A Quick Break

Taking a few days off from pointing out Trump's incompetency, divisiveness, and his dangerous agenda. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe he'll handle this crisis in Texas as a President should. I'll withhold judgement for a bit.

Be assured the following hasn't been forgotten:

1. Russia
2. Conflicts of interest
3. Chaotic infighting in the White House
4. Encouraging bigotry, including white supremacy and Nazism
5. Irrational need to erase anything Obama did
6. Russia
7. Serial lying
8. Nepotism 
9. Golf every weekend
10. Saber rattling against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela
11. Plan that is no plan in Afghanistan
12. Sabotage of PPACA
13. Ill-considered removal of regulations (or perhaps benefiting his buddies)
14. Undermining the free press
15. Russia

So, What's the Plan, Afghan?

President Trump gave a speech last night outlining his "new" Afghanistan strategy. First I'd like to cover a few things that I liked, or agreed with, about the speech:

For the first time that I can think of, President Trump admitted that he changed his mind about something. Normally, when he changes positions, he either lies about his previous stance, or ignores it. He pointed out that his initial instinct was to withdraw from Afghanistan. He has been very vocal about our involvement there being a mistake, and his articulated foreign policy has been to avoid foreign entanglements. 

He also called out Pakistan, accusing them of harboring terrorists and providing a safe haven for them and for the Taliban. I have said myself that we should stop supporting Pakistan economically and militarily if their national interest is at odds with ours. One of the problems in this region is that the national interests of our allies are not always in alignment with ours, and often our friends are enemies to each other; Turkey and the Kurds are an example. 

He rejected the idea of an announced timetable for withdrawal. While I understand that the intention of Obama's announced withdrawal date was not only to let Americans know that we had an exit plan, but also to let the Afghan government know that we expected them to defend their own country and not depend on us indefinitely, the result was to embolden the Taliban to wait us out, knowing that our time was running out. 

There are also things that I am either against, or simply less than impressed with.

Once again we hear the refrain of "he sounded presidential", and that he stuck to his script. Has the bar gotten so low that "he can read" is now a qualification for greatness? He can read a teleprompter and sound like he's never seen the words before...blah, blah, blah.

Trump's justification for staying in Afghanistan is the military version of not understanding the economics of sunk cost. He wants us to stay because "our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made..." That's not a reason. That's saying we're going to continue to fight in Afghanistan because we've been fighting in Afghanistan. He also brings up the supposed dangers of terrorists groups filling the vacuum that a hasty withdrawal would leave. I don't buy it. Terrorist groups have formed more because we are there than because we left.  To a lot of these people we are an invading and occupying force, and infidels to boot. Every day we stay there we make it easier for the Taliban or ISIL to recruit. 

He complained about being dealt a "bad and complex hand". Yeah, well welcome to the presidency. Every president inherits problems. Obama inherited all this from Bush too, suck it up.

And despite Trump declaration that victory will have a clear definition, we're still pretty vague on what victory will look like, so, just like with the last two presidents, we'll never know when we're done. How will we know when ISIL is obliterated and Al-Qaeda crushed? Preventing the Taliban from taking over the country? For how long? They control 40% of territory right now, are we going to "obliterate" them too? If not, how do we know they won't come back?

Then there's the assertion that the Afghan government must do their share. The Afghan government is corrupt and it's military doesn't give a shit. Huge amounts of money has been skimmed off my corrupt generals and politicians. He doesn't want to engage in nation building, but it will take a much different Afghanistan to do what Trump wants them to do. And with this latest fuzzy long-term commitment, we've enabled the corruption and the dependence for who-knows-how-many-more years. 

And finally, let's not forget that the Taliban is not a terrorist group. They are the deposed government of Afghanistan that we ousted. What we are involved in is not a fight against terrorists, but a civil war. That's what we were involved with in Iraq before we got out. 

The bottom line is we heard a lot of tough talk, but no real change in how we're doing things.

Why It Wasn't Enough

Why wasn't Trump's condemnation of Nazi & White Supremacists enough? After all, didn't he condemn Nazis and White Supremacists by name? It wasn't enough, and here's why:

First of all, the rally in Charlottesville was unambiguously a White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi rally. There was no chance that anyone travelling to participate could mistake it for anything else. Even if by some miracle someone who did not support this extreme right-wing confluence of groups stumbled into the rally, the Nazi flags, the racist and bigoted and ant-Semitic chants and the aggressive stance of most of the participants should have tipped this hypothetical person off. Many of the rally attendees were also heavily armed and outfitted military style.

