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Trump is Eyeing Iran Hawk Brian Hook as First Foreign Policy Pick
"The Iranian view is that Trump wants to make a deal, but it depends on whether he appoints the same neoconservatives as last time"

Brian Hook, a hawkish fixture of the first Donald Trump administration who formerly served under George W. Bush, is reportedly getting the call to start staffing the State Department for a new Trump term. Hook, known as a major Iran hawk who helped lead the “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions, sabotage, and assassinations that characterized Trump’s approach to Tehran, has been appointed to help oversee the formation of a new foreign policy team, according to reports from Politico and CNN.

Hook served as U.S. Special Representative for Iran and advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the last two years of Trump’s presidency, which saw the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and expansion of crushing sanctions intended to spur regime change in Iran. That approach ultimately failed to collapse the Iranian government, or compel it to reduce its support for its network of armed proxies in the region. Instead, it wound up escalating the hostility between the two countries while Iran ramped up its nuclear enrichment following Trump’s withdrawal from the Obama-era nuclear deal.
Hook has also had a longstanding hawkish view of Russia that may place him at odds with Trump, who has promised a speedy negotiated conclusion to the war in Ukraine. Since leaving the Trump administration, Hook has worked as vice-chairman for a New York private equity firm focused on international investments.

Hook’s views on Iran may wind up influencing Trump’s approach to the country. While both Trump and vice president-elect J.D. Vance have said that war with Iran is not in America’s interest, Hook has pushed forward policies throughout his time in office that increase the likelihood of such an outcome. His appointment may also set up a clash between neoconservatives and the restraint-focused wing of the Republican Party.

EU has wish list for Trump, but support for his tough China agenda will be expected
In Brussels, there is an expectation that the US election result could usher in a shifting balance of power in Europe.
The European Union is planning for talks with Donald Trump’s transition team as it seeks to head off a major economic and political shock after his convincing victory in Tuesday’s US presidential election.

High on their wish list will be keeping the tap open for US funds to flow to Ukraine and avoiding scything tariffs on European goods. Brussels has already been told what Trump would expect in return: EU backing for his tough agenda on China.

The China demand was made clear during preliminary talks with Republican interlocutors ahead of the election, according to people familiar with the talks, although it is likely to be just one item on a laundry list from a man who showed disdain for EU institutions during his first stint in the White House.

For more than a year, the European Commission has been working to “Trump-proof” the bloc, which has sore memories of his last term in office, during which he initiated a trade dispute and repeatedly threatened to revoke the American security blanket Europe enjoys.

Baskets of carrots and sticks have been prepared, including offers to buy more US energy goods to reduce the gaping trade deficit – and targeted retaliatory tariffs of more than 50 per cent if those offers fail.

Funny that Musk gets in the photo but Vance is nowhere to be seen.

Policy Note 2024 | November 2024
Trump Wins While Americans Vote for Progressive Policies

by Pavlina R. Tcherneva

On November 5, 2024, American voters sent Donald Trump back to the White House. In 2020, he lost his bid for reelection to Joe Biden, after winning in 2016 against Hillary Clinton (but only thanks to the electoral college). This time, however, Trump won the popular vote. All the new energy that surrounded the Harris-Walz campaign was outmatched by the turnout from Trump supporters.

All polls—whatever one’s feelings about their reliability—kept pointing to the same defining issue in this (as in every other) election: the economy. Critical issues of democracy, abortion, and immigration filled the airwaves and political speeches, but the economy remained once again more powerful than any one of them.

Economists uniformly failed to grasp what these “concerns with the economy” were all about. They kept celebrating the decline in inflation and kept pointing to the fastest recovery in postwar history. The labor market—almost everyone declared—was now at full employment (a few of us strongly disagreed). Real wages, especially at the bottom, had finally risen for the first time in many decades. Fiscal policy had returned, juicing up economic growth with mega-contracts to firms and generous credits for renewable energy: all developments we hadn’t seen in decades.

