MESSAGE
| DATE | 2016-11-16 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] the New Yorker is so stupid
|
On 11/16/2016 02:34 AM, Ruben Safir wrote:
> This idiot, Jonathan Chait, forgets that before Trump soundly defeated
> the Democrats, he equaly defeated the Republicans. Th two parties are
> so netted together that is is not really possible to do one without the
> other.
>
>
>
And just in time to emphasis the point
http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/15/adviser-national-security-leaves-trump-transition-team/
Cohen, meanwhile, drew widespread attention for his tweet:
“After exchange w Trump transition team, changed my recommendation: stay
away. They’re angry, arrogant, screaming “you LOST!” Will be ugly,”
tweeted Cohen, who served from 2007 to 2009 as counselor to
then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He was a driving force behind
an open letter last spring – eventually signed by 122 Republican
national security leaders – who opposed Trump’s candidacy.
BTW - I like Ms Rice.
>
> Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Have a Plan to Make President Trump Popular
> By Jonathan Chait
>
> House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and incoming Senate Minority Leader
> Charles Schumer.Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
>
> In the disorienting wake of Donald Trump’s election, Democrats in
> Congress grasped for some normality. To them — being Democrats reared
> for decades in a lawmaking culture — this meant some reassurance that
> they would participate in legislation. They quickly settled on Trump’s
> proposal for infrastructure spending as a promising venue through which
> they could trade cooperation for policy leverage. Charles Schumer, the
> incoming Senate minority leader, sounded excited about the prospect of
> passing a bill he has worked for years to enact without success. “As
> President-elect Trump indicated last night, investing in infrastructure
> is an important priority of his,” announced Nancy Pelosi. “We can work
> together to quickly pass a robust infrastructure jobs bill.”
>
> How and where to cooperate with Trump presents many dilemmas for the
> opposition, pitting the Democrats’ self-interest against the need to
> safeguard the welfare of the country’s political institutions. There are
> certainly venues where Americans alarmed by the incoming president ought
> to consider working with him for the sake of preserving the welfare of
> the country. But infrastructure is not one of those dilemmas. Supporting
> a Trumpian infrastructure bill would be to cooperate with the subversion
> of American government and an act of political self-sabotage. It is an
> idea so insanely bad it disturbingly suggests the party utterly fails to
> grasp the challenge before it, or the way out.
>
> ***It would make sense that Trump’s election would enable the passage of
> a large infrastructure plan if he were replacing a president who opposed
> such a plan. This is not the case. Obama spent years pleading publicly
> and privately with the Republicans to support a national infrastructure
> bank. They blocked it on the purported grounds of affordability. To the
> extent they are willing to support infrastructure spending under Trump,
> or at least stand aside, it is a continuation of a pattern dating back
> to Reagan, in which Republicans toggle between wild expansionary fiscal
> policy under Republican presidents and brutal contractionary policy
> under Democratic ones.****
>
>
>
> - Yeah, Trump, like Bloomberg and Guiliani before him, eat those
> Republicans lunch...
>
>
>
>
> Republicans blew up the deficit under Ronald Reagan, then fomented
> hysterical warnings of insolvency under Bill Clinton. When Clinton’s
> policies structurally balanced the budget, they unbalanced it with
> massive tax cuts, a military and security buildup, and a prescription
> drug benefit, all entirely debt-financed. When the first signs of
> recession appeared in early 2008, Republicans did support a Keynesian
> stimulus bill. As Obama entered office, the seeming mild recession that
> had spurred both parties to action a year before had spiraled into a
> bottomless crisis unlike any in memory. But at the moment the
> justification for Keynesian stimulus had become stronger than at any
> time in the previous 80 years, Republicans embraced austerity, insisting
> temporary deficit spending would worsen the economy. They held to that
> stance — with the exception of tax cuts for the rich, which they support
> regardless of circumstance — throughout Obama’s presidency, which is why
> they blocked infrastructure spending despite its appeal to the U.S.
> Chamber of Commerce and other business groups.
>
> The cycle has been repeated enough times that careful observers simply
> assume that the GOP will immediately flip from debt hysteria to debt
> mania. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters today he
> still “cares” about the debt, but has realized that economic growth is a
> priority that will help resolve it — a realization that somehow dawned
> in the immediate aftermath of the election after eluding him throughout
> Obama’s two terms. This is a major reason the stock market has taken
> Trump’s election with such equanimity: The government is no longer held
> hostage by an opposition party committed to tight fiscal policy. Steven
> Blitz, chief economist at Pangea Market Advisory, told The Wall Street
> Journal that he had previously worried the economy would tip into
> recession, but that new debt-financed tax cuts and spending would allay
> such a scenario: “Now that Republicans are in control, there’s no
> concern about debt and deficits,” said Steven Blitz, chief economist at
> Pangea Market Advisory.
>
> Again, this reversal has no relation to actual economic conditions. The
> unemployment rate is now half the level it was at the outset of Obama’s
> presidency, when Republicans opposed fiscal stimulus. For Democrats to
> cooperate unconditionally with this strategy is to institutionalize a
> political order in which Democratic presidents must be punished with
> contractionary policy while Republicans are rewarded with expansionary
> policy. Reasonable people can disagree about what level of national debt
> can be sustained, but the figure is finite. The political system seems
> to passively accept that America’s long-term debt should be allocated
> toward the goal of maximizing growth exclusively during Republican
> administrations. Why Democrats would find this system good for their
> country, let alone their party, is difficult to understand.
>
> There is additional irony in the prospect of a Republican infrastructure
> plan, one with even more chilling implications for democratic
> governance. In addition to their opposition to Democratic Keynesianism,
> Republicans opposed Obama’s stimulus on the purported grounds that it
> contained “pork” and “crony capitalism.” As Michael Grunwald details in
> “The New New Deal,” his history of the stimulus, Obama’s administration
> was seized with terror of being attacked for boondoggles. It established
> a rigorous vetting mechanism to ensure no dollar would be
> misappropriated, and obligingly eliminated any spending program that
> could be attacked as wasteful. Republicans gleefully savaged spending
> plans for such infrastructure as resodding the National Mall — as if
> surrounding the Washington Monument with grass was an absurd indulgence
> — public swimming pools, and virtually anything else. The
> administration’s terror of waste did not stop the news media from
> framing the stimulus as largely an exercise in pork, or in deploying its
> resources to scour the country for examples of supposed waste. As
> Grunwald shows, no evidence of impropriety surfaced. As a political
> exercise, though, the campaign to lambaste the stimulus as corrupt
> payoffs to insiders was a success.
>
> What makes this history relevant is not the implication Democrats should
> be driven by revenge or to replicate the Republican strategy. Indeed,
> low levels of routine pork-barrelling ought to be considered at worst a
> third-tier problem. The issue is that Trump is actually proposing to
> invite unprecedented levels of corruption into government. Trump’s high
> potential for corruption involves the interplay of two different
> rejections of political norms. First, unlike every other presidential
> candidate in modern history, he has refused to disclose his tax returns,
> so his financial interests remain opaque. Second, he will continue to
> hold his interests in office rather than retreat into passive
> investment. Indeed, his branding business is so intricately connected to
> his name, which will be enhanced immeasurably through his standing as
> president, that he will garner enormous personal profits even if he and
> his family govern in a completely above-board fashion.
>
> But that is a highly optimistic scenario given Trump’s history. He has
> gravitated toward business dealings with organized criminals both in the
> United States and abroad. His “foundation” was a cesspool of
> self-dealing, and he is facing trial for fraud. Business lobbyists could
> literally give Trump or his children stock in return for favorable
> treatment, and the public would have no way of knowing.
>
> Yesterday, Trump’s close adviser and rumored cabinet official Rudy
> Giuliani gave an interview to Jake Tapper about the potential conflict
> of interest. His defense made it clear how willing the new
> administration is to shred any semblance of public ethics. Asked by
> Tapper about the presidential tradition of placing his assets in a blind
> trust, Giuliani replied (correctly) that a blind trust would do no good
> if Trump’s branding business continued, since he knows its assets, and
> only selling off the entire company would do. But Giuliani insisted that
> such a drastic step would be unfair to Trump’s offspring: “Put his
> children out of work, they’d have to go start a whole new business, that
> would set up a whole set of new problems.” The premise that Trump’s
> children could not find jobs that did not involve selling their father’s
> name, and that averting the crisis of Trump-children unemployment should
> take precedence over averting massive corruption of the federal
> government is one Republicans probably do not relish having to defend.
>
> Giuliani’s second defense was even more audacious. “You have to have
> some confidence in the integrity of the president. The man is an
> enormously wealthy man. I don’t think there’s any real fear or suspicion
> that he’s seeking to enrich himself by becoming president,” he laughed.
> “If he wanted to enrich himself, he wouldn’t have run for president.”
>
> In reality, the world is replete with wealthy men who attained power and
> used it to enrich themselves. This is the very source of concern about
> Trump’s attack on the norms that prevent American presidents from using
> their power for self-enrichment. These norms exist precisely because we
> don’t assume a president is immune to temptation. Giuliani’s argument is
> that the very fact of Trump’s wealth refutes any suspicion of his
> motives and frees him from any obligation to demonstrate his integrity.
> His premise is banana republicanism.
>
> At minimum, Democrats could insist that any dealing with Trump be
> conditioned upon him selling off his family business and placing the
> assets in a blind trust, and attaching a law requiring presidential
> candidates to disclose their tax returns. They now have the opportunity
> to simultaneously expose the hollow joke of Trump’s populist image and
> to defend vital protections against the subordination of the presidency
> to private gain. They seem ready to choose neither.
>
> Congressional Republicans demonstrated the partisan advantage to be
> gained by unified opposition. As Mitch McConnell boasted, the public
> would hold the president and his party alone responsible for how they
> believed Washington was doing, and their estimation of how Washington
> was doing would be colored by the degree to which the two parties were
> getting along. If Democrats support elements of Trump’s agenda, it will
> make Trump more popular and lift the popularity of his party, enabling
> Republicans to entrench their majorities.
>
> Giving Trump and his party such a valuable gift, and weakening
> Democrats’ own chances for regaining power, is worth doing in the case
> of a vital humanitarian interest. But for some highways? And to give
> bipartisan cover to what may well have grants to contractors who will be
> giving kickbacks to Trump and his family? From the standpoint of
> Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer, the end of the Obama-era legislative
> boycott and a return to the old Washington, where they can sit with
> colleagues and hash out funding formulas and hold ribbon-cutting
> ceremonies, probably feels like sweet relief. They appear to be in the
> grips of a dangerous myopia.
>
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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