Before we begin, some definitions of terms: a government is an entity with a legitimate monopoly on the use of force. A company is a semi-voluntary association of individual people that is designed to make money, and under capitalist theory, compete with other companies for dominance of the market. The use of force by a company is illegitimate (this assertion may be contested by some reactionaries.)
Modern history has seen the rise of the international conglomeration, an extension of the original company, to the extent that such entities rival the power of national governments. The federal government of the US has been fighting a losing battle against such “cartels” since many of them survived World War Two, partly by supplying armaments to both sides. This behavior would be treason under the limited US definition of the term, but the companies have gotten away with it because of corrupt deals made at the highest levels of government. Government has sown the seeds of its own destruction.
The United States federal government, the most powerful national government in the world since 1945, is under threat. (The federal government is also known to people like Steve Bannon as “the deep state.” The secret desire of every modern Republican is to “shrink it until you can drown it in a bathtub.” Lincoln is spinning in his grave.)
Here is the predicted sequence of events: national disgust will gradually continue to build as the full extent of the conspiracy between Don the Con and Vlad “the Impaler” becomes widely known. In November 2018, the by-elections will turn ferociously Democratic, even in such states as Alabama. Movements such as that in Florida, to amend the constitution to re-enfranchise people of color convicted of minor felonies who have served their paroles, will tilt the electorate towards a more accurate representation of the complexion of our country.
If (and that’s a big if) the by-election returns a majority of Democratic members to Congress, in January 2019, Don the Con will be impeached. Conviction is almost assured (see below on the public details of his conspiratorial acts) in the Senate because of the enormity of his deed.
This means that Don the Con will serve out most of his Presidential term in office. However, if Moral Mike Pence can be toppled at the same time (for his complicity with Mike the Spike Flynn) then, with a majority in the lower House of Congress, the Democratic Speaker of the House will become President. Let’s go out on a limb and predict that will happen sometime early in 2020. That means that the next Presidential election will be held on a background of fierce Republican resistance, which will appall voters and assure an Electoral College majority for the Democratic Presidential candidate and possibly majorities in both Houses of Congress.
Here’s another prediction, and an easy one: with the retirement of Orrin Hatch, Mitt Romney will become a Senator from Utah. Romney is, at least, an ally of the deep state, so this is a positive development despite Mitt the Mutt’s treatment of his dog (the incident in which the dog travelled on the roof of Mitt the Mutt’s car for hundreds of highway miles has been attested to by witnesses and confirmed by Mike’s statement (and I quote, out of context!) “… my dog loves fresh air.”)
New York magazine has published an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s new book about Don the Con and his “administration” and it seems that most people in Don’s campaign thought he was going to lose the election and didn’t think he should be President anyway. His wife was in tears when she learned of Don’s projected victory on election night, and the two were fighting on Inauguration Day. Read all about it here: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html
This comment appeared on a New York Times article about the pre-election investigation of Trump’s campaign by the FBI, an investigation that was kept secret for fear of influencing the election:
John M
Portland ME 1 hour ago
The chilling bottom line here is that the 2016 presidential election was a tainted fraud. If this election had been a jury trial, based on all of the new information that has come out, a mistrial would have been declared by now and the verdict would have been thrown out by the judge.
As the article notes, critical, disqualifying information about Donald Trump and his campaign’s illegal contacts with Russia was deliberately withheld from the American people by the FBI and CIA. As voters, we were not given all the relevant information we needed to make an informed decision.
While we were provided every scintilla of negative information about Hillary Clinton, large chunks of critical information about Trump were covered up or withheld. We didn’t even get to see his tax returns!
The quadrennial presidential election is the crown jewel of American democracy. Every action and every decision of every person and agency in government should defer to the sacredness of the American voter in exercising his or her right to vote and being provided with all relevant information.
If we can’t preserve the integrity of our national elections, everything else about our democracy is hollow and meaningless. The tragic story of the 2016 election is that the institutions that should have been protecting our democracy, such as the FBI and the news media, chose to put their own institutional needs ahead of those of the voting public.
Some democracy!
From an opinion piece in the Guardian, a liberal website and newspaper based in the United Kingdom:
So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.
We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.
Neoliberalism appears to be a repudiation of much of traditional liberalism and an excuse for a beggar-thy-neighbor attitude.
