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Next Steps: Clean Up The Democratic Party, Oppose Trump
People have now learned and accepted that Trump is inevitably the new president of the United States. They try to figure out what that means. We do not know, neither does anyone else. A lot of rumors and speculation are circling of who will take up this or that job in a Trump administration. These rumors are mostly created by those who would like that job, or their personal lobbies. They should be ignored.
The mainstream media is barely able to issue a mea culpa for their extreme pro-Clinton campaign and total failure of reporting the real state of the union. It is now looking for obfuscations like claiming no one could have gotten it right. That is a cheap excuse for incompetence.
It is astonishing that THE media outlet that did the most to shine lights on Clinton is ignored in any of the main stream after-election reporting. I am talking of Wikileaks and Julian Assange who did their very best, under high personal risk, to report the truth about Clinton's and the DNC's utter corruption. A big thank you to them!
Clinton in her very late concession speech, found no words for her culpability or that of the campaign she ran. But the loss of the running is her personal failure. The "bernie bros" and "deplorables" thanked her hostility by not showing up to vote. She had 6 million votes less than Obama while Trump got about the same number as Romney! Instead of focusing on Trump's disastrous economic program she ran a warmongering "blame Putin" campaign. Her economic program was tinkering on the margins of the neoliberal status quo. Certainly not what voters in difficult financial situations, and there are a lots of those in today's U.S., needed to hear. There are now attempts to get Clinton pardoned for breaking classification laws and rules with her private email server as well as for her tax cheating, private slush fund "charity", the Clinton Foundation. If the Democrats want to keep at least some appearance of uprightness they should fight all such attempts. Let her pay a very heft penalty for her shenanigans.
The Democratic party apparatus is corrupt and was completely on Clinton's side. It cost the party the presidency as well as the House and any progress in the Senate. I find it very likely that Sanders would have won the primaries if the party apparatus had acted as neutral as it should have. He had a much better chance of beating Trump. With Sanders as candidate in the general election House and Senate seats would have been easier to keep or to win. There is an urgent and thorough cleanup needed in the party from top to bottom. Sanders should be given the lead of the party and be tasked to again win a majority in the House and/or Senate in the 2018 midterm election.
Trumps true program will now come to the fore. A lot of stuff he said during the campaign will soon be forgotten. His economic program is a repeat of Reaganomics with a dose of isolationism in trade. How that is going to work out with the pivot to Asia and countering China is a mystery. His stand against Muslims was fake, as he let the embassies of the Gulf states know early on.
The military will get more money for lots of funny programs. That is nothing new. It just build some $7.5 billion a piece battleships solely for their new, very special guns which now will not be used because their special ammunition is, at $800,000 a shot, too expensive. A total waste of money but at least it paid for some good jobs. (More jobs could have been created with that money in more important, non-military programs.)
Trump will cut taxes for big enterprises and the rich. He will cut social programs. The general budget will go deep into red. In a few years he will have to, just like Reagan, increase taxes to regain some budget balance.
His campaign unleashed a new wave of racism. Racism had not vanished – indeed it was very much in the open during Obama's time. But open hostile incidents against "the other" will probably increase. It will be difficult and take some time to reign it in again.
It will be important to oppose Trump as much as possible. He is a somewhat megalomaniac and he currently has party majorities in both houses. He will have to be taught that not everything he tries is good or even possible. Trump will want a reelection and another four years as president. He can face opposition on the ground, from people who voted for him, if those people can see a plausible alternative. Clintonian tinkering on the edges of the status quo is no such alternative. There needs to be broad stroke economic policy, plausible and explainable, that offers a better world to them. If the Democrats, or a third party, can develop and present such a program there is good chance that the era of Trump will be a short unremarkable chapter in the history books.
@ NemesisCalling
So where did I say anything about Preibus? I call BS on you. And then you go on to accuse me of singling out Bannon as a racist when I wrote specifically about white supremacists…more obfuscating BS.
I think Bush/Cheney Obama/Bide and yes, Hillary should be tried for war crimes.