The counter-protesters, on the other hand, were a mixed bunch. The so-called Antifa, or anti-fascists, were given a lot of prominence, and blamed for some of the violence, but they were only a small part of the opposition. There were members of clergy and their congregations, there were Black Lives Matter activists, there were people from all walks of life. In short, the counter-protesters were people who were opposed to groups of people who believed that other groups of people were not as good as them, weren't really Americans, or weren't really people. And for all the criticism of the Antifa's violent tendencies, there are people who credit the Antifa for protecting them or even saving their lives, shielding them from alt-right violence.

And of course one person was killed by a right-wing participant and 19 others injured.

Trump's first statement didn't even mention the White Supremacists, Nazis, and Alt-Right, a member of which who killed Heather Heyer. Instead, he condemned violence "on all sides...on all sides", giving moral equivalency to the purveyors of hate and those who protested that hate.

Trump's second statement was a bit more measured, and mentioned Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, and White Supremacists by name, as well as "other hate groups". Even adding the qualifier: "like I said on Saturday" to describe something which he certainly didn't say on Saturday.

Most Trump opponents were not fooled by this scripted response and were questioning why it took him several days to condemn by name these groups. A third statement came in response to questioning during a press conference where he angrily reverted to his initial statement, blaming the violence on "both sides" and claiming that one side was "not all...Neo-Nazis...[or] white supremacists by any stretch" and said that some of them were "fine people". (see the second paragraph above) Trump went on to decry those who want to take down statues of Confederate heroes, suggesting that they are erasing American history.

These two groups were not equivalent. One side was promoting hatred and bigotry and using intimidation and aggression to drive home their point, the other side was resisting that hatred and bigotry and resorted to violence to resist intimidation, aggression and violence from the rally organizers.

I'm not surprised that Trump chose to equate the two sides, to equate hatred and resistance to hatred. I'm also glad that the second statement wasn't the only one that he made. We got to hear the real Trump, the unscripted Trump, the Trump who, in his campaign encouraged and emboldened this brand of hatred and bigotry. Unsure? David Duke loved Trump's response.

This is a post-script added after I watched a few minutes of Trump's "rally" in Arizona. He spent several minutes attempting to debunk the opinion that many Americans now hold that he's an enabler of racism and hatred. It was especially enlightening that when he read the transcript of his first statement, he left out his words "on many sides, on many sides"  which was interpreted, at least by me and many who think like me, as equating the bigots and promoters of hatred with those who resist bigotry and hatred. When reading his third statement, he also left out his comments about there being many "fine people" among the right-wing protesters. On a side note he made several references to a "small group" protesting his rally, while I have seen live coverage of a quite large gathering protesting him. 

And of Course There's the Day-to-Day Sabotage

I discussed regulations the other day
(http://tjpolitics.blogspot.com/2017/08/regulations.html), and the ongoing rollback, which is pretty much all Trump and his band of Congressmen have accomplished so far. Trumpists, and conservatives in general, support eliminating regulations, until, of course, regulations that they like get eliminated. Somewhat similar to how everyone wanted to repeal the PPACA until they realized that they actually liked large parts of it. But despite Trump's failure to get the PPACA repealed, he has expended plenty of energy undermining and sabotaging the law, causing instability in the markets and uncertainty about the future for millions of Americans. The good news is that Republicans and Democrats have indicated that they are willing to work together to stabilize the insurance markets, but they are working at cross-purposes with a president who has an irrational need to destroy everything that his predecessor has accomplished. Trump may have no idea about how legislation works, but that doesn't mean that he can't still do a lot of damage. His interactions with Congress on the PPACA is just one illustration of how his petulant and vengeful nature manifests itself. He had no plan, no ideas, didn't know the details of the plans that were out there and had no understanding of why the legislation couldn't pass. So he yells, he bullies, he insults. And everything grinds to a halt. Meanwhile, something that actually has bipartisan support - infrastructure investment, will likely never get done because we're bogged down in fulfilling unrealistic campaign promises.   

Lest We Forget

The fact that the President of the United States, (or least his family, businesses and close associates including campaign officials), is being investigated for illegal actions related to Russia's attempt to interfere with and influence the presidential election, and it isn't the top story anywhere today, is in fact, at least third or fourth in line, should scare the shit out of us all.

