More than one-quarter of the total homeless population nationwide lives in California, roughly 114,000. The vast majority are “unsheltered” — a more bureaucratic term to describe the thousands living on the streets, under freeways and tucked into grassy fields and parks in cities all around the state.
This is a little late, coming after Christmas and all, but it appeared in the New York Times 12/21/2017. I think it’s the climate that causes this excess of “unsheltered” people.
The latest dodge from Don the Con, in response to a question from reporters as to whether he would submit to an interview with Mr. Mueller is, “I’ll talk to lawyers. We’ll see.” That is a change from six months ago, when he claimed he was “100% willing” to answer questions under oath from a special prosecutor.
It seems that Don should be willing to go through the same procedures that Horny Bill Clinton ( I just made that up ) had to go through during the Whitewater investigation, with a politically extreme special prosecutor, who had already spent years investigating an old land deal that the Clintons were involved in when he was governor of Arkansas.
Just before Bill went on the stand, the special prosecutor got a tip from a lady named Linda who worked in the White House. It seems that Linda, who was a holdover from the Bush administration and was politically highly anti-Democratic, had been having conversations with a girl named Monica who was an intern working for Horny Bill.
Monica had confided in Linda, not knowing that Linda had been on the lookout for dirt that she could use against the Clintons. Apparently Monica had a crush on Horny Bill, and he had cooperated to the extent that he allowed her to give him ten blow jobs (Ten!)
So Monica told Linda all about it, and Linda encouraged her to spill every detail. Most important for Linda’s purposes, she advised Monica not to have a certain blue dress cleaned that had Horny Bill’s semen on it. Thus, the Republicans got their fever dream, an impeachment for lying to the special prosecutor about an activity that was not illegal in that state ( adultery is still illegal in some states ) and not really anyone’s business but Bill and Monica’s ( and of course, Crooked Hillary’s, who coulda-shoulda-woulda dumped Horny Bill on the roadside. )
Most important for our rant today, Horny Bill submitted to many hours of questioning by the politically motivated special prosecutor– personal, oral examination, not written answers to written questions. If Don the Con can’t go through a similar ordeal, and we know he can’t ( because he’s not a lawyer, and is pathologically incapable of telling the truth ) then he can be justifiably impeached and removed as president. If he can’t answer questions under oath, then he’s not fit to be president.
What kind of country would we have if our leader couldn’t answer questions from his own Justice Department? I mean reasonable questions about his conduct of his election campaign, his business activities, who he has borrowed money from, and who he has talked to in the Russian government, not prying questions about his personal love life?
The Republicans have tried to excuse Don the Con’s crudity, his sexual batteries, his lying boasts, his threats and insults, his management “style”, and even his campaign’s contacts with Russian agents. They can’t excuse the fact that he owes many millions of dollars to Russian cut-outs and has profited to the tune of many more millions of dollars by selling properties to other Russian cut-outs.
Don the Con is obviously beholden to Russian government interests, and susceptible to blackmail. The Russians could publicize all the shady deals, the ones we don’t know about yet, deals with Russian citizens who secretly work for the Russian government. But the Russian story is over. Don failed to deliver on their main ask: to end financial sanctions on Russians involved in human rights violations. The Russians don’t care what happens to him now.
The Russians have succeeded in their attempt to sow discord in the United States and weaken us. They have created a major distraction which takes up large amounts of time that we should be using to discuss ways to “make America great.” They have succeeded in encouraging the xenophobic element of our society– that one-third of our people who are ignorant and that think immigrants are bad and people of color are bad– to express themselves openly and offend the other two-thirds, while harassing and oppressing minorities.
We are in a cold war with Russia ( which started a hundred years ago with our government’s reaction to the Russian Revolution ) and we are losing. We must “cowboy up” and punish the elements in our society who are aiding the Russians ( I’m talking about selfish oligarchs here, like Don the Con. ) Our ideals of human individual rights are the standard by which we distinguish ourselves from the Russians and we must protect and extend civil rights ( as well as enhancing individual prosperity ) to win this war.