This was an economy that most economists hadn’t seen in their professional lives. For 50 years, wages had been stagnating, jobless recoveries were the norm, labor force participation rates were falling. This time was different: the fastest recovery from any postwar recession, growth rates America hadn’t experienced in decades, prime-age employment at its historical peak, record peacetime government spending, and wage increases at the bottom of the income distribution. This time the recovery felt different. But despite the post-COVID splurge to salvage and repaint the old American economic engine, for many families it was the same old clunker under the hood.

And this is exactly what the various ballot measures on election night seemed to tell us. When presented with questions about the economy and their standard of living, voters expressed their displeasure with how things were going and they voted in support of pro-worker measures—especially in red states.

Here are some of the ways in which state ballot measures played out.

Paid Sick Leave
Three states had introduced measures requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to workers (Alaska, Missouri, Nebraska). In all three states, these measures passed. All three states voted for Trump.

The United States is the only advanced country without a federally mandated paid leave policy.

Minimum Wages
When it came to wages, Alaska and Missouri passed measures to increase their minimum wage to $15/hour (in 2027 and 2026, respectively) and adjust them with the cost-of-living thereafter (a similar measure had already passed in Nebraska in 2022). A fourth state (Arizona) rejected a proposed measure to reduce wages of tipped workers.1 Arizona, too, voted for Trump.

In California, a minimum wage ballot measure (Prop 32), which would have raised the minimum wage to $18/hour, was rejected. It is unclear why, but CA voters had already passed a law in 2023 to raise the minimum wage to $16/hour in 2024.2 Massachusetts had proposed an unusual and generous increase in the wages of tipped workers (to reach 100 percent of the MA minimum wage by 2029—while continuing to earn tips), but that ballot measure was also rejected. While none of the existing or proposed minimum wages are living wages, it seems some red states are catching up to increases that have been happening in blue states.

Infrastructure, Climate, Health
In California,3 two infrastructure investment measures passed. Prop 2 authorizes a bond issue to go forward for public school and community college facilities, while Prop 4 is another bond issue for the support of water infrastructure, wildfire protection, and addressing climate risks.
CA also passed a measure regulating how federal money from drug reduction programs would be spent (Prop 34). Voters wanted 98 percent of such funds to go directly to patient care.

Housing and Prison Labor
What CA voters also wanted is to retain oversight over such bond issues, and therefore they defeated Prop 5, which reduced the votes needed to approve bond issues for housing and other public infrastructure from the current two-thirds majority to 55 percent. CA also rejected a measure to expand rent control (Prop 33) and a measure (Prop 6) that would have banned forced servitude (i.e., using prison labor as punishment). Prop 6 would have made prison labor voluntary and would have prioritized rehabilitation.

School Choice
Three states introduced a measure to amend the state constitutions and allow state money to go to private schools. In all three states, the measure failed (KY, CO, NE). Considering that school choice is a signature Republican policy, it is notable that two out of the three states that defeated this measure voted for Trump.

Reproductive Rights
Repealing Roe v. Wade was bad politics. Voters overwhelmingly supported measures to protect reproductive rights and the right to an abortion. Such measures passed in six states (AZ, CO, MD, MO, MT, NV). In some states, the right to an abortion is now a state constitutional right (CO, NV). Other state laws protected that right up to the point of fetal viability (AZ). New York passed a measure (Prop 1), which adds an anti-discrimination provision to the state’s constitution. NY reproductive rights activists argue that the right to an abortion is now subsumed under a wide range of other protections against unequal treatment.

Nebraska had two ballot measures. In the first one, NE voters rejected establishing the right to an abortion until fetal viability, while in the second ballot measure, they voted to enshrine in the constitution the current law prohibiting abortions after the first trimester, unless it is required due to medical emergencies, sexual assault, or incest. In South Dakota and Florida, the proposed constitutional right to an abortion also failed.

