The Shape of Trump to Come

Jeez Ilargi
MORE Trump apologia?

The Special Counsel will most likely find that Trump laundered many millions of Russian cash through his real estate deals. Enter the Bank of Cyprus and Wilbur Ross. Of course, this was before the campaign. Think of the Whitewater investigation of the Clintons leading to a stained blue dress years later and a thousand miles away. I do not expect Trump to be charged or impeached however.

You may endorse Trump and his policies Ilargi, but please do not blame the deep state if the guy’s former crimes come back to bite him. He makes it so easy for them. He can’t help himself. He is still grifting, profiting from his office. Some people never have enough.

While we wade through, and are distracted by, the Trump hero worship (or his demonization) children are suffering as a direct result of Trump policies. Just one example are the poisons released into the atmosphere that were banned previous to Trump. Black neighborhoods reach right to the chemical plant gates. How much additional child illness and premature death are you willing to trade for Assange’s freedom? The good people who stand behind Trump and truly value our democratic republic (and the First Amendment) need a real hero, not this guy.

Yup, the elitist globalist policies of Obama and Clinton were horrible. Many children died. More spasms of a dying empire. How does that make the racist, anti-environmental,corrupt and poisonous policies of Trump acceptable?

I’m old now, but they used to tell me two wrongs don,t make a right.

> And V. Arnold, did you notice what Picasso could do when he was just 16?

Reminds me of the Tom Lehrer line in the lead-in to “Alma”:

“It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.”

And for those who imagine a pro-Trump bias, I think rather, its an Anti-CIA-Mockingbird-Echo-Chamber bias.

Anyone remember, for instance, when Liberals were peaceniks, and not intent on beating the war drums against “Russia”? I sure do. But then again, engineers have to have a functioning memory, or else they can’t do their jobs…we remember Operation Northwoods, Tonkin Gulf, Babies in Incubators, WMD in Iraq. All our major wars were con-jobs by … someone.

But I’m sure it’s different this time, with Russia.

Yeah. Ilargi is pro-Trump. Russia is the biggest threat to Western Democracy, ever. Check is in the mail. etc.

Exactly, davefairtex–all wars are con-jobs started with false flags. Look at the event that kicked off the war on terror. It’s rich, Ilargi brings a lifetime of experience and intense study to bear on the articles he writes, and a couple of nobodies come here to tell us all how wrong he is–the arrogance!

davefairtex
Anyone remember, for instance, when Liberals were peaceniks, and not intent on beating the war drums against “Russia”? I sure do. But then again, engineers have to have a functioning memory, or else they can’t do their jobs…

Yep, remember it all.
The great unraveling is upon us as the snowflakes, in their mindlessness, swarm reason and logic.
Likewise in engineering; and old enough (73) to have the long view back. The long view looking forward doesn’t look hopeful; a lee shore and breakers ahead…

When Donald Trump was running for president, there was really no reason to expect that, as a Republican, he would be that much different than any previous Republican. Being from New York City, plus his decades of being an quasi-movie star, suggested he would be a centrist. His attacks on his opponents and Hillary were not the norm, but were entertaining. The Republican party was nearly dead.

The FBI and CIA were doing their regular work of watching for intrusion by foreign governments, including Russia. When they were alerted to Trump showing up with Russian links the only fear was that, like any other American, he might be subject to undue influence/blackmail, it the Russians had anything on him. This is a decades long MO. Nothing new.

When the security people went to inform him of same, instead of understanding that they were covering his back, he seems to have felt they were trying to get power over him.

After the election, he didn’t want anything to delegitimize his victory, so he couldn’t admit that there was any Russian influence. The Mercers, Cambridge Analytica, etc., Bannon – mostly his own greatness, was why he defeated crooked Hillary.

Then came the work of being President and governing, for which the campaign was not prepared, since they’d hadn’t expected to win.

Many didn’t like the thought of him winning, particularly women. Peter Strozk’s email comment to Lisa Page about not letting it happen was pure, boyfriend bullshit bravado. Same thing you do when lost and driving through a bad neighborhood, you boldly reassure your girl/wife/passengers you know what you are doing.

So, one in the job, President Trump wants to continue to run for office, doing so on instinct in front of the crowd, and get adulation for his stand up routine – I’m so bad. He doesn’t want to read, having never really been a reader. He goes for theatrics.

The bar for performance is very low. He set that in the campaign saying he could go out on 5th avenue and shoot someone without losing any supporters. He’s a fighter of the WWF variety – lost of story and drama. Certain crowds love that. All that is needed is to single out an opponent who, by definition is a villain.

TAE readers are exactly that. People who read and study the world daily, and have done it all their lives. They encounter new perspectives and may change their minds, correcting the database, or doing further research. I expect every reader has changed their mind more than once in their life, as what was once thought to be true, was found to be lacking. What really caused the Civil War? Why was the Federal Reserve established? What is money? What is debt?

So as junkies for world information and history, please consider that President Trump would never read all the articles in a single issue of TAE, and perhaps not even one complete article.

What is next? Of the four predictions, I only see revocation of security clearances as plausible, simply because it stirs things up in the newscycle. That’s all he cares about.

The other three actions require some deep understanding that would only be a product of long term research and study. His advisors don’t demonstrate that and certainly he hasn’t done the research himself.

Realizing that the President of the U.S. is considered “President of the World”, so many follow our politics and interpret them. That is their right. Looking at the G7 or G20 politics, elections and leaders, from my particular interest of regional cooperation, I wouldn’t comment or judge any of them. When I worked for a regional agency, my philosophy was to deal with whomever God sent me. It was necessary to be apolitical because whomever won was the person you had to work with..

That might be written in a textbook somewhere, but I learned it by observation.

Big, wealthy Republican donors are getting what they want. Most interesting today was the Guardian story: “In US, UK, People Die Early Due To ‘Shit-Life Syndrome’ ” First thing I did reading the article on my phone was to highlight “Shit-life Syndrome” and web search it. Yes, a real term. UK & US leading locations for it. There will be much more of, particularly if the incentives are to the poor are to fight over declining resources.

Donald Trump will remain the center of attention as long as possible. That seems his single goal.

On that figure, people project fearless leader desires or feckless leader disappointments.

Will the President Trump show be cancelled or renewed? A simple, yet sad question.

The independents will decide. That is the ballast which right the ship. There is no Left in the U.S. not by international standards. Religious social conservatism is not political or environmental conservatism.

In the future there will be less. The game is in play.

MoFlora
Enjoyed your comment.
I was living in Boise in ’68 and made it a point to go see Seeger live in a park after the radio station said if you want to see all the communists in Boise, go to his concert.
By god, there must have been 6,000 communists there… 😉
Moved back to Portland and marched against the war in Vietnam and stayed active.
I self exiled in 2003 and to this day; best thing I ever did. Enough was too damned much.

Since AE’s deflation prediction was negated by vast monetary and credit expansion and there is no reason to believe such will not be deployed again, and then again, as long as the biosphere cooperates, the entire project has lost it’s meaning. IM like huge swaths of what I call the alt economic community have turned towards fascism to get clicks. Repeating it’s narratives, endlessly, as here in today’s post.

Life under fascism will not be so bad for those who know their place. The ‘conservative’ dream of a perfect society is that people know their place. I am actually agnostic on this point, that liberal democracy can work in any culture that is not uniform culturally, if not racially.The post Great Depression Liberal dream just an historic oddity perhaps.

Ah Dr D.
Indeed there can be evidence of money laundering that has not been made public. The special Counsel has seen documents and records that others have not had access to – like the tax returns. And, if talking about the Russian money gives you hives, you can examine Lula’s connection or the money from the Gulf States and Israel.

The New York and Miami real estate booms were very much about laundering money. Colombian money, Mexican money, Russian, Saudi, Kuwaiti and more all wound up in these markets. Trump is by no means the only player. It was common. Trump, however, is the one who ran for President against the ruling system – vowing to break it up. If he had any skeletons in his closet they were going to be exposed by the people he declared to be his enemies. If he didn’t see all of this mess coming he really isn’t very bright. Reformers have to be clean or they are instantly called out for hypocrisy – at least.

And it goes on. He inflates the “membership dues” at the resorts where he vacations. The very wealthy get access. No one else. The Washington hotel is another example. Money for access. The guy can’t help himself. Trump is just a crook.

Of course there are articles posted about the poisoners on TAE. But as Trump rolls back yet more air pollution regulations today, sickening more children, how can you support Trump and yet claim the environment is an important issue for you? It’s obviously not as big a deal as Mueller, the FBI and Russian bedwetters.

As regards your subtle insult, I believe I know as much about what has transpired in rural America over the last 40 -50 years as anyone who frequents this site. I’m inside the house now because of the very heavy smoke. After years of fighting wildfire as a volunteer firefighter and EMT I have a sensitivity to it. I’m not able to get the ox to his pasture or run the chainsaw to cut firewood, I will however weed the onions – I’ll just wear a mask.

We work every day to grow the alternative to an unsustainable system. This year our small raspberry patch yielded 22 gallons of berries – just one indicator of the hundreds of species we have planted here over the years.

Several species of insects are missing this year. ALL the songbirds are gone along with most of the bats. Two of our main native tree species are dying from the warmer winters and drier summers. Because of that, we are engaged in enhancing phytomigration by starting tree, shrub and grass seedlings that are native far to the south. We are engaged in forest restoration on a large local scale and we bury carbon by the ton. We use about 20 -25% of the hydrocarbons we used ten years ago. And you?

The important climate and environmental work is being done at the individual and community level. All the elitists in their limos in Paris don’t do shit.

Pick up a shovel.

Dr. D writes as though he’s only read about rural America, never been there: “Death for shit life syndrome, living in a poor rural area, with no health care, no income, no opportunities, and no help from neighbors, the rural ways having been erased with a 50 year social genocide”. Rural people are quite resilient. I’ve worked on rural development since 1973 in Virginia’s Northern Shenandoah Valley. They qualified for inclusion under the Appalachian Regional Commission in the 1960s, but chose not to participate. Some Virginia counties did. In 1968, the Commonwealth extended its history of promoting local and regional planning as a means to foster economic development. The encouragement of sub-state planning district commissions, and later mandate for local planning commission, a subdivision ordinance, and by 1980, a local comprehensive plan has proven to be very effective, though the work is never done. A 1972 Executive Order by Governor Linwood Holton provided that State agencies align their sub-state districts to the Planning District regions, using single or multiple districts. This simple alignment made for an ability for regional analysis and coordination to support planning and subsequent investment long term. While most states have some variation of this, I’m not aware of any that did this at all.

Very little research is done in this area because the data set does not exist. American has a Metropolitan Obsession. Economists and policy people study the way that the data is presented. They have very little sense of geography. FIPS codes of the 1960s are alphabetic, so that’s the way data is organized. Alphabetical lists of places, cities, States don’t convey much location data. Consider Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas – FIPS-ANSI codes 1, 2, 4,,5.

The migration of population to cities has been a long term trend. Larger populations do have economies of scale, if they have the self-governance skills to manage it. City-building is the hallmark of civilization, so by the 1700s it was common knowledge that it took 300 years to build any City of substance. Rome wasn’t built in a day – they all knew and understood.

As population moved to cities, the Metropolitanism of the early 20th Century, Benton MacKaye, architect of the Appalachian Trail, published: “The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning”, as a call to help small/rural communities to cooperate to maintain quality of life. Trails were to keep communities connected. I live near the trail in the Shenandoah National Park. Recently I met a hiker, probably mid-30’s, that was using the trail connections to go from Warren County to Rappahannock County. Certainly a rare person. I informed him that such was the initial vision.

Stable or declining population, there are always births, deaths, in and out migration, brings with it a diseconomies of scale. Not enough people to support a particular store, restaurant, medical specialty, course at the high school, etc. The way this can be overcome is to network regionally. The circuit-riding minister or judge is an historic adaptation when territories are sparse, but growing.

This is also called regionalization, but that came to be a negative term. Local people want things to stay local. Cooperation may lead to their not having a reason to exist – to be consolidated out of existence, contrary to the intent of the founders of that community. Cooperation is normally considered in game theory as the prisoner’s dilemma; will people cooperate on the story to save their skin. This is one form, but local government cooperation faces what I call “the neighbor’s dilemma”. If we cooperate too much, our reason for existence will fade away. Our identity will be lost, betraying the founders whose optimism was the call “to build a shining city on a hill”. My Town, Front Royal, chartered in 1788, was note as have seven hills, just as another historic city.

Non-metro America, rural counties not part of a multi-jurisdictional Metropolitan Statistical Area, solely based on commuting patterns, stand alone. Regional planning promoted in the 1950s and 1960s was attacked as Soviet regionalism, focusing on how Stalin had moved populations for his political purposes. You’ll still find such critiques of regionalism on the web. Each local government, whenever created, is to be inherently self-sufficient. Ronald Reagan encouraged more local government formations as the bedrock of democracy. True for sure, but small scale enterprises have a greater challenge in the world that requires more expertise. It is the people that count.

A new hospital is of no use it it does not have doctors who practice there. People drive to get to the best doctors. Physicians are more successful where they do the highest number of procedures, getting really good at it.

Social genocide is a new term for me and notion that is tis a 50 year program is hard to place anywhere in my life experience in the U.S. The Shit-Life Syndrome is real, primarily a consequence of the failure to educate, the greatest abuse that older generations can impose on the young, either by intent or neglect. Both types can be recognized in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.

The notions that you can make money with money, using other peoples’ money and faking it until you make it is just fine, are a few of the behavioral problems in the winner-take-all world. This profit motive free pass neglects the community motive that humanity has used since the plains of Africa to perpetuate itself.

Where you to think I’m just a sermonizer, I do invite people to look at 2020 Census Challenge: A Functional Sub-State Region/Regional CouncilData Set for Research, Policy and Programming in the U.S. for my public proposal to deal with the Metropolitan Obcession and increase alignment between local, State and Federal prgramming. Federal may be the more difficult, but local and State alignment is critical. Needy, inefficient suburban areas have the population, votes and money. They know government works to their benefit. Rural people are taught the opposite, yet they are among the most cooperative people on earth.

A good book that explained the way rural populations have been played is Joe Bageant’s “Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War” published June 19, 2007. Joe, a friend of mine, did not propose solutions. He simply pointed to the issues as he saw them. Too salty for political discourse at the time perhaps, it will fit the coarse language of the present.

To identify one error would be fine.