There is only one way to drag this country up out of the economic mire into which it has allowed itself to sink. First we have to tax the hell out of the rich. They are the ones who have the excess income. The poor already can’t afford to live a decent life. They have nothing to spare. There was a crook in my youth named Willie Sutton who was famous for robbing banks. Someone asked him why he robbed banks and his answer was, because that’s where the money is. Well, the rich are where the money is and we have to make them pay their fair share, which is definitely the larger share.
After WWII, the period that all nostalgia seems to reach back to, the nation was booming and everyone was working hard and being well paid. Taxes on the rich reached almost 90% and they still managed to get richer and didn’t rush to leave the country. So taking that cue, it seems perfectly natural for the rich to pay a larger share of their income to taxes. They will still be able to keep the private plane and the yacht. They may have to sacrifice the second yacht but they can always say it was for the good of the country. Ain’t patriotism great? Just as important will be the money spent and to an unconscioucable extent wasted by the Pentagon. I‘m talking here about the military budget.
Trump keeps talking about having the strongest military in the world. But we already have the strongest military in the world by a multiple of about ten. Now, what we have to do is have the smartest military spending in the world. Last year the Pentagon admitted that they had lost a trillion bucks. Lost a trillion bucks! How does that happen without the Defense department firing every stupid asshole that works there? Now we hear that the Pentagon has repressed a report that shows they wasted an additional $128 billion. Do you have any idea how much good we could do for the people of this country with $1,128,000,000? It boggles the mind; and Trump wants to give these incompetent bunglers more money? He wasn’t so worried about our military strength when he was ducking the draft.
So what’s the answer? Well, I’m not an economist but to me the answer is pretty simple. You increase taxes to people making over a certain number. You cut back military spending, first by firing half the people working in the Pentagon and; then by reducing our military presence in countries all over the world that haven’t been at war since 1944. Then you realize that social security isn’t an entitlement but rather a bank account into which people have paid since they started working.
Yes, there are now only two people working for each recipient where once there were six, but if the government would stop stealing from it the way they have been since 1950, there would still be enough, with some small adjustments, to more than cover the program into the 2070’s.
Medicaid, Medicare, certain other entitlements and some universal health care are essential to the welfare of the citizens of the country. For a country and its government to be successful it must provide some kind of livable life for its people. Both parents working and still needing food stamps to feed their kids is not living, it’s barely existing. Ending a life of hard work and having nothing to look forward to but poverty and starvation or homelessness is not acceptable for a great nation, so certain entitlements are necessary for the common good. We must provide them or we have failed as a nation.
And just a surely we must provide a working infrastructure; first because it will enable the nation to function and second because it will provide a certain amount of work that will otherwise never be available. Those that voted for Trump because they believed that he would provide jobs are destined to despair. Sure some of those jobs he lied about really are disappearing overseas but even those jobs will soon disappear from China, Africa or wherever they went because they, like most of the jobs that disappeared here, will be replaced by technology. It’s very easy to replace a manufacturing worker with a robot because like the workers they will replace, robots don’t have to think to do those jobs.
I heard a very prescient line the other day. “Soon there will only be two living beings in a manufacturing plant; a man and a dog and the dog’s only job would be to keep the man from touching anything.” It’s terrifying but it’s true.
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There’s been a hell of a lot of noise about the Russians hacking our election and guess what: Nothing is going to be done about it. Obama will ignore it like his red line in Syria, mainly because he doesn’t want to start a cyber war with Russia just as he is leaving office and Trump, even if he was really mad about it, which he isn’t, doesn’t have the stones to stand up to anyone who is a real threat. Trump is a loudmouthed bully and we all know that bullies back down when they are confronted with equal force or equal determination.
The man who doesn’t bother to go to intelligence briefings because he is too busy going on a bragging tour, doesn’t believe or understand or maybe doesn’t want to understand that all the intelligence agencies, including the FBI, have agreed it was the Russians who hacked the DNC. He doesn’t want to admit that because it doesn’t play into his fantasy of himself as a conquering hero.
But the fact is, the hacks were real. Chairman of the Clinton Election committee, John Podesta was hacked as was the DNC and those hacks appeared on WikiLeaks on Oct 7. On Oct 9th the FBI contacted Podesta about them. That was the last he ever heard from the FBI regarding hacks. Then in the middle of the fall, FBI director James Comey said that his agency was abandoning its investigation of Clinton’s emails. Then a week before the election Comey came back to say they were once again investigating those same emails but never mentioned any investigation of the hacks of the DNC or the information released from them that favored the Republicans. Even when the other 16 intelligence agencies declared that they had definitive proof that the Russians had hacked the DNC, the FBI refused to go along, showing just as definitively that Comey, a Republican, was acting in the interests of his party rather than in those of the country or the definitions of his job. Now even the FBI has come to admit that the hacks have come from the Russians and that their release favored the Republican candidate. Only Trump and his little yapping bitch Kellyanne Conway still deny that the hacks came from the Russians. Trump’s the guy who when he was losing kept yelling that the election was rigged but now that he has won doesn’t want to hear anything about hacking.
So what can Obama do, if he gathers the guts to do anything? First of all there are additional sanctions that can be brought into play. This gives us economic as well as physical sanctions to fall back on. There are actual cyber actions; serious physical attacks on Russia such as shutting down a section of their electric grid, or interfering with their ability to guide their air traffic. There are many others including economic sanctions against the oligarch class that rules the country.
The big problem is to do something that fits the crime. The Russians interfered with our election. That is the kind of thing that leads to war but in our current world condition any war between us and Russia could lead to a nuclear Armageddon so any response must, by the nature of the situation, be in scale to what the Russians have done. It must be great enough to show the Russians that we mean business, strong enough to deter any response or further incursion by the Russians and yet not so great as to breed escalation. It’s a very fine line to navigate and this column doesn’t think that either Obama or Trump has the where-with-all to negotiate that line. Which means we’re screwed.
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Donald Trump calls the Electoral College a work of genius. That is obviously because its existence allowed him to steal an election which he lost in the popular vote. The Electoral College allows candidates to avoid the one man one vote democratic system that this country is supposed to be based on. If we didn’t have an electoral college Hillary Clinton would now be the president elect.
The fact is that after the current election democrats poled out at over 80% in favor of changing the election laws to one-man one vote and Republicans poled out to the same percentage in opposition to that change. Yes, one man one vote favors the Democrats – now. That doesn’t mean that the roles won’t be reversed in the future but the fact remains that one – man one vote is the only democratic way. And that goes for the Senate too. In fact the only institution that is truly democratic in any of our areas of government is the House of Representatives and bizarrely enough that outfit is currently strongly Republican.
These things will go back and forth as the coasts become more and more populated over the years. They will lose some of their Democratic appeal and gain Republican strength even as the center of the country becomes weaker and weaker as it loses population. But the only consideration should be that we have a democratic form of election and that is; one man one vote and as long as we don’t, this will not be a true democracy.
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People who have followed me thru the last election have asked me lately why a person like me, a former Republican, has been so vitriolic toward the GOP. Well it’s pretty simple and rather than go into any other aspect of it I will simply point to North Carolina where a Democrat won the governorship this year. So what is happening there? The Republican Senate of North Carolina, in a bogus improvised meeting, voted to take away most of the powers of the governor-elect and the incumbent Republican governor signed the bill into law, thereby to a large extent, negating the election. This is typical GOP behavior and it’s exactly why I have come to despise the current manifestation of that party. This kind of petty, underhanded behavior has no place in a country in which we put the good of the country ahead of the good of any political party. The GOP has forgotten that and abandoned the good of the country