Right to Vote
Anti-immigrant rhetoric dominated this election cycle, leading to uniform support for “citizenship requirement to vote” measures wherever they were introduced (IA, ID, KY, MO, NC, OK, SC, WI). In Nevada, voters approved a proposal to amend the state constitution to require voter identification for in-person and by-mail voting. To become law, this measure will need to be approved a second time during the 2026 election.

Economic Signals
While the sample of ballot measures that dealt with economic issues in this election cycle is small, it still makes clear where the electorate’s anxieties lie. Red states voted to protect workers, supporting minimum wage increases and mandated paid sick leave. Voters in CA and MA didn’t go for another round of measures, perhaps because they had supported similar increases in recent history. Still, CA voters supported measures to strengthen healthcare, schools, and public infrastructure.

For those who remember the politics of school vouchers from the Betsy DeVos area, it is notable that red states rejected using public funds for private school vouchers.

While Democrats rightfully singled out abortion and democracy as core issues in this election, and zeroed in on housing affordability and childcare support, they said very little about uniformly popular policies like raising the minimum wage and mandating paid family leave.

We should note that none of the minimum wage increases (in blue or red states) will deliver the living incomes that Americans are calling for. The MIT living wage calculator4 is a quick check for how much one must earn to make ends meet. There is no corner of the country where minimum wages come close. Still, these ballot measures are saying that working families can’t keep up.

When people say that inflation is their top concern, they are also saying that their jobs and paychecks aren’t allowing them to stay afloat. They are telling us that they need a break; they want paid leave, they want government funding to directly support their immediate needs: patient care, public schools, clean water. They don’t want the public’s money to go to already-thriving private schools.

Left Behind
The US saw the fastest recovery in postwar history and an unprecedented level of government spending, but for working families the economy has pretty much returned to its pre-COVID status quo. And that wasn’t pretty. But for a brief moment during the COVID crisis, Americans realized what was possible: they got universal healthcare, no questions asked. They could get student loan relief and a break from other debt and rent payment. Parents received a universal child allowance. All of it was possible and all of it disappeared. Still, Americans wanted and needed more.

Today we know that the job market is softening even as the unemployment level remains around its pre-COVID lows. Part-time-employment for economic reasons has been on the rise. Job-related anxieties have been clear in sentiment surveys for a while,5 but the problems are deeper and structural. American families’ standard of living has been slipping for a long time: housing, education, and healthcare have been consistently out of reach. The high grocery bill that American families get to see every day has only added insult to injury, even as official measures of inflation have fallen.

Failure
In 2008, the Queen of the United Kingdom asked how professional economists could fail to foresee the 2008 crisis. Well, not everyone failed—for one, we at the Levy Institute saw it—but the mainstream establishment didn’t. Today, we can say that most economists uniformly failed again. They failed in the US, in Europe, and everywhere authoritarianism is on the rise; failed to understand that patching up the economy after each crisis is not enough.

Economists fed this complacency with talk about a booming economy and “full employment” (which it was not), celebrating the increase in real wages at the bottom of the distribution, without sounding the alarm that it is not enough to keep up. They urged us to celebrate this once-in-a lifetime postwar growth, glossing over the clear sense among the electorate that the economy is profoundly broken and folks are fed up with the status quo.

Growth is not enough. This much should have been obvious long ago. Structural economic issues and insecurity still shape voters’ lives and continue to shape every dimension of politics. For those of us reading the economic tea leaves pointing to economic insecurity, the ballot measures corroborated the anxieties voters feel about their standard of living.

As one friend put it to me:

We are two parents with three Master’s degrees between us and three kids. I make $15-23/hour teaching and have a second job. My husband has a full-time job with benefits but he just survived a first round of layoffs and we don’t know what’s next. Groceries are not affordable, childcare is not affordable, our property taxes continue to rise but we can’t even afford basic house maintenance. Our car repairs put us over the edge, while our kids are growing and their financial needs are expanding. Sending them to college is extremely expensive and our own student loans are impossible to pay. Health insurance has been a help but each year we pay more and more out-of-pocket expenses uncovered by Obamacare. Most jobs require advanced degrees but pay miserable wages. The list goes on and on. We live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford entertainment or “wants” like we used to.