The US is still by orders of magnitude the biggest military in the world: for example, we have eleven aircraft carriers in service, where China and Italy have two each and Russia has one. However, that is the only thing that the US is best at when Don the Con finishes with his deconstruction of “make America Great.” For starters, we don’t have the highest standard of living, and there are several countries where the average person makes more money, lives better, and dies older than in the US. But why argue about relative standing? Let’s talk about what government is for in the first place.
Shouldn’t the government be making efforts to raise everyone’s standard of living, not just defending our country against the rest of the world?
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: the Preamble to the US Constitution sets out the purposes of government: to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty…”
- “form a more perfect Union”: originally this referred to the fact that this constitution was supposed to supersede the old constitution then in effect, and unite the former colonies more effectively.
- “establish Justice”: this refers to the system of law through which men could mediate disputes and malefactors could be dealt with; this manifests as the Department of Justice.
- “ensure domestic tranquility”: this refers to the National Guard in a general sense; preventing armed insurrection by disaffected locals (particularly over Whiskey Taxes) is probably a good thing.
- “provide for the common defense”: the Defense Department, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard, and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.
- “promote the general welfare”: this is the part of the Constitution that the Republicans want to suppress.
- “secure the blessings of Liberty”: clearly this means the protection of people’s ability to express themselves, the absence of censorship, and (through the Fourteenth Amendment) the equal protection of the law.
Promoting the general welfare can be interpreted in a very broad sense to mean that the extreme wealth inequality that is being produced by capitalism (both here and in China and Russia) is injurious to many people’s health and well-being and that the government needs to do something about it. Reducing wealth inequality can be done very simply, by taxing those at the highest income level and giving support to those at the very lowest income level. This concept is so repellent to Republicans that they willingly support a psychotic con man as their nominal leader in order to push through their ultimate desire not to help those less fortunate than them.
Right now, the total running of the government takes up a historically low 16 percent of the total economic output of the US; normally, in past years the government took 20 percent. This refutes the conservatives’ claim that we are being forced to support a bloated government. The economy can support significant growth of government in the right places.
What are the right places? Well, our military seems to be adequately funded, taking up about twenty percent of the budget, and, as noted, being the most powerful in the world by orders of magnitude. Social Security and Medicare take up almost half of the total budget and don’t need to grow. But assistance for poor people, free school breakfast and lunch, stuff like that– not so much spending right now and could use enhancement. Not much spending on rational regulation and enforcement to prevent abuse of the weak by the strong. No spending on ensuring full employment, that is, seeing to it that everyone has a decent job with a living wage– no spending at all. That’s not right.
We really, really, need to provide broad support to the most needy people to raise their standards of living so they can contribute more to our Social Security fund by being employed at jobs that pay a good wage. We need to organize labor to improve worker’s satisfaction, we need to integrate robots with workers so as not to discard the workers when their jobs are enhanced by automation, we need to make sure that companies treat workers consistently and with respect and not just take their part-time temporary irregular with no benefits labor.
We can’t just assume that capitalism will raise everyone’s standard of living because it won’t. Exploitation is the natural state of affairs with capitalists and is repugnant to human rights. Government must step in to regulate the behavior of capitalists and reduce the spread of inequality; or else violence and rebellion will eventually destroy the system.
I have seen references to a New York Times story that falsely concluded that the FBI had investigated Donald Trump’s campaign’s connections to Russian meddling and supposedly had found no “clear connections.” I couldn’t find the article until I clarified the search terms. It wasn’t coming up on my searches of the New York Times files on their own website. Finally I tried Googling the statement: “FBI investigate Trump Russia no connection” and there it was: a “fake news” story published on October 31, 2016 claiming that the FBI had investigated Trump and found no “clear connection” to Russia. In fact, the FBI was continuing to investigate Trump-Russia based on a tip from an Australian diplomat, reinforced by the Steele dossier. Here is the article.