But despite the war-mongering, despite the false equivalence between Neo-Nazis & protesters, despite the legislative failures and the feuds with his own friggin' party, the investigation continues.

President Trump might denigrate any mention of this investigation as "fake news", he might jokingly ask "are there any Russians here?" at a rally last week ( a rally? quite another subject) and call it all a witch hunt, but why then are there so many meetings that his people "forgot" to include on security clearance forms or outright lied about? (Scurrilous, I say, scurrilous!)

Let not forget that this investigation is still proceeding.

And You Thought We Defeated the Nazis

Like I said in a previous blog, I just can't keep up with Trump. Who would have thought that there would be something that would push the specter of two military interventions, one nuclear, from the front pages? That story was one of a large White Supremacist/Neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville Virginia that devolved into violence and the death of one of the counter-protesters. Trump made a weasel-worded statement that decried hatred "on all sides" and refused to answer a question about White Supremacist terror.

I hope no one is surprised.

Trump campaigned on an us versus them platform that was short on specifics, short on remedies, but long on hatred. Even before his run for President, who can credibly claim that his "birther" attacks on President Obama, if not motivated by personal racism, were designed to stir up racist sentiment by many Americans? His statement that "the blacks" love him did not negate his idiotic assertion that black neighborhoods were filled with death, violence, drugs, no jobs and crappy schools. He expressed his belief that a judge could not try his case fairly "because he was a Mexican".  He seemed irked that people expected him to reject support from KKK leader David Duke. And most egregious, he has staffed his White House with people who openly espouse the White Supremacist agenda. It is clear that the racist, bigoted, Neo-Nazi, White Supremacist portion of America now feels that being a racist, bigoted, Neo-Nazi White Supremacist is politically acceptable.

President Trump had the opportunity yesterday, as he had on other occasions, to specifically condemn Right-Wing, Racist, White Supremacist, Neo-Nazi hatred. These people came together with no other purpose than to spew their hatred. As if the Confederate battle flags weren't enough of a clue, now the Nazi flags are in full view. We've all heard the bullshit about the Confederate flag being all about "Southern culture", but what bedtime stories are these people telling themselves that justifies a god-damn Nazi flag? But did Trump call out this hatred by name? Of course not, he weasel-worded that there was hatred "on all sides" in his insipid "condemnation".

This is what you got when you voted for him (or for Stein or Johnson, or stayed home) - you unleashed the hatred that has been bubbling beneath the surface that now has permission to come out and play.

I hope no one was surprised.

I Cannot Keep Up

 I literally cannot keep up with the insanity that is the Donald Trump presidency. There are so many issues, there are so many crazy pronouncements, there are so many deviations from reality that I don't even know what to focus on. Who would have imagined that possible nuclear war with North Korea isn't the top headline this morning? But let's backtrack a bit and look at the war-mongering.

Who can deny that the Kims have always been provocative? Who can deny that they have frequently made threats against the United States? Starting with grand-daddy Kim Il-Sung, continuing with daddy Kim-Jong-Il and now with Kim-Jong-Un, they have always seemed to us to be cartoon villains. The North Korean leaders have not done much to convince the world that they aren't a bunch of tough-talking, but impotent, tin pot dictators. It's also pretty evident that North Korea has always been intent on arming itself with nuclear weapons. Every diplomatic overture by the United States, as well as intervention by Russia, China and the United Nations has ended with North Korea cancelling any agreements. But all the bellicose talk by the Kims over the years has been little more than talk. North Korea, like the little guy on the playground mouthing off to the captain of the football team, has always counted on United States restraint. They knew that there was a close to zero chance that the United States would launch a first strike, so they felt emboldened to run their mouths. And the United States has always acted with restraint. Again, like the captain of the football team who knew there wasn't much of an upside to beating up the mouthy little kid, we knew that muzzling North Korea wasn't worth another war. But in light of our president's remarks this past week, can North Korea still be assured of our restraint? Can they be assured that we won't attack first? A backed-into-a-corner North Korea that suspects that it might get nuked if it doesn't act first seems to me a dangerous option. And what if our hair-trigger-temper president decides that he will launch a preemptive strike? China has already indicated that it will defend North Korea if we attack first. Are we prepared for that?