That’s it. That’s the story of downward mobility for a middle-class American working family, with a clear punch list for policy makers. The same punch list we’ve known about for decades.


Notes

1. The Arizona measure (Prop 138) was particularly convoluted but it would have made it more difficult for tipped worker wages to keep up with increases in the state minimum wage. Currently, employers can only pay $3 below the state minimum wage: a gap that will be shrinking as a percentage of the minimum wage as the latter increases. The new proposal would have fixed that gap at 25 percent less than the state minimum wage.
2. https://www.dir.ca.gov/DIRNews/2023/2023-66.html
3. https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/index.htm
4. https://livingwage.mit.edu/
5. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/29/us-work ... finds.html

DrEvil » Fri Nov 08, 2024 2:15 am wrote:

Funny that Musk gets in the photo but Vance is nowhere to be seen.

Musk paid for his spot. Also, he fucks and Vance doesn't (unless you count furniture). Money and sex, that's like catnip to Trump.

Jeb Bush
@JebBush
Susie Wiles is a great choice for President Trump’s Chief of Staff

Michael Tracey
@mtracey

Susie Wiles, Trump's top campaign adviser and new chief of staff, was the Duval County, Florida co-chair for John McCain's 2008 campaign, and co-chair of Mitt Romney's 2012 Florida campaign. So her elevation clearly signals a dramatic ideological shift in the Republican Party

Trump campaign quietly distances itself from RFK Jr after new vaccine safety comments

Donald Trump’s team appeared to be quietly distancing itself from Robert F Kennedy Jr in the immediate aftermath of the election amid speculation that the former presidential candidate could be handed control of US public health agencies.

Advisers to the president-elect questioned whether Mr Kennedy, a vaccine sceptic who has also been the subject of a series of bizarre stories involving animals, would make it through a security check for a cabinet position.

It raises questions about what role, if any, Mr Kennedy would be given in the Trump administration, as the Republican’s transition team sets about filling thousands of federal posts for his return to the White House.

Mr Kennedy had previously said that Mr Trump had “promised” him control of the Department of Health and Human Services and public health agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

However, there is disquiet in the Trump team about media attention on the former independent candidate after he was pressed in a post-election interview with NBC about his vaccine scepticism.
***
Mr Kennedy said that he would seek to fix the “huge deficits” in vaccine safety but clarified: “We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.”

According to CNN, a source close to Mr Trump said: “That is not what we want people focused on today.”

Mr Kennedy, son of the late attorney general Bobby Kennedy and nephew of president John F Kennedy, has also said he plans to remove fluoride from drinking water.

The claim prompted criticism from public health experts, who argued it would undo one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century.

Mr Trump’s camp is now questioning whether Mr Kennedy could get confirmed for a cabinet-level position by the Senate, obtain security clearance, or even want to go through those processes.

“If you dump a bear in Central Park and think you’re above the law, you don’t want to have to go through that gauntlet of political correctness,” a former Trump official told CNN.

Elon Musk, who was praised as a “new star” and “amazing guy” by Mr Trump on Tuesday, is expected to be handed a key administration role.

The president-elect has previously said he plans to install the Tesla billionaire, who has called for the federal budget to be slashed by $2 trillion, as the head of a new government efficiency commission

Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
I wouldn't want to tamper people's enthusiasm around this but Trump literally chose Pompeo's former senior policy advisor Brian Hook to run the State Department's transition team...

And it looks likely he'll name Bill Hagerty as Secretary of State, a senator who list 2 of his main issues on his website as being "standing up to communist China" and "standing with Israel" (https://teamhagerty.com/the-issues/).

So it doesn't look even remotely likely that we're looking at a radical shift in US foreign policy. The most contentious figureheads might be cast aside for aesthetic purposes but the broad policy direction remains.