This web site points out that, during Obama’s presidency, the unemployment rate went from 10 percent to below 5 percent; the stock market went up 250 per cent. Of course, since January 20, the stock market has continued to rise. The point, however, is that the economy did well during Obama’s reign, starting from a serious recession (the worst in nearly a hundred years) to a consistently and significantly rising market.
At the same time, the yearly deficit in federal receipts went down dramatically, from a trillion a year to 400 billion. That is as it should be; according to simple Keynesian principles, government should run at a significant deficit during bad times and at a surplus during good times. Unfortunately, the Republican tax cut bill makes a $1.5 trillion plus hole in that principle, returning us to severe deficits at a time when we should be raking in surpluses to stock up for the next recession. It is George W. Bush’s tax cut all over again– creating a huge deficit at a time when the economy was rising, which caused severe discomfort when the economy tanked in 2008. Why do the Republicans hate economics?
OK, so maybe you didn’t know either. But I knew… and Nikki Haley should have known. She is, after all, the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations. The report, if it is to be believed, is that two Russian pranksters managed to connect with Nikki Haley on the phone and talked with her for twenty minutes without her realizing that they were playing a practical joke on her. The highlight, or lowlight, of the conversation was when the pranksters, pretending to be the Polish Premier, brought up the the fictional country Binomo. They asserted that Binomo, “near Vietnam”, had declared its independence and had elections, in which the Russians had interfered. Nikki claimed to know this made-up country and agreed with the assessment that Russia had interfered.
In looking up this absurd story, I found that it was carried on RT (formerly Russia Today) and a number of off-center web sites, and was backed up by a YouTube video from the imposters themselves. Among the sites that carried the story: Raw Story, Newswire, Sputnik, and Pravda (I didn’t know that Pravda still existed.) Conspicuously absent: CNN, ABC, CBS, etc., etc. No major US sites have picked up this story over the last several days, despite the audio recording of her voice assenting to the existence of Binomo.
David
California 9 minutes ago
Long term bond yields on Treasuries are around 2.5%.
That doesn’t seem consistent with the prospect of long term
real growth of 4%.
If we are going to grow at a 4% rate, somebody needs to inform the bond market.
either that 4% growth rate number is bogus or long bonds are way overpriced.
Long-term Treasury bonds are sold at rates that “float”, meaning yields represent savvy investors’ estimates of what real growth will be over the next 5-10 years… i.e. no better than growth over the last ten years.
This quote is from a New York Times article about Don the Con’s attempts to prevent anyone from another country (darker than him) even visiting the United States:
Those who know Mr. Trump say that his attitude toward immigrants long predates his entry into politics.
“He’s always been fearful where other cultures are concerned and always had anxiety about food and safety when he travels,” said Michael D’Antonio, who interviewed him for the biography “The Truth About Trump.” “His objectification and demonization of people who are different has festered for decades.”
…
In 2014, well before becoming a candidate, he tweeted: “Our government now imports illegal immigrants and deadly diseases. Our leaders are inept.”
His comments were not so much an expression of hatred of immigrants as of hatred of people of color: Mexicans, Haitians, Africans, Afro-Americans, even Native Americans, the ultimate natives. The only people he likes are white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants… but he’s happy to import people of any color to work service jobs for him, as long as they go home when they’re done.
This comment, from someone who usually leaves right-wing comments, struck me as interesting and actually quite accurate:
Richard Luettgen
is a trusted commenter New Jersey 5 hours ago
If Trump has six people close enough to hear or be briefed on confidential and sensitive conversations who are willing to spill them to the Times anonymously, then he has a bigger problem than uncontrolled immigration. Unless they’re using burner phones or public phones (if you can still find any), then an FBI he also doesn’t trust should be dumping phones and finding these people. Oh, and I believe the Times that six people came forward, and not Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
This guy still hasn’t learned that he’s not working out of his Trump Tower offices, and that his is one of the most politicized jobs in the world. I might disagree with his extreme position on immigration and be personally offended by the “AIDS” and “huts” comments, but I’m far more concerned by what appears to be monumental naiveté in a U.S. president. And by his apparent inability to inspire enough loyalty among his advisors and staff that SIX (!) people ratted him out.
If he has a policy that the bureaucracy must obey and that policy lies within his powers to impose, then he has a problem managing the bureaucracy. That suggests that he needs to dedicate more attention to the management aspects of his job, and that he should get more of the open positions in his administration filled to help him out. And that he’s surprised at numbers he should already know intimately is astonishing.
