Trump, the Lucky Loser

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise whatsoever.”

Random House

In just Donald Trump’s first week in office, it’s becoming obvious that the illusions he lives under will be no different than during his first term as president. He is counting on the American electorate to not believe what they are seeing.

For instance:

Climate change—"drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels when we are experiencing the worst climate disasters in history due to global warming—e.g., horrific wildfires, tornadoes and hurricanes.

Healthcare—Leaving WHOrg that monitors worldwide pandemics, and censoring the CDC and other government healthcare watchdogs’ research while releasing their results only after they have been vetted by his political appointees.

Military preparedness—now allowing military service members not to be vaccinated for COVID-19 and reinstating service members with full pay who were discharged for refusing vaccines.

Immigration—Saying he will deport millions of undocumented immigrants, when it will reduce badly needed workers in low-paying jobs that American citizens aren’t taking.

Tariffs—Asserting he would raise tariffs as high as 50 percent on nations with huge trade imbalances viz the U.S., when economists are saying it will be inflationary, and in Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s words, “make us poorer.”

Public education—Wants to abolish Department of Education that supports the 80 percent of students in public schools.

Tax cuts—Just extending his first term tax cut beyond 2025 when it is scheduled to expire and could add as much as $5trillion to the already bloated federal budget deficit, which could cause investors to lose faith in the US Dollar.

President Trump’s real intentions are already becoming clear in his second presidential term in office. He and his Oligarchs want to steal the US Government blind, as I said last week, by keeping Americans and the media as blind as possible to what he intends.

Why does Trump continue policies that will only harm more Americans while enriching himself and his oligarch supporters?

This was highlighted in Pulitzer Prize-winners Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig’s just released book, Lucky Loser that raises a bigger question in a Washington Post review by Bethany McLean about the ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ ethos of modern America. In a world that conflates the ‘trappings of wealth with expertise and ability,’ where ‘fame, detached from any other marketable talent or skill,’ is ‘a highly compensated vocation,’ does it even matter if you never actually make it?”

The outright distrust of truth is a propaganda tool used by autocrats that public media has normalized. This probably tells us best why he was able to take over the Republican Party that has drifted so far from conservative values and was once the environmental party when Republican President Nixon signed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency into law in 1970.

So will he be more successful in passing his promises in his second term? We should ignore some of his most nonsensical executive orders, such as attempting to amend the 14^th Amendment by decree that guarantees citizenship for anyone born in the U.S. 50 states and territories, which he knows can’t be done by decree or executive order.

But the furor that it and the immediate release of 1500 January 6 Capital attackers from prison, mostly convicted felons, will generate enough attention that it will cloak his real intention; reduce or eliminate as many government programs as possible that make life better for ordinary Americans, such as Medicaid, in order to fund more tax cuts.

He has already rescinded the Biden executive order to cap Medicaid spending on drugs that would save Medicaid $billions in costs.

“In reversing the executive order Biden signed in 2022, Trump halted an effort to cap the copayment for generic medications at $2 for Medicare beneficiaries, along with another program that would see Medicare pay less for drugs that receive accelerated approval from the Food and Drug Administration,” according to MarketWatch’s Jessica Hall.

And there is also the question of what Trump will do with regard to the prescription-drug provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, which would be substantially more consequential. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, Medicare can negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs with the aim of making drugs more affordable for older adults and people with disabilities.

He continues to throw bombs at the public media by announcing he will seek retribution from those prosecutors that sought his indictment for the various crimes he committed during his first term, such as January 6, withholding Top Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere, while hoping to erase the Grand Jury indictments in some way.

And he will eventually have to settle the $500 million in awards won by women he defamed. So it’s no wonder that he will use his immense power that is meant to protect U.S. citizens to protect himself instead, at their expense?

Harlan Green © 2025

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

No Art of the Deal

 ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

“After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously:” Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

Huffington Post

Historians will puzzle over the results of our latest presidential election for decades. A majority of Americans have just voted in a con artist and sexual predator for the second time who has failed in most of his business ventures and left investors holding the tab.

One conclusion will be that identity politics won, after all. Enough white women chose Donald Trump over the East-Asian/Black Kamala Harris who advocated more rights for women, while enough Hispanic and Black males put their faith in a misogynist who has sexually assaulted women.

Identity politics has moved much of the Democratic Party to the left with the Black Lives Matter and LBDGQ movements. But most exit polls said it was the economy that decided the vote—everything became too expensive after COVID-19.

My conclusion is that it has taken very special presidents to lead such a diverse populace that will defend the constitution. In modern times it was Roosevelt creating the New Deal to bring America out of the Great Depression and win World War 2.