The first sentence misleadingly implies that the FBI investigation is over and has found nothing: “For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign… Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.” In fact, the investigation was continuing, widening further, and had been initially presented with presumptive evidence of the “conclusive or direct link” which had not been denied nor contradicted by any further leads, merely further confirmed by additional evidence which had to be further evaluated. “none of the investigations so far” merely showed that agents had not had enough time to fully evaluate the evidence they had uncovered. Worse, the FBI may have been stalling because they were afraid of appearing to attempt to influence the election; they assumed that Don the Con would lose and they didn’t want him to accuse them of working against him.
The testimony given to Congress by the head of Fusion, Glenn Simpson, referred to a period just before the election, after Steele had briefed FBI agents on his findings– he felt compelled to tell them because he saw what he thought was clear evidence of a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government, that is, illegal activity. After he advised the FBI and was reimbursed for a flight to Rome to tell them more details, he lost contact with them. That is, they failed to follow up with him on his findings. He began to suspect that the FBI was biased in favor of Trump (and in fact, there is some evidence that the local New York office of the FBI had some Trump advocates in control) and stopped contacting them; he did not update the FBI on his further findings as he continued his digging into Russian sources.
In other words, Steele thought the FBI might have been compromised, in part because of the announcement that they had re-opened the investigation into Clinton’s emails. A week before the election, an article appeared in the New York Times that poured cold water on the suspicion that Don the Con was conspiring with the Russians. This article was essentially fake; while its contents were accurate enough, its lede and headline gave the false impression that there was nothing wrong with the behavior of Trump and his campaign– while nothing could be further from the truth. Serious questions had been raised and no exculpating answers nor alibis were forthcoming. At the same time, the “re-opening” of the Clinton email investigation was pure show, an attempt to prove to Republicans that the FBI was being nonpartisan and thorough.
The re-opened investigation into Clinton’s emails was re-closed shortly before the election, after agents feverishly pored over the copies of emails found on the hard drive of a Democratic sex fiend married to a Clinton adviser and found absolutely nothing new. Embarrassing, but purely window dressing for Republican whataboutists. The pair of stories and headlines gave the desired effect: even Clinton loyalists were dismayed, and the story of Don and the Russians appeared to be over. That lead to a surprising victory for Don, who knew nothing about his team’s laser sighting of voters in swing districts in key states using weaponized data either stolen from Democratic databases or assembled from publicly available records based on such things as recall petitions in Wisconsin.
All this– fake news planted in the New York Times, of all places, for a cherry on top– led to an upset win for the Don. So here we are: up shite creek without a paddle.
(kitten and dog picture courtesy of Pixabay.)
Don the Con’s edict that 200,ooo fugitive Salvadorans must return to El Salvador next year has been denounced for its heartlessness and the effect it would have of the 193,000 US-born children of these “temporary” residents. That much has been pointed out. What has not been emphasized is the negative effect that the forced emigration of a quarter of a million people (counting US-born minors) is an economic disaster, both for them and for the US economy. Don the Con does not seem to comprehend that every adult living in the US contributes to the economy; their employers pass to the federal Treasury a portion of their paychecks earmarked for Social Security in addition to their income taxes and this money goes directly to pay current retirees who themselves paid into the system for years. The younger a worker is, the longer she or he will pay into the system; it matters nothing whether that worker comes from El Salvador or is a Native American.
Thus Don’s policy will directly contribute to diminution of the Gross Domestic Product, as well as motivating push-back among voters with relatives among those to be re-displaced. Don’t bother to tell him though– he is psychotically anti-immigrant and so far to the right wing that he has hit the wall of anti-political correctness.
For a dangerous period of time, the international status of the United States of America will be at risk. Tilting towards autocratic regimes such as Russia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and the like, and destroying trade relationships, Don has alienated the traditional allies of the US. Withdrawing from active participation in Southeast Asia will encourage China to proceed at full speed with its continent-spanning development efforts that will ensnare many weak governments in an economic hegemony– and make it possible to drive an automobile from the west end of Europe to Beijing, following the old Silk Road. If the US fails to participate in development and push back against Chinese censorship of the Internet, China will take over half of the world.