And just when we all started checking the news first thing in the morning to make sure nuclear weapons haven't been launched, Trump says that military intervention in Venezuela is a possible option. What? Where did that come from? Granted, Venezuela is a mess right now. President Nicholas Maduro is in the midst of a power grab that is eliminating all vestiges of democracy, there are riots and starvation. So what's the plan? Who, exactly, would we go in to support? Our record of nation building and democratic support is pretty poor lately. This, from the guy who seems to actually like dictators, and has said publicly that we will not be imposing our values on other countries or telling them how to conduct their affairs. Why? Venezuela is very, very close.

I'm not a reflexive pacifist. Not in my personal life and not in my politics. Sometimes the military has to be sent in to defend our nation. However, I have seen very little in the last few years that has justified military intervention. We went into Iraq because we cherry-picked intelligence reports. We stayed there and in Afghanistan because the mission kept changing and we had no clear defined goal, nothing that we could point to and say "if we accomplish this we're going home, we won". We got involved on the periphery in Libya and Syria and helped unleash chaos. We're back in Iraq supporting anti-Islamic State forces, although some of the groups we support are fighting each other.

Into this mess we now have a president who wants us to get involved in two more wars, one because their leader says mean things and the other because it's close.

I'm a strong proponent of civilian oversight and control of the military. I wasn't in favor of the Department of Defense being run by a former general, or two other generals being top advisors, that's what the Joint Chiefs of Staff are for. But if we're going to have all these generals hanging around, maybe the president should listen to what they have to say and moderate is tone a bit before we're all enguylfed in fire and fury.

Regulations

Listening to certain sectors of our society, you might come to the conclusion that regulations are bad. Regulations as a concept. All regulations. There is a school of thought that regulations are by definition government overreach and without them businesses would be free to grow the economy by investment and job creation. But exactly what are government regulations? The intent of regulations is to carry out legislation enacted by Congress. Sometimes the law is very specific. In that case regulations serve to give direction to the agencies tasked with executing and implementing the law. They detail the process and procedures that they will follow to carry out the law. Other times the law is vague in some aspects and the regulations will fill in the details, define terms, as well as setting up the procedures for execution. There are also regulations that are written in order to carry out the broad mission of an agency or department. For example the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is responsible for ensuring safe and healthy workplaces in the United States. Many of the OSHA regulations cannot be traced back to a specific law, like the regulation that pallets must be stored flat on the floor rather than leaning against a wall - this falls under the broad umbrella of keeping the workplaces safe. Local Health Departments are another example. They have broad authority to promulgate regulations that will ensure food safety. In my own job at the Nebraska Department of Revenue, the law might be that there will be a 5.5% sales tax on all sales transactions, but only several named service transactions. It is then up to the department to come up with regulations defining precisely what constitutes a sale, what constitute a transaction, etc.

Do regulations cost businesses money? Do they inhibit economic growth? Do they prevent job creation?

Regulations can cost a company money. If there is an environmental regulation that prevents a company from dumping their trash in the local river, the cost of finding an alternative destination for their trash is going to cost money and eat into the bottom line. If businesses are required to be handicap accessible, then the cost of ramps, bathroom sinks, etc is going to cost money. But I dispute whether they actually inhibit economic growth. I have never met, or even heard of a businessman, who when confronted with some extra costs, just said "screw it" and accepted the lower profits. Most businesses figure out some way to get that bottom line fat and healthy again.

This brings up job creation. But let's dispense with the myth that business operators create jobs out of some altruistic impulse to give their fellow man a hand. Jobs are created because the business owner needs bodies to carry out some of the functions of their business, i.e. there is more work than he can do himself. If the work of the business can be done by fewer bodies, either by automation or increased efficiency or both, then jobs get destroyed. When I toiled in the retail world there was a tight focus on the amount of money spent on labor. It had to be a certain percentage of sales, so if the sales went down, the amount of people who got to work decreased as well (it wasn't quite that simple, but it describes the situation in broad strokes). The idea that some cash getting freed up due to a reduction in regulations is going to create some jobs is wishful thinking...or outright deception. Even without "costly" regulation being factored in, business owners are constantly looking for ways to reduce their labor costs...self-checkouts at Wal-Mart anyone?

None of this means that some regulations shouldn't be eliminated. The promulgation of regulations is not a quick process, it involves input from all stakeholders as well as public hearings in addition to studies on the impact - environmental, economic etc. Eliminating a regulation should be a thoughtful, detailed process as well. They shouldn't be eliminated just because an influential business objects to it, or someone has an ideological problem with it.