But post-WWII generations eventually forgot what the New Deal had accomplished and voted in a Republican Party that by 1980 had begun to drain the federal budget by continually cutting taxes for their wealthy supporters creating massive federal deficits; Reagan (-$400 billion), GW Bush (-$1 trillion), and Donald Trump (-$5 trillion).

Democratic presidents wanted government programs that benefited more Americans, so President Clinton created actual budget surpluses in his last four years, President Obama brought America out of the Great Recession spawned by the GW Bush administration’s fiscal mismanagement and created Obamacare.

President Biden created a second New, New Deal to bail us out of the COVID-19 pandemic and begin to pay down Trump’s massive deficits, thereby creating the fastest economic recovery from the pandemic among developed countries. It is designed to protect Americans from climate change and modernize the economy for decades to come.

And now a peculiar American form of amnesia has set in once again; a majority of Americans have voted in Donald Trump for a repeat performance with the hope he will cure their economic malaise, even with his record of multiple bankruptcies. And Republicans will surely run up massive deficits in their quest to siphon even more of the federal budget as they did in his first term.

His stated policies will also endanger us because Trump not only wants to weaken America militarily by weakening military alliances such as NATO, but weaken environment protections as well by gutting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency once again for the fossil fuel industry in the face of more frequent and greater hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires.

We know this because one of Trump’s first actions when elected in 2017 was to leave the Paris Accord. He has called climate change a hoax.

We currently have the second highest carbon emissions per capita after China, but would become the highest emitter among developed countries if Republicans succeed in rolling back 30 years of environmental regulation.

Why did he leave the Paris Accord I in 2017 when it is a voluntary accord to reduce carbon emissions? It was to help the coal industry, where Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is heavily invested in coal and has already made $millions with the 50 percent bump up in coal stocks since Trump took office.

And the Koch Brothers $millions that were spent to elect Tea Party candidates paid off as Trump initiated an immediate review of President Obama/s Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants.

Surrounded by coal miners at the time, the president described the Paris Accord as a “crushing attack” on workers and vowed to nix “job-killing regulations. “We’re going to have safety, we’re going to have clean water, we’re going to have clean air, but so many [regulations] are unnecessary, so many are job-killing,” he said.

And Trump now says he wants Elon Musk to become the efficiency czar, which will cause even more economic damage, since Musk has promised to cut as much as $2 trillion “of waste”—the amount of the current budget deficit—from the next federal budget, at the same time that Trump and Republicans have promised more tax cuts for their wealthy supporters.

But in the words of Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz in Project-Syndicate, “After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously.”

The next four years of Republican rule will be a measure of how much many Americans have fooled themselves once again, as they did in 2017. For a second time Americans will have the chance to learn from that experience, especially the young who may not have been of voting age, to see how Trump and the Republicans mishandled the economy that mostly profited themselves.

And it will be another bitter lesson for our women, minorities, the poor and even many in the middle class, as well as those that will suffer from the effects of a warming atmosphere.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

Global Connections TV Interview

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Here is Global Connections Television interview about Building Community: Answering Kennedy’s Call, a memoir of my years of public service.

Global Connections Television (GCTV), the only talk show of its type in the world, has featured a myriad of guests ranging from leaders at the UN to the private sector to academics to non-governmental organizations.

Harlan Russell Green, a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkey, is the 2023 Winner of the Peace Corps Writers’ Publisher’s Award for his latest book on “Building Community: Answering Kennedy’s Call.” Mr. Green is a Rotarian, retired Mortgage Banker, and Editor/Publisher of Popular Economics Weekly, a financial wire service he began in 2000.

The US Peace Corps put him on an international trajectory that provided unique opportunities to work with the US Environmental Protection Agency, Caesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers of America, and several community development projects to create sustainable, livable areas.

One of his award-winning films was the “The Great Clean Air Debate.” With the UFWA, he produced “Fighting for Our Lives” and “Why We Boycott.” He also worked on projects with Rotary International and Partnering for Peace, an organization of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who are now Rotarians that strive to connect Rotary Clubs with Peace Corps Projects.

I began writing this memoir in 2017, after wondering how it was possible that Americans had elected a president suffering a severe mental disorder. Did it mean our democracy was dying or already dead, and Americans now wanted a demagogue as president who believed that he was above all laws and the constitution?

It reminded me in many ways of the 1960s when there was just as much social unrest and different ideas of democracy. This was the era of McCarthyism and communist witch-hunting, right wing against left wing political views, the civil rights movement, and an unpopular war in Vietnam that was fracturing American communities.

We coped with the dysfunction and cynicism then by searching for communities that could mirror our values and ideals, and when we found them, to contribute to their growth.