This comes from a New Yorker article by Amy Sorkin:
In reality, the question of whether Trump has the right mind to be President must be seen for what it is: a political question. Voters are the ones asked, ultimately, to make the risk assessment. Those who oppose him, in highlighting his really dangerous volatility, might ask when his supporters will see that he is stupid and unfit—and that they, in contrast, are clever and competent—and just stop this crazy Presidency? The answer, for all practical purposes, is when someone comes up with a candidate who can beat Trump.
This spring, and all the way through the elections in November, we need to work on people to develop the kind of speaking style and charisma they need to beat the Big Con.
(The dog and cat picture comes from Pixabay and is also available in larger pixel sizes. They have “1.2 million free images” and there’s a lot of cats and dogs. An amazingly big free site… What’s the catch? They attach cookies to your browser.)
This is a post in Fortune online that is encouraging: billionaire Tom Steyer has been pushing for new Democratic candidates for federal office with his “NextGen America” program that he actually started in 2013 (time to really gear up, Tom) and he is putting his money where his mouth is. He has already spent millions on TV commercials advocating impeachment and collected 4 million signatures on a petition for same. He says he is totally focused on November 6, 2018 as must-win situation. He also says he has no plans to personally run for office (good thinking, Tom! Billionaires are people too but they don’t have a good record as President so far.)
Read the details in the post in Fortune. And be happy. Please. Look, a clown.
This comment was posted to a Charles Blow opinion piece in the New York Times:
Beartooth
Jacksonville, Fl 4 hours ago
The Democratic leadership ever since Bill Clinton was first elected was built up of neo-liberal “Rockefeller Republicans.” They were the first to seek their major financial support from corporations, banks, &billionaires – which required them to throw the working people & trade unions, the traditional base, under the bus. Any significant support of unionism or working people’s lives would shut off the corporate piggybank in a flash.
Now, the Pelosis, Shumers, Reids, Hoyers, & other members of the Democratic Leadership Council have so perverted traditional FDR/HST/JFK/LBJ liberalism that they should really change the party name to the Republicrats. A new broom is needed for a clean sweep of the elitist establishment. The only good sign on the horizon is the staggering number of new young first-time candidates, many women, workers, & minorities have filed as candidates for 2018. The previous record was the Republicans with their Tea Party victory in 2010, with 72 new filings. The Dems now are way above the 700 mark & that number will continue to grow over 2018 as a new generation of non-elite, non-cynical, idealistic younger people strive to throw out the corrupt, elitist neo-liberals who currently control the party in Congress & the DNC & rebuild a true peoples’ party.
Who could lead the people out of this neoconservative nightmare that the Republicans are trying to build? An amazing number of new candidates have filed– maybe there will be one who is charismatic enough. She will have to be non-elite, non-cynical, non-corrupt, and a great orator. She will have to be bulletproof to stand Don the Con’s insults and calumnies. Preferably, she will be female– a woman. Preferably, she will be black, Latino, or both. I am hoping that she will reveal herself during the campaigns for this November. Without her, we will be in for a long, bloody multi-front war between Tea Party dead-enders, Nazis, Klansmen, capitalists, left-wing Democrats, socialists, and communists.
This comes from New York magazine on January 4, by Eric Levitz; this is the final paragraph of an essay about Don’s senility and narcissistic personality disorder:
And yet, progressives’ fixation on the 25th Amendment is far less deluded than the rationalizations that keep Republicans from invoking it. By all accounts, most GOP Congress members recognize that Donald Trump is a pathological narcissist with early stage dementia and only peripheral contact with reality — and they have, nonetheless, decided to let him retain unilateral command of the largest nuclear arsenal on planet Earth because it would be politically and personally inconvenient to remove his finger from the button.
You don’t need a degree in psychiatry to call that crazy.
It’s just as well that the 25th Amendment isn’t invoked, because impeachment of Don the Con without concomitant impeachment of Moral Mike would leave us in a situation possibly as bad, or worse– considering Moral Mike might be more competent at oppressing the people and cracking down on irreligious behavior like eating with women other than one’s wife.