I want to end private finance and unfettered inheritance.
So lets end my comment with a chunk of an article about Brannon
From Mother Jones:
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Trump’s new campaign chief denies that the alt-right is inherently racist. He describes its ideology as “nationalist,” though not necessarily white nationalist. Likening its approach to that of European nationalist parties such as France’s National Front, he says, “If you look at the identity movements over there in Europe, I think a lot of [them] are really ‘Polish identity’ or ‘German identity,’ not racial identity. It’s more identity toward a nation-state or their people as a nation.” (Never mind that National Front founder Jean Marie Le Pen has been fined in France for “inciting racial hatred.”)
Bannon dismisses the alt-right’s appeal to racists as happenstance. “Look, are there some people that are white nationalists that are attracted to some of the philosophies of the alt-right? Maybe,” he says. “Are there some people that are anti-Semitic that are attracted? Maybe. Right? Maybe some people are attracted to the alt-right that are homophobes, right? But that’s just like, there are certain elements of the progressive left and the hard left that attract certain elements.”
A Twitter analysis conducted by The Investigative Fund using Little Bird software found that these “elements” are more deeply connected to Breitbart News than more traditional conservative outlets. While only 5 percent of key influencers using the supremacist hashtag #whitegenocide follow the National Review, and 10 percent follow the Daily Caller, 31 percent follow Breitbart. The disparities are even starker for the anti-Muslim hashtag #counterjihad: National Review, 26 percent; the Daily Caller, 37 percent; Breitbart News, 62 percent.
Bannon’s views often echo those of his devoted followers. He describes Islam as “a political ideology” and Sharia law as “like Nazism, fascism, and communism.” On his Sirius XM radio show, he heaped praise on Pamela Geller, whose American Freedom Defense Initiative has been labeled an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bannon called her “one of the leading experts in the country, if not the world,” on Islam. And he basically endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s primary challenger, businessman Paul Nehlen, who floated the idea of deporting all Muslims from the United States.
During our interview, Bannon took credit for fomenting “this populist nationalist movement” long before Trump came on the scene. He credited Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)—a Trump endorser and confidant who has suggested that civil rights advocacy groups were “un-American” and “Communist-inspired”—with laying the movement’s groundwork. Bannon also pointed to his own films, which include a Sarah Palin biopic and an “exposé” of the Occupy movement, as “very nationalistic films.” Trump, he said, “is very late to this party.”
At Breitbart News, one of the most strident voices for the alt-right has been Yiannapolous, who was banned by Twitter during the RNC for inciting a racist pile-on of Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. Published back in March, his “Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt Right” featured an illustration of a frog taunting an elephant—the frog image being a meme white supremacists had popularized on social media. The piece praised the anti-immigrant site VDare, the white nationalist site American Renaissance, and white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, as the alt-right’s “dangerously bright” intellectual core.
On the RNC’s opening day, Yiannapolous spoke at a “Citizens for Trump” rally. He also co-hosted a party featuring anti-Muslim activist Geller and the Dutch far-right nationalist politician Geert Wilders. Yiannopolous has proved to be Breitbart’s most vitriolic anti-Muslim presence, erasing the distinction many conservatives draw between Islam and “radical Islam.” After the Orlando shootings, Yiannopolous told Bannon on his weekly radio show that “there is a structural problem with this religion that is preventing its followers from assimilating properly into Western culture. There is something profoundly antithetical to our values about this particular religion.”
Bannon has stoked racist themes himself, notably in a lengthy July post accusing the “Left” of a “plot to take down America” by fixating on police shootings of black citizens. He argued that the five police officers slain in Dallas were murdered “by a #BlackLivesMatter-type activist-turned-sniper.” And he accused the mainstream media of an Orwellian “bait-and-switch as reporters and their Democratic allies and mentors seek to twist the subject from topics they don’t like to discuss—murderers with evil motives—to topics they do like to discuss, such as gun control.” Bannon added, “[H]ere’s a thought: What if the people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent.”
