So, after being dumb enough to vote a bunch of Tea Party hacks into the House over two elections, after finding that all the GOP promises did nothing but crash the economy under Bush and after discovering that a Republican congress did nothing to help Obama restore their jobs, the current Trump voters put a man into the Presidency that has appointed a bunch of billionaires most of whom are anti-labor to his cabinet,. Just the right kind of guys to give a shit about your problems!
Yeah, Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s choice for Secretary of the Treasury, really cares about the fact that you lost, first your job and then your home in the Bush induced crash. While you were being thrown out of your home, good old Steve was busy sticking it to 36,000 other suckers just like you. His Old West Bank was right in the middle of the whole real estate rip-off that sent hundreds of thousands of people to the poorhouse and homeless shelters.
And Mnuchin is just one of the billionaires that Trump is appointing to his cabinet. Mitt Romney one of his finalists among a bunch of stiffs for Secretary of State is famous for his 47% of the people who don’t count. That’s you he was talking about when that quote lost him the election to Obama. Mitt didn’t get it but another millionaire, Rex Tillerson, who runs maybe the biggest corporation in the world and really worries about the little guy, did. So once again you are thoroughly screwed. And you deserve it.
Voters passed on Hillary because they were worried about a perfectly legitimate charity her husband headed. They passed because she raised a lot of money from Wall Street. They believed Trump when he said he was on their side. Now he is filling his cabinet with men and women who are the ones who have screwed you over and over on the way to becoming billionaires.
Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos, as Secretary of Education will be a disaster. She is another billionaire who backed him in the election and who has been more than vocal about her support for Charter Schools to the deficit of public schools. That in a nutshell is the limit of her qualification for this job. Why does she feel so strongly about Charter Schools? Well, to be fair, some Charter schools have been very good for students, but to face up to the problem as a whole, Charter Schools, which are profit making to a large extent, suck money out of a public school system that desperately needs it. Right now Charter Schools which DeVos is going to fight for, pay higher salaries to teachers than public schools can afford; to a great extent because the Charter Schools are drawing that alary money away from the public school system. The profit that investors in Charter Schools make, is money lost to education. This is a simple fact. No one invests without expecting a profit. That’s what defines the difference between an investment and a charitable gift. So the investor’s profit is used to enrich them instead of in paying better teachers or buying school supplies for public schools
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Why wasn’t Michael Hayden considered for Secretary of State? Former General, former head of the CIA, former head of he NSA. He is a man with no abiding political allegiances; he has the most balanced overview of the world condition seen in modern politics. He is former military and therefore understands both the intent and the responsibility of power. Every time he speaks to conditions any place in the world it is like listening to a course in foreign affairs. This is a man who, if he wanted the job, could be a huge asset to any administration and since neither he, nor Trump has much loyalty to either political party he would undoubtedly be able to keep politics out of governance.
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The Left has a bad habit of calling all those who voted for Trump racists and bigots. They obviously all aren’t. What they are, are people who put their own personal goals above the good of the country. They are people like many doctors I know, as well as, successful businessmen who voted for Trump because he opposed Obamacare. In doing so, he took a few bucks from their overstuffed pockets so that many who would otherwise not be able to afford medical care at all could obtain some coverage. So they chose a few more bucks in their pockets at the expense of electing a man who denies climate problems, backs big oil, big Pharma and big weapons manufacturers; a man who has already testified to his racist, bigoted, misogynistic qualities. You can take that whatever way you want but the fact is that we have to call a spade a spade and nothing Kellyanne Conway says is ever going to change that.
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Trump has managed to encourage Carrier to keep 1100 jobs in this country but carrier is still cutting back on its employment rolls and 1300 jobs will still leave Indiana. And oh, by the way, when it was discovered that Carrier was going to keep its engineering department of 350 in Indiana anyway, those jobs shrank to 750. It’s beginning to look more and more like a typical Trump promise. An important factor on the deal is that Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, owes over 10% of it yearly billing to government contracts and that leaves them vulnerable to the pressure that Trump has been talking about exerting. But for Trump to even match Obama’s accomplishments in putting people to work in the private sector he will have to do the same deal with 1,800 other companies and he will still come up short of what Obama delivered in the Stimulus Bill that saved almost a million jobs in the auto industry alone. And it still won’t work! Why? Because the kind of manufacturing jobs we’re talking about are disappearing to robotics and to foreign companies that aren’t answerable to Trump or any other American President. They aren’t coming back! The trick is going to be educating those that will be out of work to do the jobs that are coming available in the computer industry, clean energy, security and all kinds of other industries that have hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs even as this is being written and that will have millions of jobs for those that are trained for them in the near future. But the job seekers have to get the education and training and many of them are just not suited to that course.
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Watching the speech on the first leg of Donald Trump’s, Sore Winner Tour was pretty awful. Trump has already established himself as a liar, a bigot, a misogynist, an egomaniac, and a sociopath. Now he is busy establishing himself as a bad winner. I have never in my long years seen a president-elect go on a gloating tour. If this is the way he thinks he will unite the country he is even dumber than he has made himself out to be. He is ungracious, egotistical and as divisive as is humanly possible.
This is the real Trump and you can say all you want about what he may do for, or to the country but he really is a dangerous demagogue.
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During the above referenced speech Trump announced that he had chosen General James Mattis as Secretary of Defense. Interestingly enough, Trump stepped heavily on the nickname “Mad Dog”’ which, of course appeals to him but seems not entirely accurate since Mattis is known not just as a fighting general but also as an intellectual, and may be Trump’s best nomination so far. Trump, of course, drew an inaccurate parallel between Mattis and George Patton, a true mad dog general to whom Omar Bradley once said, “I’ve done this job because I’ve been trained to do it … you do it because… you love it.” One of the great blanket denunciations I have ever heard about a man.
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When Bill Clinton left office he left the country with $550 billion surplus, which George Bush inherited and pissed away. Bush turned that surplus into a $1.5 trillion dollar deficit and brought the national debt up to $7 trillion. He did that despite the fact that he didn’t pay for either war he started and through his deregulation of business allowed the Banking, Wall Street and Real Estate interests to crash the economy. Barak Obama raised the debt to $10 trillion while he was in office but he used that money to save the economy and pay off Bush’s war debts.
Now we have Trump who wants to cut taxes, keep all entitlements, like Medicare, raise military spending and add a huge infrastructure bill. Sounds great doesn’t it? The only problem is, if he does any of that he will surely raise the debt from ten to twenty trillion bucks and the interest on it alone will break the country. Does he care? No! He will handle it like he handles his current business interests. He will take the country into bankruptcy and stiff everyone who is owed money by the government. Hey, you voted for him.
Even conservative Republicans see this as a monstrous horror show, but none of them wants to admit that you can’t do any, let alone all this stuff if you cut taxes. Cutting taxes on the rich has been the staple of all Republican economic policy since before the flood.
Republican’s like Paul Ryan still give lip service to his version of trickle down economics. They refuse to accept the many times proven fact that lowering taxes on the rich just makes them richer. They refuse to accept the fact that giving the rich tax breaks doesn’t encourage them to invest in small business; it only incentivizes them to grow bigger stock portfolios.
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If Donald Trump needs a place to draw a red line in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has given him the perfect excuse. For more than half a century we have treated the Saudi’s like allies, buying their oil, funding their military and generally helping the Kingdom, the ruling family in power. While we have been doing that, the Saudi’s, a nation led by a fanatic Muslim sect called the Wahhabis, have been funding terrorist activities, staffing the bombing of the World Trade Center and generally directing Sunni incursions into other nations like Yemen.
Now we find that the Saudi’s have been funding al Qaeda in most of their operations in Afghanistan where they have killed many Americans. There was a time when we needed Saudi oil but that time is long past. It’s time that we held The Kingdom to our standards and our demands. We no longer need Saudi Arabia. They are, in fact, an obstacle to most of our policies in the Middle East. Trump should stop the sale of all military weapons to the Saudi’s immediately. This will cause a huge noise to come out of our military industrial cabal but it must be done. Then we should cut off all other funding to them and to Israel.
This blog firmly believes in American support of Israel but Israel is a rich nation so why are we sending them money with no strings attached? If they want our money they should provide a quid pro quo like recognition and implementation of a Palestinian state. It’s time Netanyahu and his Right Wing thugs recognize the fact that you can catch more flies wit honey than with salt. Maybe if they stop antagonizing a people with legitimate complaints and help them achieve their goals they would have less terrorists attacking them from within and a much stronger, safer homeland.