A month ago, I began to discuss the terms democracy, socialism, capitalism, oligarchy, and so on (using definitions from Wikipedia) and I touched on forces distorting democracy. In the US, oligarchy has grossly distorted and degraded democracy. A fundamentally incompetent, mentally unfit candidate with a persuasive speaking style and personal charisma has been elected President, with the help of the oligarchic Russian government.
With the publication of Michael Wolff’s new book on the White House and its current occupant, a few former supporters have begun to change their views of 45th president. There are several things about which they have been in denial:
First, there is the outside interference of another country in our election– interference which was openly welcomed by the candidate, who stated in a speech that he wished the Russians would locate and publish “33,000 missing Hillary emails.” There is good evidence already, with more to come, that the candidate’s campaign and possibly the candidate himself conspired with the Russian government in a successful plot to rig the election.
Second, there is the manifest incompetency of the leader, which has become more and more apparent to his closest associates. Such details as the statement that the leader neither reads anything he is presented with nor listens to anyone who tries to give him advice have been laid out in the new book. In response, the leader has seen fit to assert that he is “stable” and “a genius”– both manifestly false, consistent with everything else that comes out of his mouth.
Third, there is the blatant racism, nativism, and sexism displayed by the leader on a daily basis.
Wolff’s book describes the progressive disillusionment of the entire staff of the White House over their leader’s incompetence, infantile behavior, tantrums, and refusal to take sane advice.
One adviser who attempted to explain the Constitution to the leader was met with rolling eyes and complete loss of interest or comprehension by the time he reached the Fourth Amendment. The adviser must not have gotten to the Amendment dealing with methods of succession if the President should be compromised.
According to the book, Steve Bannon made it clear, shortly before he was fired, that our leader would not end well. He enunciated three possibilities: first, “due to Democratic incompetence”, the President might last into 2020. Second, with the support of Republicans in the House, the leader could be impeached (although chances of this happening before January 2019, when a Democratic majority may untie the hands of the House, are not high.) Third, the Cabinet and Senate could invoke Article 25, which allows them (if united) to remove the President immediately for inability to effectively exercise the responsibilities of his office.
As I noted before, in December a dozen Congress-people were secretly and extensively briefed by a psychiatric expert in the evaluation of “dangerousness”– that is, the chances that a patient could cause harm to come to others through his derangement. This, of course, relates to the leader’s possession of the nuclear “button”, among other things.
A clear deficiency of our form of government is the fixed times at which Presidential elections are held; in most other countries with Parliamentary governments, elections can be held at any time, particularly when the government in power has lost the confidence of the people or of a strong coalition in Parliament.
The most “conservative” members of Congress and the Republican Party as a whole have continued to fiercely back the President and to attack FBI special investigator Mueller without mercy. Two Senators have gone so far as to attempt to have the author of the infamous “Steele dossier”, retired master spy Michael Steele, indicted for supposedly lying to the FBI about his contacts with the news media.
The Steele dossier, a brilliant piece of opposition research funded at first by Republicans and then after their convention by supporters of Hillary Clinton, reported damning facts which have (despite the lies of their detractors) been largely corroborated. Taken together, they show a web of business connections with Moscow which have enmeshed the current President for many years, even as far back as 1986. Many of these connections appear to be money laundering– that is, the export of ill-gotten gains from one country (Russia) to another (the US.) For example, Russians have made enormous investments in real estate in the US and other countries through the leader’s companies that appear to be designed to lose money.
One such occurrence was the sale of an estate in Florida to a Russian billionaire (estimated net worth $12.8 bn), Dmitry Rybolovlev, in 2008– “for investment purposes” (not as a personal dwelling). The price was $95 million, the highest price ever paid to that time in the US, and an advance over the price the current President paid in 2004 (the estate was bought in a bankruptcy filing for $41.35 million.) (The property had been on the market for two years with no takers, and the original asking price was $125 million; after the sale, the house was demolished and the lot broken in three, with one piece already sold for $34 million.) In four years, the leader’s real estate company made a profit of over 100%, realized at a time when real estate values were collapsing due to a severe recession then beginning. These circumstances smell of money laundering.