Former President Obama challenged Americans to inspire the youth to a life of service in 2017 after he left the presidency; and the youth he talked about are my target audience. He said then:

“We have some of the lowest voting rates of any democracy and low participation rates that translate into a further gap between who’s governing us and what we believe. The only folks who are going to be able to solve that problem are going to be young people, the next generation. And I have been encouraged everywhere I go in the United States, but also everywhere around the world to see how sharp and astute and tolerant and thoughtful and entrepreneurial our young people are. A lot more sophisticated than I was at their age. And so the question then becomes what are the ways in which we can create pathways for them to take Working to develop successful communities is as important today because of the deep divisions and the possibility of future wars.leadership, for them to get involved?”

Working to develop successful communities is as important today because of the deep divisions and cynicism today and possibility of future wars.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

The Great Clean Air Debate--Part II

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

 Chapter Six

Environmental Protection Could be Hazardous

At the time, I remember thinking environmental protection should not mean crawling down the partially opened rear stairs of a Boeing 727 passenger jet into a muddy field at San Francisco International Airport.

I had boarded a regularly scheduled Sunday afternoon flight to Los Angeles where I was producing a one-half hour public service television show for the USEPA on the dangers of toxic substances in anything we might eat or drink.

        I sat next to a World War II pilot on that cloudy, rainy day in a United Airlines 727. Wisps of clouds raced by as we ascended. I hated the 727 with its three engines in the rear of the plane. It took off and landed like a wounded duck, as far as I was concerned, yet the airlines used it for the shorter flights. It always seemed to land with a deep thud that made me close my eyes on the approach, wondering if it had landed safely, and it seemed to lift off at the very last moment from the end of the runway.

 As we climbed, I noticed a vapor streaming from the wing tips. I pointed it out to the former pilot I had just met. He said not to worry too much: they were probably jettisoning some excess fuel.

“But why?” I asked. “Why would they be jettisoning fuel after the takeoff?” It wasn’t long before we knew the answer. The pilot’s voice came over the intercom: “We don’t want you to be alarmed, but we have to return to the airport.”

I looked at my seat partner who seemed calm. He had been regaling me with stories of his fighter pilot days in World War II in the Pacific. “I don’t know what it could be,” he said. “Probably some malfunction in the navigation system, or some of the dials aren’t giving accurate signals.”

That was when the airline pilot told us what was actually happening. “We are returning because a warning light is telling us something is overheating in the cargo bay,” he said over the intercom. “It may be nothing, a light malfunctioning, but we would like you to grab your ankles as we approach landing, just in case.”

That was possible when flying in the 1970s. Seats were farther apart. In fact, airlines competed to offer more leg room rather than less in those days.

        Though my heart beat a little faster, I didn’t think anything could really be wrong. But my partner and I grabbed our anklesas we approached, just in case. The plane had been circling while continuing to jettison fuel.

We heard the landing gear lock and the jet engines reverse thrust to slow down the plane as we landed, so I thought the flight was over. Suddenly there was a much louder THUNK, then the plane tilted crazily and began to slowly rotate. Those of us grabbing our ankles could see nothing, but I had the sickening feeling that I was going to die.

The THUNK was followed by a screeching of metal, but I had no idea how long that lasted before the silence. It was a silence that I honestly thought meant the end—I think we all felt that way—even though my mind was racing. Was it even possible this was what the afterlife must be? A limbo of sorts with nothing to see or hear? It was as if, at that moment, I had left my body, and whatever had become of me was hovering overhead.

But then I heard screaming, and a group of uniformed pilots suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was only later that I realized they were off-duty pilots hitching rides home on the weekend. At this moment they happened to be in the right place at the right time. At least six of them rousted passengers out of their seats.

Most of us were in shock. They had to literally grab some of the passengers and throw them down the inflated chutes that had opened before it dawned on the rest of us that we needed to get the hell out of there.

Being near the tail of this 727, my partner and I had only one escape route. There was an exit staircase that opened under the tail, but it was only partially open. We crawled our way down those steps and found that the tail was sitting in the mud. When we stood up to look around in a slight drizzle, hands and knees covered in the mud, we saw we were in a wet field beside one of the runways. The nose of the plane was buried in a small, corrugated metal shack that must have stopped its slide.

My partner said immediately, “It has to be one of the landing gear.”

“What landing gear?” I asked. I looked up and down the runway we were beside and saw no landing gear. My partner had taken out a miniature Minolta camera and began clicking away in all directions as people continued to crawl or slide out of the plane. Some lay on the ground moaning, as sirens from approaching rescue vehicles screamed louder.

