Bits & Pieces #79

 

About a week before the election Donald Trump gave a speech in which he laid out what he would do if he were elected. Naturally he began it with an attack on Hillary Clinton for any number of real or imagined grievances and then went on to rave about the media being against him, and finally to attacking the women who had come out saying he put his tiny, grubby hands on them. When he finally did get to some kind of plan it was the same old pathetic crap that he has raved about before in that he talks about wanting to do stuff but gives no plan on how that stuff will actually get done or paid for. He talked about creating 25 million jobs while cutting taxes on the rich, about raising the level of security with no hint on how that will be done and about a dozen or so other things without ever mentioning any plan on how to accomplish them. So now that he is the president elect and has the paths open to get some of what he talked about into law, let’s take a closer look at what he really wants. It’s interesting in that some of it might actually work for the good of the country and some of it would be a major disaster.

He claims that on the first day he is in office he will present a constitutional amendment on term limits, a hiring freeze on government employees, a ban on lobbying after working for the government and another on all foreign lobbying for elections. He will also direct the Secretary of Commerce to end labor abuses. All of this looks pretty good.

He speaks to a plan to grow the economy 4% per year and create 25 million jobs but he doesn’t say how. He claims he will reduce taxes for the middle class, after saying he would reduce taxes on the rich. Which will it be? You can’t do both and actually pay for anything. He will reduce the corporate tax rate from 35%, which no one pays, to 15% and establish tariffs to discourage companies from moving overseas to get cheap labor. He will raise one trillion dollars in incentives to build infrastructure in the next ten years, but doesn’t say how. He will fix the VA and assure school choice for any parent and he will expand vocational and technical education, create a task force on violent crime and increase the strength of our military. Remember this is all going to be done as he cuts taxes.

Okay, so most of you are looking at this and saying, well, if you suspend fiscal reality, that doesn’t sound too bad and if that were the end of it, you would be right. Unfortunately that’s just the icing on the cake. Now let’s look at the rest of what he wants to do.

He wants a requirement that for each business regulation congress passes two will be cut which will put us right back on the brink of 2007. He claims he will renegotiate NAFTA and withdraw from the TPP. Changing NAFTA might help in some areas but just abandoning the TPP will hand Southeast Asia and all her trade to China. He will label China a currency manipulator, which is true, but there are more diplomatic ways to handle that situation unless he really appoints Rudy Giuliani Secretary of State in which case, understanding Rudy’s diplomatic skills and knowledge of foreign policy, we will probably be at war with China in about two weeks.

He will lift the restrictions on fossil fuel production and the Obama roadblocks on allowing fossil fuel projects to progress and he will cancel billions in payments to UN environmental projects so don’t plan on being able to breathe much longer. He will cancel all orders issued by Obama on security, replace Antonin Scalia with another fascist, cancel all funding of Sanctuary cities, begin removing two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and suspend immigration from terror prone areas like Syria. Getting rid of illegal criminals is always a good idea, telling them apart from everybody else unless they commit a crime, is another matter. We do still have a constitution.

He will end common core and bring education control to local communities, which means every kid in the south and mid-west will have to memorize some bible while the rest of the kids in the country are learning computer science. Not a great way to fill the job vacancies of the future.

He says he will repeal and replace Obamacare, which he has already somewhat backed down from, institute health savings accounts and allow us to buy insurance across state lines, which is a good idea unless you want to get rid of insurance companies all together which would be a better one. He will let states manage Medicare funds, a disastrous concept, speed up FDA allowances on drugs, improve child care services, a great idea, end illegal immigration, not a bad idea, and build a wall, a stupid idea

Getting even a fraction of these things passed into law while cutting taxes, would increase the national debt by about 20 trillion, mainly because he shows no way of funding any of it and it would probably bring us to war with at least a few other countries including China and Russia. Let’s hope that Donald has the intelligence to surround himself with men and women who have some knowledge of the world and the finances that dive it or e are really going to be in deep shit.

****

There are a lot of rumors going around about Trump and his association with high ranked mobster Bob LiButi but how about Trump’s association with mob hit man Joey Ullo? That’s the real scandal and when it hits it will blow the roof off the White House.

*****

It isn’t the greed of oil and gas pipeline operators that offends most thinking humans. Greed is a natural element of the kind of person who will exploit the earth’s natural resources even past the point where such exploitation is dangerous to the planet’s inhabitants. It’s the arrogance and the complete disregard for the safety of those, through whose towns the pipelines are constantly pushing that makes ones blood boil.

The crap going on, in the Dakotas, is horrible enough and the knowledge that with the emergence of the Trump presidency that type of thing will be repeated over and over again is even more maddening, but that, after all, is in the Dakotas, a barren land of low population and little connection to the kind of busy, overcrowded, nuclear powered area that is now being threatened by Spectra Energy’s huge (42”) methane gas pipeline that will run nearly under the troubled Indian Point nuclear power plant in North Salem, NY.

Spectra is planning to do this despite a massive methane explosion on its Texas Eastern Pipeline in Greenberg ,PA in late April of this year. I have no idea where the Spectra decision makers currently reside but in order to get the okay to put a methane pipeline under a nuclear power plant that has already had problems they should be forced to move themselves and their families to property directly adjacent to the North Salem plant. If they think it’s so safe they should be willing, nay happy, to live in the shadow of disaster.

Before the April explosion, Spectra bragged that they had run pipelines safely for over fifty years. They never mentioned leaks, only explosions, but the April explosion really put the kibosh that argument. The reality is that these greedy, unprincipled assholes want to run a highly explosive gas line under an already compromised nuclear plant only a few miles from New York City and the approximately fifteen million people who live in and around it. There’s greed and monumental stupidity and then there’s whatever it is that these guys are infected with. It is imperative that this piece of insanity be stopped, and the men who conceived it put out of business.

*****

This blog has always believed that the right to demonstrate for the things in which you believe is embedded in the concept of democracy. It has also believed, just as strongly that the right to whine is not. The current anti-Trump demonstrations around the country are stupid and counter productive. Demonstrating is a great way to accomplish something- if you have a goal. These demonstrators don’t have a goal, just a pathetic whine because they didn’t get what they wanted. If they are dumb enough to think that they are going to overthrow the election result, they are too stupid to walk the streets without a keeper. One of the great ironies of the demonstrations is that a great percentage of the demonstrators didn’t even vote for Hillary. These are the people who refused to vote because Bernie didn’t win the primary or worse, voted for the ridiculously uninformed Gary Johnson for the same idiotic reasons.

The racial demonstrators of the 1960’s had a goal. They accomplished something. So did the anti-war demonstrations. What is the goal of these senseless fools? We know they’re pissed off. They don’t have to clog our streets to tell us that. Maybe if they had worked harder or at all, for Hillary, we would now have a different president-elect. They didn’t and we don’t. That’s the reality and instead of carrying on like spoiled children, which many of them are, maybe they should pay attention to what the new administration plans to do and figure out what they can actually do to make it better or maybe even to stop it. That, would be a constructive use of their time.