By why the assumption that regulations are bad just because they're regulations? We have regulations against child labor. We have regulations against polluting our natural resources. We recently added a regulation requiring financial consultants to act in the best interest of their clients (and why is that controversial?) We have regulations preventing the banks from crashing our economy...again. They're assumed to be bad because some business leaders and lobbyists for industry are looking for ways to increase their profits. And it's long been the standard that a business operator's main (if not only) responsibility is to provide profits for the investors and stockholders. This goes back to Henry Ford, who was willing to forgo short-term profits by paying his employees more. He saw that this would reduce turnover and give them the means to buy his cars! Some of his stockholders sued and won, insisting that his actions were costing them money. A business owner has no financial reason to care about the environment, his employees or the larger economy. Of course, some do care, but it's only the law and regulations which compel them to refrain from acting in ways that are harmful to the environment, employees or the greater economy. Unregulated banks and home loan companies caused the economy to crash; unregulated manufacturers in the early decades of the 20th century polluted the air and our rivers; unregulated employers abused their employees. And there was no legal recourse until their were laws and regulations preventing these abuses.

Our current administration has made eliminating regulations a big part of its agenda. Men and women have been nominated and confirmed as the heads of agencies and departments that they have sued in the past, people who oppose the mission of the departments that they head. Cabinet officials and advisors who have a financial interest in eliminating regulations in order to line their own pockets  are making the decisions. The decision process is in the hands of people who will personally profit from these actions.

Evaluate regulations? Yes. But let's slow down and get the foxes out of the henhouse.

Chaos

The recent soap opera regarding the failed Repeal and Replace effort regarding the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) illustrates perfectly that despite the President's "no chaos" tweet, the President, his allies in Congress, his cabinet and staff, not to mention all the informal family and friends advisors have no idea what they're doing.

It's transparently evident that the Republican opposition to the PPACA (I'm not going to call it "Obamacare") was nothing more than a focus of their irrational opposition to anything and everything that Obama tried to accomplish as President. Even before it passed, the details of the PPACA were distorted and lied about (remember "death panels"?) and no sooner was the ink from Obama's signature dry when state attorneys general and Republican lawyers started filing suits to cripple the law before it had a chance to do some good. Most, if not all, Republican lawmakers made repealing the PPACA the centerpiece of their campaigns, continuing the lies and distortions and riling up the conservative base who often did not have the slightest idea what was in the law. Candidate Trump, who knows how to work a crowd better than most politicians, made repeal  (and later "replace") a central element of his campaign, but even Trump, who was so insistent that the PPACA was "a disaster", didn't really know what was in it.

But you would think that the Senators and Representatives, some of whom actually know what they're doing (slimy as they are, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell aren't stupid, and are experienced legislators) could have come up with a replacement in the seven years that they complained about how bad it was. But that was obviously not what they were spending their time doing, because when it was time to present an actual plan, the Republicans couldn't agree among themselves on what that plan should be, and they all had to agree since they locked the Democrats out of the whole process. The most ridiculous development was when the Senate leadership presented a bill, which they acknowledged was bad, and tried to sell it to their caucus by insisting that it wouldn't become law!

The whole time this was going on, the President was hectoring the Senators, including some thinly veiled threats, berating them for not getting a replacement passed. Every version of the Republican replacement bill was in stark contrast to what Trump said he wanted in a replacement bill, although Trump's vision was pretty vague: a "beautiful bill:, a "better bill", a "more affordable bill". He even called the Senate bill "mean" at one point. By the end he was reduced to tweeting that they should just repeal and start over, or just pass something, anything. So much winning.

Meanwhile, while all of this was going on, or not going on, legislatively, White House staffers were at each others' throats. Sean Spicer the press secretary quit over the appointment of Anthony Scaramucci as his boss, the Communications Director, whom Chief of Staff Reince Priebus also opposed. When Scaramucci accepted the job he immediately attacked Priebus and other White House staffers. Priebus was sacked, then Scaramucci was fired, but not before he suggested that Steve Bannon was performing oral sex on himself. And let's not forget the President's feud with his own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who was with Trump from Day One. Key positions in the State Department are unfilled, which is headed by a neophyte, by the way, as are many cabinet positions. Foreign relations are being conducted by early morning tweets, which are often contradicted later in the day by Trump's appointees.

In some respects, this widespread incompetence keeps some of Trump's agenda from being enacted. That's good. But it also puts us in a precarious position on the national stage. Will nuclear weapons be launched at North Korea via an angry tweet?