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Maybe it is just me but I read Nationalist as a dog whistle for white supremacy. Again I am not using the term racist, as others might.
Posted by: psychohistorian | Nov 14 2016 7:01 utc | 212
@228
I wan’t the F*****G problem fixed permanently this time!!!!
You do??? You could have fooled me.
So in other words you don’t think this Zionist Neocon cabal created an impenetrable system from which they could exert and retain this power? You’re gonna crack it, right?
So you want me to name the architects of PNAC and Clean Break and every Prime Minister and President of Israel since JFK was U.S. President, which is the watershed moment from which Zionist power took off exponentially, and you want me to name the Zionist heads of the top financial institutions? Why, it’s not obvious to you?
Okay so millions of people died and are still dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya combined not to mention those in Palestine still dying and the crimes against humanity committed there, and those dying in Yemen while I write this and soon to be followed by Iran that has 70+ million and let’s say a million or more are set to be slaughtered there and I think I’m being real modest since Israel has considered using nukes there.
So while a f…king holocaust against Muslims is going on in the Middle East, because we’re talking death in the millions, displacement of millions, and you think there’s the luxury of time to address and change the laws of oppression (whatever that means; you’re the vague one on that), institutions, private finance and unfettered inheritance. All sounds pretty vague to me requiring who knows how much time to change this…and how are you going to convince the capitalist masses of all this?
Let me tell you something, as the Irish say: it’s a long way to Tipperary before all that’s accomplished, and meanwhile to hell with the millions of people more than that are going to be slaughtered and ethnically cleansed and displaced in the name of Zionism in the next several years!
I’m not saying you don’t have a point, but instead of all that bullshet to digress from the crime, why don’t you start by spelling out the crime that needs to be stopped now, urgently? ZIONISM!
There’s only one thing that must be condemned and shattered, right now and that’s f…….king ZIONISM, a supremacist garbage ideology, that’s leaving a trail of war crimes and bloodshed from here to the wazoo, f…..king supremacy as bad as the Nazis could ever dream of; millions squashed by thousand pound bombs while these Zionist Neocons hide behind religious myth, religious entitlement; milking the previous holocaust and guilting everyone into submission with the biggest misnomer of the late 20th and early 21st century : anti-semitism; the blackmail muzzle, censoring the truth about Zionism.
So start by identifying it: ZIONISM! There aren’t ten things to fix at this moment that will save the millions of lives hanging in the balance; there’s only one. ZIONISM, a supremacist ideology that needs so much protection to exist, the entire Middle East must be thrown into chaos and re-arranged to accommodate such blatant supremacy and the miserable Zionist racist protectorate, a trivial state that continues committing war crimes with impunity every day.
Zionism is a crime generating a holocaust in the Middle East! And the Zionist Neocon cabal are using the most powerful nation in the world, the U.S., to commit this holocaust. So don’t give me that your priorities are so f….king urgent, when the lives of millions hinge on just declaring one f…king ideology a crime. What do those millions about to be slaughtered and displaced care about your unfettered inheritance and private banking? Why don’t you start by spelling it out: Zionism is a crime. That’s all that’s needed; for everyone around the world to spell it out. Zionism is a f…king crime….period, and the Zionist Neocon cabal are tantamount to war criminals that should be rounded up and brought before a Nuremburg-type War Crimes Tribunal.
ZIONISM is a crime against humanity and the Zionist Neocon cabal are war criminals committing a holocaust with impunity. Once it’s pronounced a crime by everyone around the world; the cabal is history! Then there’s time to address those issues you think will stop this from ever happening again. Listen, I agree, that whatever reins in unfettered power is good, but we have to do something right now, and it starts with everyone protesting the crime right at this very moment and condemning it worldwide and it starts with you, me, and everyone to follow; it’s not rocket science and quit making it so damn complicated. We need the short-term solution to save those all those lives not a long, drawn out process.
Posted by: Circe | Nov 15 2016 1:35 utc | 229
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