The pilots and crew members herded us away from the fuselage. I saw no smoke, and so thank God, maybe no fire. They were also shouting, “No pictures, please, no pictures, please,” which my partner, of course, ignored. When I looked down the runway that crossed ours, I saw a small object lying in the middle of it. It was our landing gear: four wheels still locked to the strut that anchored it to the wing.

     

        The right-side wing was buried in the ground, and we now could see what had happened. Its landing gear, with all four wheels, had broken off the wing and was laying with its strut assembly barely visible in the distance. We must have skidded for more than a mile before coming to a stop in this muddy field. 

 

The ex-fighter pilot told me that he had once crash landed on a beach and broken his back in the Philippines during World War II. It underscored how lucky we were this time. The United pilot must have landed too soon with too much fuel in the tanks. I had flown enough to know planes usually take off with more fuel than is safe to carry when landing, in case they were stuck in a holding pattern before descending to the tarmac. The extra weight may have caused the wounded duck to hit the runway harder than was safe. But the pilot’s skill probably saved us by keeping the plane’s nose up, said my seat mate, despite the impact that could have flipped us end-over-end.

So I cancelled the television show that weekend, even though United Airlines offered to put me on the next plane to Los Angeles—once the runways were cleared.

There was no map of what we should or could do in those early days. But making the public aware of what was happening to our air and water was a priority. Administrator DeFalco wanted the public to know why we were here and what needed to be done to protect the environment.

It was the dawning of an awareness of how human activity affected the environment, of the growing danger of toxic chemicals that Silent Spring author Rachel Carson had written about. We would educate and inform the public about our mission.

Harlan Green © 2022

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

Do We Want to Save the Planet?

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

SF Chronicle

President Trump just announced the U.S. will withdraw in one year from the Paris Accord of almost 200 countries that have agreed to significantly limit Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions.

This happened within a day of a report from the Alliance of World Scientists endorsed by more than 11,000 scientists that says the world is facing a climate emergency.

“Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.”

Is it a coincidence Trump announced the withdrawal from the Paris Accord on the same day satellite data shows that last month was the warmest October on record ?

I think not. Trump’s announcement took the headlines, thereby preempting the far more important climate news to back pages. The withdrawal is to take effect one day after the 2020 Presidential election.

His administration is full of lobbyists and former executives of the fossil fuel industry in what will ultimately prove to be a vain attempt to further enrich themselves in the face of looming environmental disasters.

The total of 11,253 scientists from 153 countries affirm that” if we do not act or respond to the impacts of climate change by reducing our carbon emissions, reducing our livestock production, reducing our land clearing and fossil fuel consumption, the impacts will likely be more severe than we've experienced to date," said lead author Dr Thomas Newsome, from the University of Sydney.

In fact, "That could mean there are areas on Earth that are not inhabitable by people," said the report.

How so? Because it is already happening. We know great swaths of North Africa and the Middle East have experienced mass population exoduses from an increasing frequency of droughts that are causing outright civil wars (Syria), and anti-immigrant xenophobia in many countries.

BBC News summarized the report’s recommendations:

• · Energy: Politicians should impose carbon fees high enough to discourage the use of fossil fuels, they should end subsidies to fossil fuel companies and implement massive conservation practices while also replacing oil and gas with renewables.
• · Short-lived pollutants: These include methane, hydrofluorocarbons and soot - the researchers say that limiting these has the potential to cut the short-term warming trend by 50% over the next few decades.
• · Nature: Stop land clearing, restore forests, grasslands and mangroves which would all help to sequester CO2.
• · Food: A big dietary shift is needed say researchers so that people eat mostly plants and consumer fewer animal products. Reducing food waste is also seen as critical.
• · Economy: Convert the economy's reliance on carbon fuels - and change away from growing the world's gross domestic product and pursuing affluence.
• · Population: The world needs to stabilise the global population which is growing by around 200,000 a day.

But there’s more. It can cause irreparable economic damage that results in geopolitical unrest; even wars, as countries compete for limited resources. The U.S. Pentagon has been warning of this outcome for years, because it has labeled climate change a direct threat to our national security.

A summary of its latest January, 2018 report to congress showed that it was also harming military preparedness in future conflicts, so much so, that a US News & World Report in a 2017 report said,

 “During his confirmation process for the post as secretary of defense this spring, Gen. James Mattis wrote in the question/response period: "Climate change can be a driver of instability and the Department of Defense must pay attention to potential adverse impacts generated by this phenomenon."

From shifting temperatures to desertification, environmental changes have the potential to significantly affect the movement of populations, the availability of resources and the stability of governments. The results can be famine, drought, disease and a rise in global conflict.

Then the question must be asked: Why on earth is the Trump administration denying climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Accord when we now know it is causing  the suffering of millions, and is a threat to our national security?

Harlan Green © 2019

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