Showing posts with label Trump administration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trump administration. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Edward Harrison — Trump’s working class sellout, tactical nuclear weapons, government shutdown, tax reform and immigration

Since Donald Trump became US president, his core economic agenda has been sidetracked repeatedly by so-called cultural issues. However, now the administration is stepping up its tax reform effort. Even so, other issues threaten to derail this agenda item too (like nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula!). Of course, it’s not even clear we’re talking about tax reform here. Much more likely, Trump has sold out and is now merely pushing for tax cuts for the wealthy.
Nevertheless, the risk to the economy of failure is not that big. And the risks of a government shutdown have receded due to Hurricane Harvey. Now, the real risk is a military confrontation in Korea. Thoughts below….
Credit Writedowns
Trump’s working class sellout, tactical nuclear weapons, government shutdown, tax reform and immigration
Edward Harrison

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Edward Harrison — The failure of the Trump presidency

In sum, while Donald Trump, the cultural warrior, is failing as President on the economic front, not helping get us to the 3 or 4% growth he promised, he isn’t cratering the economy yet either. A US debt default or a military war could certainly change that though.
The US economy has been resilient. We are now back to 2% growth after a mid-cycle pause due to the (partial) bursting of the shale oil investment bubble. But, since we are in the ninth year of this economic expansion, you have to believe we are at the late stages of the cycle. That means we should be actively asking ourselves what the US economy would look like if a recession started in the next 12 to 24 months.
And that’s where my concern is. US households are spending beyond their means to sustain even 2% growth (see here and here). What happens when US consumers are forced to cut back? The hope has always been that tax cuts or wage increases would come before consumers do cut back. But nothing on the horizon shows this will happen. And Donald Trump’s ineffectiveness as President makes robust wage growth and tax relief for the middle class even less likely.
PS – The chaos in Charlottesville tells you that if you combined a failed Trump presidency with economic recession, you have the pre-conditions for some serious political extremism and revolt.
Credit Writedowns
The failure of the Trump presidency
Edward Harrison

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Michael Lewis — Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming From Inside the White House

Donald Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, once campaigned to abolish the $30 billion agency that he now runs, which oversees everything from our nuclear arsenal to the electrical grid. The department’s budget is now on the chopping block. But does anyone in the White House really understand what the Department of Energy actually does? And what a horrible risk it would be to ignore its extraordinary, life-or-death responsibilities?
Vanity Fair
Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming From Inside the White House
Michael Lewis

Monday, July 10, 2017

Voltaire Network — Just who is organizing the leaks against Donald Trump?

During the first 126 days of Trump’s presidency, 125 pieces of classified information have been illegally leaked to 18 press agencies (the majority of the leaks being directed to CNN). The rate, it would appear, is around a leak a day, seven times more than the number of leaks during the corresponding period in the four preceding mandates. The majority of these leaks concern the inquiry into possible interferences by Russia during the last Presidential electoral campaign....
The existence of these repeated leaks makes us think that there is a conspiracy a-brewing within the high-level administration, 98% of whose officials voted for Clinton rather than Trump.
Ya think?

Voltaire Network
Just who is organizing the leaks against Donald Trump?
Translation by Anoosha Boralessa

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Jefferson Morley — It's Official: How the Koch Brothers Killed Trump’s Job Plan


That was quick.

This is the big problem with electing outsiders to clean up government and put the people first, as Jesse Ventura found out, for example. Outsiders have no political base once they begin governing unless there is a wave election that results in a a wholesale replacement of insiders with outsiders. And even with a wave election, there is still the administrative bureaucracy and the deep state, which both provide continuity across administrations.

AlterNet
It's Official: How the Koch Brothers Killed Trump’s Job Plan
Jefferson Morley, AlterNet

Sunday, April 16, 2017

Saturday, April 15, 2017

Reeves Wiedeman — The Duke Lacrosse Scandal and the Birth of the Alt-Right

It not only launched [Richard] Spencer’s career, but that of White House adviser Stephen Miller, too.
Richard Spencer has become somewhat of a fringe Alt-Right character if not caricature. Conversely, Steve Miller is a presidential adviser in the Trump administration with a West Wing office adjacent to the Oval Office along with Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and Kellyanne Conway, in addition to VP Mike Pence. Miller is the youngest of the group and an up-and-comer in US politics. He is a person to watch.

New York Magazine
The Duke Lacrosse Scandal and the Birth of the Alt-Right
Reeves Wiedeman

See also
Miller parlayed his experiences as a conservative activist at Duke into a job on Capitol Hill, where he worked for former Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, then for Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s choice for attorney general. It’s in Sessions’s office where he came into his own in Washington.
Miller was someone on whom Sessions “relied very heavily,” said Andrew Logan, who worked as Sessions’s press secretary while Miller served as communications director. “He sort of necessarily became involved in all of the policy areas as well.” According to Logan, Miller was involved in writing nearly all of Sessions’s speeches.
Miller quickly became associated with the hardline anti-immigration, anti-globalist views that characterize Sessions and which became a main theme of the Trump campaign....
Miller is also closely connected with Bannon.
Though Miller preceded Bannon on the Trump campaign, they got to know each other while Bannon was still running Breitbart.

“I know Bannon feels the same way that I do about him,” said one Breitbart News staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Always expressed a lot of admiration for him.”
The staffer referred back to a speech Jeff Sessions gave at a Breitbart-sponsored CPAC event two years ago in which Sessions spoke about being a populist, and tied it to Miller.
“That Sessions speech at CPAC was basically Breitbart laying down the ‘This is what we believe on immigration’ and that’s pretty much inseparable from Miller,” the staffer said.

Asked to describe Bannon and Miller’s relationship, a former Breitbart Newsstaffer said “Sponsor-client relationship from what I can tell, or mentor-mentee, which is the policy Bannon regularly adopts with younger people.”
“You could not get where we are today with this movement if it didn’t have a center of gravity that was intellectually coherent,” Bannon told Politico Magazine last year. “And I think a ton of that was done by Senator Sessions’s staff, and Stephen Miller was at the cutting edge of that.”
The Atlantic
How Stephen Miller's Rise Explains the Trump White House
Rosie Gray

Sarah Ellison — The Inside Story Of The Kushner-Bannon Civil War


It's more about the reality show than the title. Weekend read.
Hate-watching is a key element of reality television: viewers get a surge of superiority and catharsis when watching characters they do not respect but in some strange way are drawn to. “It’s incredibly satisfying to hate-watch [Trump],” Shapiro said—and the same goes for watching members of his staff. Senior West Wing aides, like the president himself, exhibit a trait that is essential for a successful reality-TV show: they are largely unself-aware, not fully realizing “how they are perceived, because they will keep stumbling into the same mess over and over again, and they are really easy to place in a cast of characters,” said UnReal’s Shapiro. They are, in part, reliable caricatures of themselves.
Vanity Fair
The Inside Story Of The Kushner-Bannon Civil War
Sarah Ellison

Monday, April 10, 2017

Alex Pfeiffer — Tillerson Says U.S. Will Defend Innocents Around The World


The Trump administration goes full-on liberal interventionist and assume the role of US as world's policeman as integral to American leadership.

Oh wait,
Spicer said a press briefing Monday, “The Trump doctrine is something that he articulated throughout the campaign, which is that America’s first. We are going to make sure that our national interests our protected, that we do what we can to make sure our interests both economically and national security are at the forefront.”
“We aren’t going to just become the world’s policemen running around the world,” Spicer added. “We have to have a clear and defined interest wherever we act, and it’s our national security first and foremost that has to deal with how we act.”
Can someone help me out. Who is in charge here, anyone?

Friday, April 7, 2017

Daniel McCarthy — Donald Trump's Biggest Problem

"The president has lost his base, or is in grave danger of doing so."
McCarthy thinks that Trump is clever enough to play the various faction of the GOP off against each other, even though they are at each others' throats . We'll see whether Trump really is the Master Persuader.

