)

In 1974 Wanniski invented a new phrase – "supply side economics" – and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn't because people had money and wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money.

The more things there were, he said, the faster the economy would grow. And the more money we gave rich people and their corporations (via tax cuts) the more stuff they’d generously produce for us to think about buying.

At a glance, this move by the Republicans seems irrational, cynical and counterproductive. It certainly defies classic understandings of economics. But if you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense.

To help, Arthur Laffer took that equation a step further with his famous napkin scribble. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would go up! Neither concept made any sense – and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies – but together they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to fully embrace the Two Santa Clauses strategy. He said straight out that if he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, those tax cuts would cause them to take their surplus money and build factories, and that the more stuff there was supplying the economy the faster it would grow.

George Herbert Walker Bush – like most Republicans in 1980 who hadn’t read Wanniski’s piece in The Wall Street Journal – was horrified. Ronald Reagan was suggesting "Voodoo Economics," said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer's tax-cut theories would throw the nation into such deep debt that, he believed, we'd ultimately crash into another Republican Great Depression.

But Wanniski had been doing his homework on how to sell “voodoo” supply-side economics.

In 1976, he rolled out to the hard-right insiders in the Republican Party his "Two Santa Clauses" theory, which would enable the Republicans to take power in America for the next forty years.

Democrats, he said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. From food stamps to new schools to sending a man to the moon, the people loved the “toys” the Democrats brought every year.

Republicans could do that, too, the theory went – spending could actually increase without negative repurcussions. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes!

For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich, which wasn’t to be discussed in public, it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts.

The rich, Reagan, Bush, and Trump told us, would then use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus stimulating the economy and making average working people richer. (And, of course, they’d pass some of that money back to the GOP, like the Kochs giving Paul Ryan $500,000.00 right after he passed the last tax cut that gave them billions.)

There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They'd be forced into the role of Santa-killers by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.

When Reagan rolled out Supply Side Economics in the early 80s, dramatically cutting taxes while exploding spending, there was a moment when it seemed to Wanniski and Laffer that all was lost. The budget deficit exploded and the country fell into a deep recession – the worst since the Great Depression – and Republicans nationwide held their collective breath.

But David Stockman came up with a great new theory about what was going on – they were "starving the beast" of government by running up such huge deficits that Democrats would never, ever in the future be able to talk again about national health care or improving Social Security.

And this so pleased Alan Greenspan, the Fed Chairman, that he opened the spigots of the Fed, dropping interest rates and buying government bonds, producing a nice, healthy goose to the economy.

Greenspan further counseled Reagan to dramatically increase taxes on people earning under $37,800 a year by doubling the Social Security (FICA/payroll) tax, and then let the government borrow those newfound hundreds of billions of dollars off-the-books to make the deficit look better than it was.

Reagan, Greenspan, Winniski, and Laffer took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today. They and George HW Bush ran up more debt in eight years than every president in history, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined.

Surely this would both starve the beast and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks. And that's just how it turned out.

Bill Clinton, who had run on an FDR-like platform of a "New Covenant" with the American people that would strengthen the institutions of the New Deal, strengthen labor, and institute a national health care system, found himself in a box.

A few weeks before his inauguration, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin sat him down and told him the facts of life: he was going to have to raise taxes and cut the size of government. Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous programs, declaring an "end to welfare as we know it" and, in his second inaugural address, an "end to the era of big government."

Clinton was the anti-Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as Republican politicians campaigned on a platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases. State after state turned red, and the Republican Party rose to take over, ultimately, every single lever of power in the federal government, from the Supreme Court to the White House.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton by 1999, Winniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part: "We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the 'Two Santa Claus Theory' in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts..."

Ed Crane, then-president of the Koch-funded Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year: "When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they'd died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. Just cut taxes and grow the economy: government will shrink as a percentage of GDP, even if you don't cut spending. That's why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments."

Two Santa Clauses had gone mainstream. Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when they were in office; and they knew well how to scream hysterically about it as soon as Democrats took power.

George W. Bush embraced the Two Santa Claus Theory with gusto, ramming through huge tax cuts – particularly a cut to the capital gains tax rate on people like himself who made their principle income from sitting around the mailbox waiting for their dividend or capital gains checks to arrive – and blew out federal spending.

Bush, with his wars, even out-spent Reagan, which nobody had ever thought would again be possible. And it all seemed to be going so well, just as it did in the early 1920s when a series of three consecutive Republican presidents cut income taxes on the uber-rich from over 70 percent to under 30 percent.

In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that – like an inexorable law of nature – would have to burst.

But the people who remembered that lesson were mostly all dead by 2005, when Jude Wanniski died and George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush supply-side-created bubble economies in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

"...Jude's charismatic focus on the tax on capital gains redeemed the fiscal policies of four administrations. ... Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize."

In reality, his tax cuts did what they have always done over the past 100 years – they initiated a bubble economy that would let the very rich skim the cream off the top just before the ceiling crashed in on working people. Just like today.

The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, and cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 6 of the non-governmental workforce today.

Over time, and without raising the cap, Social Security will face an easily-solved crisis, and the GOP’s plan is for force Democrats to become the anti-Santa, yet again. If the GOP-controlled Congress continues to refuse to require rich people to pay into Social Security (any income over $128,000 is SS-tax-free), either benefits will be cut or the retirement age will have to be raised to over 70.

The GOP plan is to use this unnecessary, manufactured crisis as an opening to “reform” Social Security - translated: cut and privatize. Thus, forcing Democrats to become the Social Security anti-Santa a different way.

When this happens, Democrats must remember Jude Wanniski, and accept neither the cut to disability payments nor the entree to Social Security “reform.” They must demand the “cap” be raised, as Bernie Sanders proposed and the Democratic Party adopted in its 2016 platform.

And, hopefully, some of our media will begin to call the GOP out on the Two Santa Clauses program. It’s about time that Americans realized the details of the scam that’s been killing wages and enriching billionaires for nearly four decades.
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/two ... y-40-years
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby 82_28 » Mon Feb 12, 2018 8:28 pm

Trump Administration Wants To Decide What Food SNAP Recipients Will Get

The Trump administration is proposing a major shake-up in one of the country's most important "safety net" programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. Under the proposal, most SNAP recipients would lose much of their ability to choose the food they buy with their SNAP benefits.

The proposal is included in the Trump administration budget request for fiscal year 2019. It would require approval from Congress.

Under the proposal, which was announced Monday, low-income Americans who receive at least $90 a month — just over 80 percent of all SNAP recipients — would get about half of their benefits in the form of a "USDA Foods package." The package was described in the budget as consisting of "shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit and vegetables." The boxes would not include fresh fruits or vegetables.

Currently, SNAP beneficiaries get money loaded onto an EBT card they can use to buy what they want as long as it falls under the guidelines. The administration says the move is a "cost-effective approach" with "no loss in food benefits to participants."


. . .continues. . .
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/20 ... s-will-get
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