Wise the hell up, Mr. President. You’re 71, not 7.
This is quoted from a piece in CNBC, which was also quoted by Paul Krugman, who naturally hates the tax bill just passed:
Dozens of lawmakers stand to reap a tax windfall thanks to a loophole inserted in the sweeping GOP tax overhaul bill, according to a review of federal financial disclosures.
The provision, which gives favorable tax treatment to a common form of real estate income, would also create generous tax saving for President Donald Trump, who derives much of his personal fortune from real estate.
The measure — added late Friday to the $1.5 trillion package of tax cuts — reduces the tax rate on “pass-through” income derived from real estate. Owners of such businesses are allowed to “pass through” the profits from these enterprises to their individual tax returns, which lowers the amount of tax they owe.
Those benefits will now go to roughly four dozen Republican House and Senate members who voted for the bill, according to an analysis of personal financial disclosures for CNBC by the Center for Responsive Politics. They include Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Bob Corker of Tennessee and James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Reps. Diane Black of Tennessee and Vern Buchanan of Florida.
Under federal financial disclosure rules, members of Congress are only required to report their assets in a range of dollar amounts, so a full accounting of lawmakers’ holdings isn’t available. But GOP lawmakers who voted for the bill had combined real estate assets eligible for pass-through treatment of as much as $390 million in 2015, according to the center’s analysis.
Here’s a quote from New York magazine, the last two paragraphs from an article about the tax cut passed by Congress a couple of days ago:
The Republican Party has decided as a whole to enable President Trump to conceal his tax returns, and further decided to pass a tax cut that rewards him personally. They have likewise formed a protective shield against the Russia probe, which is investigating Trump’s opaque ties to the Russian regime and criminal underworld.
The regular Republican Party of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of polluters and the financial industry once seemed to be set apart from its clownish demagogue presidential candidate. In rapid order, the strands have merged together into a party disdainful of transparency and united in self-enrichment.
Naturally, the Con and his press secretary have claimed, without evidence, that the bill would hurt Don financially. That assertion is, of course, absurd, given the nature of Don’s business and the size of the estate that he will soon pass on to Don Jr. and Ivanka. The merger of the victorious Republican Party’s image with that of Don the Con will only hurt them at the ballot box if the Democrats are able to cut through the propaganda being spread by organizations like Fox News with better propaganda.
The best propaganda is the truth and the truth is that the Republicans are deliberately trying to aggravate the disruptive wealth inequality that has developed since the end of World War II and worsened since Nixon was elected in 1968. What’s more, using the excuse of moral propriety, lies about in-person voter fraud, spurious ethical claims, and asserting religious freedoms that amount to discrimination, the Republicans are trying to enforce inequality in voting (creating an equivalent to the poll tax by enacting an ID requirement that poor people would have difficulty satisfying), prevent women from exercising their choice not to reproduce (by making birth control expensive and not covered by insurance, and restricting women’s access to abortion clinics), prevent people from poor families from going to college (by restricting college’s ability to attract able students without funds), allow segregation and discrimination in housing by private parties, make it impossible to form unions to represent workers and equalize the power relationships in the workplace, and so on and on– an ultimate libertarian wet dream for the wealthy and a nightmare for the rest.
Don the Con has successfully fooled 60 million voters with his warm, friendly voice and his ability to lie without compunction to satisfy his current audience. His real goals, other than enriching himself, are vague and malleable. He has no over-arching philosophy of the ideal state nor any understanding of economics or science. He is happy to hand over administration of most branches of government to those who have paid him the largest campaign contributions– people like Betsy DeVos, a vastly wealthy woman with no knowledge of the science of education but a fixed desire to promote home-schooling for religious reasons. Don has no understanding of the intricacies of foreign relations and takes the campaign donations of Sheldon Adelson as instructions to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem– a move that virtually every other country in the world opposed in the United Nations.
Republicans with more political experience understand that they can’t blatantly expose their ultimate aims without incurring the displeasure of the average voter. So they introduce the changes they want incrementally, on slippery slopes. Just like Adolf Hitler in the 1920’s, they depend on the failure of their enthusiasts to actually read their “Mein Kampf” manifestos; their supporters merely watch and listen to their speeches and believe their lies, which change from day to day. Like the Communists (and the post-Communist Vladimir Putin), they make use of democratic means to destroy democracy from within; once they attain ultimate power, they rig the voting process so that they can control the outcome.