Just Foreign Policy
@justfp
·
Nov 8
Trump adviser Hook advocates expanding unauthorized US war in Mideast

After Biden launched many rounds of unauthorized strikes in Syria, Iraq, & Yemen, Brian Hook told
@SenateForeign
in Feb. 2024 that Biden has a "deep aversion" to military action
"This imbalance is untenable"

Brian Berletic
@BrianJBerletic
Restocking the Swamp, Again...

President-elect Donald Trump appoints anti-China war hawk Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence.

Grenell also heads the Sinophobic "Protecting America Initiative" which encourages Americans to believe China is taking over all aspects of US life, crafting some of the most enduring lies propping up Washington's efforts to turn Americans hostile toward China.

As made clear by Trump's first 4 years in office, he told voters what they wanted to hear about ending wars while surrounded by those determined to expand them all.

No - this doesn't mean Harris was an alternative. The point is when it comes to voting for the uniparty - THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.

Concerns over Grenell’s susceptibility to foreign influence are particularly troubling given his especially close relationship with Israel, despite nominally having served as U.S. ambassador to Germany, a position which ostensibly would require close ties to Germany (which Grenell lacks) as opposed to Israel. Soon after Grenell became ambassador to Germany, he requested Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to meet him at the Berlin airport. After that meeting, Netanyahu told reporters that Grenell is a “big fan of Israel.” Grenell himself has stated that he views his support for Israeli “peace” (i.e. security) policy as a “biblical mandate” and has visited the country “more times than he can count.”

Trump’s ambassador to Germany and newly-appointed Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell said that being gay made him a better Christian.

“I was made this way. I was born gay. So the fact of the matter is I fully embrace that I was made this way in the image of God and you can be gay and be a Christian. And there’s no problem with it,” he said in an interview.

He added: “When I had cancer and I was really kind of down in terms of my physical outlook, I felt like I prayed more and I was closer to God because I was in need.

“I feel guilty about that as I go through life and, of course, the ups and downs of life, when things are going well you don’t pray as much.

“I think I get so much challenge that you can’t be gay and be a Christian that it makes me a better Christian.

“I am an imperfect follower of Christ. I fail every single day. But for me what’s the beauty of this is that the Bible talks about having new mercies every morning and grace every morning.”

Grenell was a U.S. State Department spokesperson to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration. Following his State Department tenure, he formed Capitol Media Partners, a political consultancy; he also was a Fox News contributor. Grenell was a foreign policy spokesperson for Mitt Romney during his 2012 presidential campaign.

Brian Berletic
@BrianJBerletic

Trump Considers Career Meddler/War Hawk as UN Ambassador

Stafanik is listed as an expert on the US government's National Endowment for Democracy (NED) website, the primary agency involved in political interference and regime change worldwide, including in Ukraine in 2014 precipitating the current conflict today.

Stefanik is a committed anti-China, pro-Israeli war hawk eagerly repeating baseless nonpartisan propaganda about America's "adversaries" abroad.

She has supported US legislation aimed at ramping up tensions with China alongside other war hawks orbiting the incoming Trump administration including Tom Cotton.

Pepsi or Coke, not drinking is not an option...

Michael Tracey
@mtracey
Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick for Defense Secretary, criticized the Biden Administration for not arming Ukraine quickly enough, and called Putin a "war criminal" trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union. "Ceasefires? You know what ceasefires are for him? An opportunity to reload"

Dogecoin spikes after Trump announces a Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE

Benny Johnson

@bennyjohnson
Trump’s next AG Matt Gaetz revealed shocking theory Epstein may have been assassinated in a "state-to-state" operation executed by a foreign state in concert with Feds:

"It was a foreign operation. Government-sponsored."

"There's no way you're getting the real story."

Whitney Webb
@_whitneywebb

Gaetz is also about to marry the sister of Peter thiel protege Palmer Luckey, who is building the surveillance system on the US-mexico border as well as DoD's Project Maven and AI weapons
***
GUMBY
@gumby4christ

Ha! And they got engaged at Mar-a-Lago. Quite a scene down there.