Ryobolovlev has denied ever meeting the leader, but his airplane curiously appeared, touching down at the time and place of five of the candidate’s rallies during 2016.
Purely by coincidence, he who must not be named stepped up his talk about Russia’s positives in his speeches and tweets in 2008, although he had already been laudatory. Since then, the leader has never made a statement criticizing Russia or its leaders.
Then there is the $268 million (so far) in financing that Jared Kushner, the leader’s son in law, has received from Deutsche Bank (who may have been backed by other foreign entities; Mueller is studying this issue now) to help him keep the old New York Times building– when no bank in the US would lend him money
Thus, we have, in a nominal democracy, the selection of a Supreme Leader who is manifestly incompetent, panders to the worst racism and nativism in his followers, is unable to govern his White House– and is financially beholden to the Russian oligarchic government.
The influence of large donations from rich backers was shown in, for example, the support that Richard Mercer supplied after the Republican Convention. It was estimated that at least $50 million would be needed to run a competitive final campaign for the Presidential election, but the candidate himself refused to contribute any of this money.
At that time, Richard Mercer stepped forward to offer the money; the candidate was persuaded to provide a $10 million loan to bridge the organization until Mercer’s support was guaranteed.
Apparently, the candidate himself refused to fund his own campaign despite his public promises to avoid being beholden to rich donors by self-funding. There are two possible reasons for this refusal: he was certain he would lose the election and he didn’t want to throw away the money, and he may not have been able to afford it (despite his claim to be worth billions.)
Members of the new President’s campaign include Secretary of Education and reputed philanthropist Betsy de Vos, whose primary qualification (other than her political views) is that she is the daughter of wealthy industrialist Edgar Prince, daughter in law of the founder of Amway, the brother of the founder of the security service Blackwater, and reputed to be worth $5.8 bn.
Oddly, despite de Vos’ reputation as a philanthropist, her total outlays over the last twenty years amounted to less than $3 million– $1.7 million of which went to identified Republican causes, mostly campaign committees. She personally did not donate any money to the candidate’s campaign and was publicly cool to his candidacy.
It is possible that the candidate nominated de Vos because of a positive statement she made in September 2016, after he released a plan to redirect $20 billion to a grant program for school vouchers that would support private, religious, and charter schools– apparently her sole advocacy position at the time. She said, according to Rebecca Savransky of The Hill on 11/23/16 , “We applaud the Trump campaign’s focus on school choice and laying out common-sense proposals to help all children access a quality education.” This is consistent with the candidate’s usual behavior, in which he cleaves to rich people who have made public statements specifically supporting him.
This is what happens when rich people run for public office or try to influence public policy: they usually get what they want because it is legal and easy to provide money to organizations which, and politicians who, advocate and carry out their public policy desires. However, they do not necessarily show any compassion, intelligence or political experience in implementing their wishes.
The bottom line is that our democrat process has been overtaken by rich people, who use their money to buy propaganda and votes. Once they are inducted into office, they put in place policies that enhance their fortunes and those of others in the same position. A prime example of this is the new tax bill, from which the President himself is bound to benefit, possibly by as much as $15 million a year.
The tax bill, as passed, is likely to drastically increase the deficit, which will activate a contingency plan already in place that reduces Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending. This result would be impossible otherwise, even if it was proposed in Congress, as it is politically extremely unpopular except among extreme small-government conservatives.
The suffering this would cause is suggested by the following quote from an article by Christy Bieber in yesterday’s Motley Fool: “For 50% of married couples and 71% of singles, Social Security provides at least 50% of retirement income, according to the Social Security Administration.”
This means that disaster looms for our most basic public welfare programs, the ones the Republicans really hate. Fighting this result will be extremely difficult as it is built into current law, just like the awful sequester that has already literally decimated (cut by 10%) the federal government. Yet we must resist.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 