The National Interest
Donald Trump's Biggest Problem

Daniel McCarthy, editor at large of The American Conservative
The hashtag #FireKushner became the top trending topic on Twitter Friday night, thanks to outraged Donald Trump supporters who blamed Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and top adviser, for the decision to strike Syria.
According to the outraged Trump supporters, the Syrian strike was a betrayal of Trump’s “America First” platform. They blame that policy change on Kushner.
The Daily Caller
#FireKushner Takes Over Twitter
Scott Greer

Running Government Like a Business is Bad for Citizens — Kim Brown interviews Michael Hudson


Video and transcript.
… the Financial Times of London, the premier financial paper, had a wonderful editorial, saying why business cannot make government great. In other words, why it can't be run like a government.
The main reason is that businesses are run to make a profit. And it's very surprising that Trump's supporters say, well, we need a businessman to put the government in order. Business people are their employers.
Imagine somebody working for an employer, and the last thing you want is for the employer to run his business the way he wants, without any safety conditions, without paying you overtime, without paying you a pension, without paying you medical care.
The idea of running it like a business is to screw labor. To pay labor as little as possible, and to get as much money for themselves -- the businessmen -- as possible. So, when Kushner says, “Let's run government like a business,” what he really means is, let's run government for business.
The Real News Network
Running Government Like a Business is Bad for Citizens
Kim Brown interviews Michael Hudson, President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

Monday, February 27, 2017

Larry C. Johnson — It is Confirmed, The Russia/Trump Link is a LIE!!

Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (aka HPSCI) is Congressman Devin Nunes and he spoke to the press about the allegations swirling around the Trump Presidency and its relationship with Russians. The title from the SLATE piece says it all, GOP intelligence chairman David Nunes: “There’s no evidence of anything” regarding Russia-Trump campaign contacts.…
As I have been saying, lots of inference and innuendo, but zero evidence.

No Quarter
It is Confirmed, The Russia/Trump Link is a LIE!!
Larry C. Johnson | CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm with expertise combating terrorism and investigating money laundering, formerly Deputy Director in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism (1989-1993, and CIA operations (1984-1989)

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Alastair Crooke — Trump’s Embattled ‘Revolution’

Which of these two, reflects America’s likely path, more accurately? Has the Establishment now succeeded in walking-back Trump’s agenda? Who now speaks for the President?
The answer is not hard to fathom: return to Pat Buchanan’s clear explanation of how Trump became President: “He saw the surging power of American nationalism at home, and of ethno-nationalism in Europe. And he embraced Brexit. While our bipartisan establishment worships diversity, Trump saw Middle America recoiling from the demographic change, brought about by Third World invasions. And he promised to curb them.”
Obviously, it is the Trump-Bannon wing. Were Trump to abandon his reading of the nation and of the Europeans that brought him to the Presidency, he might as well throw in the towel now. He will not be re-elected.
Will the Pence-Priebus wing or Trump-Bannon wing win out in setting policy.

Consortium News
Trump’s Embattled ‘Revolution’
Alastair Crooke, former British diplomat who was a senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy, and presently the founder and director of the Conflicts Forum


Thursday, February 23, 2017

BBC News — Steve Bannon's three goals for the Trump presidency


Minute and half video clip.

1. National security and sovereignty.
2. Economic nationalism
3. Deconstruction of the administrative state.

President Trump will fulfill all his campaign promises.

BBC News
Steve Bannon's three goals for the Trump presidency

Here is the entire interview transcript.

Time
Read Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus' Joint Interview at CPAC
Ryan Teague Beckwith

Friday, January 20, 2017

Moon of Alabama — The Not-Hillary President


Moon of Alabama analyzes what to expect from the Trump presidency.

Conclusion: "Over all I do not expect anything exceptional from Trump. His time in the White House will probably turn out to be minor remake of Reagan's."
Moon of Alabama
The Not-Hillary President
b

See also

Uncertainty reigns. This is a longish and deepish analysis by a tech writer.
Whether Trump's rhetoric, tweeting, and appointments thus far add up to gloom and doom or a bonanza likely depends on one's own political beliefs. But up until now, all of this was largely rhetoric under Trump the Candidate and Trump the President-elect. Today is Day One of the nation's 45th presidency, and with it comes a mountain of the unknown. Only one thing seems certain: change of some kind is on the way under President Donald J. Trump.
Are Technica
Donald Trump takes oath of office—what to expect from an unexpected presidency
David Kravets | senior editor for Ars Technica and founder of TYDN fake news site

Friday, November 18, 2016

James Petras — Presidential Elections: Myths and Deceits


Petras's predictions for the Trump administration.

James Petras Website
Presidential Elections: Myths and Deceits
James Petras | Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia