2017--A Year of Nightmares

Popular Economics Weekly

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Jesus was to have said to his disciples. This should be the proverb that describes 2017, a year of lost souls.

What does it say about a country that elects a President who shows no sign of having a soul, but only wants profits for himself and his cronies?

Most Americans in 2017 have seen rock-bottom American values such as equality, justice, and tolerance assaulted to bring back a gilded age that profits a few. Instead of draining the DC swamp, President Trump has filled it with a record number of lobbyists; either writing the bills Republicans are pushing through congress, or installing lobbyists in the very government agencies they are tasked to regulate.

The 2017 nightmare began on the election of Donald Trump that will forever be tainted by Russia’s well-documented attempts to tilt the election to Trump and the Republican Party.

George Will, the conservative pundit, gave the best description of Trump’s inabilities in a Washington Post Op-ed: “It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.”

Psychologists and psychotherapists have said more; that Trump is mentally ill, or has an untreatable Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but either way, he lives in a fantastical world of his own making the almost completely ignores the reality that most Americans live.

The nightmare grew when we learned Russia may have been behind many of the dirty tricks, and anti-Hillary chants of “Lock Her Up” made by Trump campaign advisers such as General Flynn. We now know the FBI began its counter-intelligence operation of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, when it learned that the Russians had hacked both Republican and Democratic Party emails.

But Russia only weaponized the Democrats’ hacked emails via WikiLeaks, Facebook, and Twitter, not those of the Republicans. Therefore the suspicion has to be that Russia could blackmail one or more Trump campaign operatives into spying for them because Russia didn’t publicize the Republicans’ emails—maybe even President Trump and his family? That is precisely what the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigation wants to determine.

The greatest nightmare of 2017 may be the record income inequity that was exemplified in the just-passed tax cuts that are to be paid for with up to $3 trillion in added federal debt plus spending cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next ten years, which impoverish the poorest among US.
Professors Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez were the first to examine 100 years of income tax returns that highlighted the wide swings in income equality. They found that the periods of greatest inequality were just before a major recession, such the as the Great Recession, and the Great Depression itself.

Both were the result of record income inequality. The greatest prosperity was post-WWII, when the modern American middle class was formed due to rapid economic growth and unionization of the workforce.

Graph: CPBB

When will the 2017 nightmare end? Maybe in 2018, if a majority of Americans realize the fantasy world the current administration and congress has created is not theirs; but Americans see a world in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is available to all.

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

A Greater Lawlessness—Part II, The Trump Presidency

Popular Economics Weekly

Rachel Maddow on last night’s MSNBC show provided evidence that the Trump White House has been lying from day-one of the Trump Presidency. The White House had denied it asked that tanks and other armaments be included in the inauguration parade, when Freedom of Information Pentagon documents surfaced recently that showed Trump officials had requested that military weapons be included in the parade.

This is but more evidence that the Trump campaign is determined to cover up and/or deny culpability for any of their misdeeds, whether real or imagined.

Rachel then concluded that the Trump White House could not be counted on to provide truthful information on any subject to the media, whom Trump had declared were “enemies of the people”, after all. So it is up to the public media to look for the facts elsewhere.

And now we know the Trump campaign, and possibly Trump himself, had done much more than that in its misinformation campaign during the run up to the November election, which in some ways puts Russia’s kompromat campaign of slander and fake news against Hillary Clinton to shame.

More-and-more evidence is surfacing that it was the compromising of FBI Director Comey that led to Hillary’s downfall. The so-called conspiracy was one of the misdeeds being investigated by South Manhattan Attorney General Preete Bahara when he was suddenly fired. It was about the collusion of Trump campaign officials with the NYPD, and Manhattan FBI officials that had possession of Anthony Weiner’s laptop in their investigation of his internet sexting escapades with women.

A January Huffington Post article documented what was a “domestic conspiracy” to elect Donald Trump. It in effect said information presently public and available confirms that Erik Prince, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump conspired to intimidate FBI Director James Comey into interfering in, and thus directly affecting, the 2016 presidential election. This conspiracy was made possible with the assistance of officers in the New York Police Department and agents within the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The report went on to say, “As reported by the New York Times, FBI Director James Comey released his now-infamous October 27th letter in substantial part because he had determined that “word of the new emails [found on Anthony Weiner’s computer]...was sure to leak out.” Comey worried that if the leak occurred at a time when the nature and evidentiary value of the “new” emails was unknown, he “risked being accused of misleading Congress and the public ahead of an election.”

By October 27th, the FBI had had access to Weiner’s computer—which it originally received from NYPD—since October 3rd, during which interval the Bureau had both the time and IT know-how to determine that the “new” emails in its possession were in fact duplicate emails from accounts already revealed to the Bureau by Clinton, her aide Huma Abedin, and the State Department.

However, when Comey was briefed on the case by agents from the New York field office on October 26th, he discovered that not only had this IT work not been done, but in fact no warrant to seize the full emails had been sought, no permission to read the emails had been requested from cooperating witnesses Weiner and Abedin, and indeed nothing but a summary of the emails’ “meta-data” (non-content header information) had been prepared by his agents.”

And when they discovered there were emails from Hillary to her aid Huma Abedin and Weiner’s wife that were also included on the laptop, they immediately began pushing Comey to reveal the links that might possibly be material evidence in his probe of Hillary’s use of a private email server.

And both polling, poll analysis, and internet meta-data (see below) confirm that the Comey Letter was sufficient to hand Trump the 77,143 combined votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that won him the election. We know from the statements made by Giuliani, and from numerous statements made by Trump on the campaign trail, that both men believed the Clinton email server case could be leveraged to ensure Clinton’s defeat in November. It turns out they were correct.

I first began writing about the greater lawlessness among Republicans wanting to maintain power in the face of a declining party membership in 2002, when it became obvious that the GW Bush administration was cooking the CIA findings on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to justify their invasion and coopting of Iraq’s oil fields. The underlying reason was once again greed, led by Vice President Cheney’s oil company friends who thought they would be able to control Iraq’s vast oil reserves.

Then they turned the Iraqi economy into a conservative dream, a tariff-less free enterprise entity that allowed cheaper US imports to put many Iraqi companies out of business, and was a major reason for the Sunni-led uprising and civil war that ensued.

We now know that on January 12th, the DOJ announced that the Inspector General would be investigating the sequence of events comprising the Prince-Giuliani-Trump conspiracy. Inspector General Horowitz noted that within his brief was investigation of the series of leaks that occurred between the NYPD, the FBI, and outside entities—including, we can surmise based on context, the Trump campaign.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen