Tag: America

The REAL Reason Trump Won’t Do Infrastructure

All over the country people will be going here or there this memorial day weekend traveling on crumbling roads, dated bridges, and passing through tunnels badly in need of updating. President Trump this week stormed out of a meeting with Democratic leaders in congress in which they had planned to discuss funding for a $2 Trillion dollar infrastructure package. In typical Trump form, the President walked into the meeting, stood at the head of the table for something like three minutes, cried because Nancy Pelosi said she believed he’s been involved in a cover up, railed against congressional investigations of his presidency, and swore that he would not negotiate with Democrats on getting anything done until they stopped investigating corruption within his administration. He then stepped out onto the Rose Garden and delivered a statement complete with big note cards, about how he’s the most transparent president in history, he doesn’t “do cover-ups”, and how the Democrats Considering impeachment are just trying to scuttle his successful presidency. (blah blah blah I’d like to point out the astounding level of projection coming from the GOP, which is in fact the only party that has done any scuttling over the last 30 years, see Nixon Presidency, see Obama presidency, and Clinton Presidency, but I digress) Once again the work for which the American people have enlisted civil servants has failed to get done under Trump, and the president blames the rule of law while we get a bucket of double-talk dumped on our heads.

This is perhaps not as straight forward an impasse as it might seem, however. Trump’s anti-oversight theatrics were also very convenient because they disguised the fact that he cannot now, or ever, deliver on his signature promise to create a “great” infrastructure program. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has signaled that he has absolutely no interest in a big infrastructure plan if it requires rolling back any part of the GOP’s 2017 corporate tax cut. You see, this Republican party has abolished the days of history in which both parties could come together and agree on a certain course of action that might benefit their constituents, even if it meant that people and businesses had to pay taxes to live in a nice country. Time and again Republican leadership has proven to whom their allegiances lie, and it’s not to the middle class. The 2017 tax bill cuts taxes heavily for multimillionaires and billionaires, and offers some temporary tax cuts to some middle class Americans. The average tax cut for the middle class has been about $500 and they have an expiration date, 2025. Obviously, this has ballooned the tax deficit in this country to absurd levels (something Republicans bemoaned endlessly during Obama’s presidency.) This has left Trump with lots and lots of BIG promises, and no way of financing their fulfillment (not to mention the damage that will occur when they don’t get fulfilled) that doesn’t strap the cost onto the backs of the middle class. Perhaps the real reason that there was no place set for the president at that infrastructure meeting, and why he’d had pre-made note card graphics ready for use at his Rose Garden propaganda display is not that Nancy Pelosi accused him of a cover up, but because the Republican Senate and Mitch McConnell will not budge on their position of 0 corporate cooperation with the government to accomplish projects that this Country needs to thrive, and perhaps to survive the coming crises that will arise as a result of climate change and shifting world economic power. We have a GOP with deeply libertarian values of limiting government, and nonexistent civic responsibility for big business wealth traps. I could go on about how short sighted this libertarian ideology is, and how it’s more often than not served as a cover for billionaires to create moral equivalency for themselves while they rob the American people blind and take us one tiny step at a time closer to our roots as the wild west. That’s a conversation for another day.

Donald Trump is between a rock and a hard place, he must either choose to don the persona of a weak, embattled president who has been stymied by investigations which he simultaneously paints as “The greatest hoax in the American history”, “an attempted coup”, and a “complete and total exoneration” As if these are all compatible narratives, Or he must admit that his political ineptitude, and his choice to tie himself into a parasitic GOP that for the last 50 years has resorted to cheap tricks, and dirty political virtue signals to harness power for the interests of big business and the very rich while claiming conservative, evangelical, and southern ideologies in order to gain the undying support of a less discerning section of the populace. Donald Trump’s incompetence is perhaps not a bug, but a feature of what the GOP wants to see out of this administration. Republicans don’t actually want to see anything get done by the government. Mitch McConnell has described himself as the “grim reaper” of any legislation backed by the Democratic House. To me, this sounds like a complete dereliction of duty, and an abandonment of the purpose for which he was elected, but to Republicans this sounds like one more knife in the back of a big daddy government that liberal cucks need to tell them how to live their lives. Oh no, these Libertarian ideologues in the GOP love to see liberal snowflakes cry, even if it means cutting their own legs off to make it happen.

Trump’s Best Hope In 2020 Is Fake News!

I believe if there’s one thing that voters in democratic states worldwide, and especially in the United States heading into 2020 should concern themselves with, it’s the danger of what I’ll refer to here as “fake news.” The Guardian published an article by Dan Tynan during the 2016 Election that outlines the story of how Social media platforms are creating lucrative advertising incentives in the US and abroad for cheap clickbait political news accounts. The reporting states,

“The town of Veles, Macedonia (population 44,000), is the unlikely home for dozens of avowedly pro-Trump political news sites, featuring headlines like Hillary’s Illegal Email Just Killed Its First American Spy and This is How Liberals Destroyed America, This Is Why We Need Trump in the White House.

The Guardian has identified more than 150 domains registered to people claiming addresses in Veles, though not all of those are associated with active websites.

Some claim to garner millions of page views per month. Most others are relatively obscure. All of them exist primarily for one reason – to cash in on the seemingly endless appetite for news about Donald Trump. And they’re getting a big boost from Facebook.”

A democracy requires the possibility of consensus, people must be able to look at the same facts and reach some common understanding about the nature of any given problem if there’s to be any hope of taking steps toward solving it. Allowing mere “clickability” to determine the profitability of content poses an obvious danger to the maintenance of constructive political discourse because, as any mildly self aware person will tell you, our reasons for any particular small decision like a click, or the fact that our eyes naturally dart across the screen to view one thing as opposed to another are pretty rarely within our control, and almost never within our full view as individuals. The human mind has evolved, it seems, not for maximization of certain scholarly intuitions or mental habits for vetting information and reasoning through arguments that are required to form a nuanced view of any topic, but instead, left untended the human mind prioritizes much more primal motivations.

Although these Social Media platforms to which Americans have so readily assigned a central seat in the space of our daily waking attention have created an effective infrastructure for delivering useful information to vast numbers of people very quickly, they do not come without their risks. These risks have become increasingly salient since 2016, the year the Russian government launched an internet hacking and disinformation campaign to assist a reality TV celebrity and failed real estate tycoon into winning the election for President of the United States of America, hacked into two voter databases in the South, and succeeded.

I want people to start reflecting accurately on what these technologies are, They are a human-machine interface, capable of hacking our attention and subconscious in various ways to accomplish any number of ends, depending on how they are used. Humans have evolutionary programming just like all creatures, and thus have certain predictable reactions which are quite easily exploited by clever engineers with questionable incentives. The fact is, that by exposing ourselves to these platforms, we are allowing a whole range of others, many of whom are far more aware of these risks than we are, and who may or may not share even our most basic political interests such as… Oh, I don’t know, Citizenship in the United States to have the opportunity to compete for direct, mercenary access to our stream of consciousness.

The threat doesn’t only lie with Russia, or Macedonians. In many cases this is something that we as Americans are doing to each other, Tynan states,

“Even smaller sites are making bank on the surge of interest in the Republican nominee.(Trump) Liberty Writers News, a two-person site operating out of a house in the San Francisco Bay Area, generates income of between $10,000 and $40,000 a month from banks of ads that run along the side and bottom of every story.”

We have to rise to a higher standard than these cheap excuses for political media. We need a generation to rise up and make way for measured, intentional political commentary in this space of cyber communication. And no, that doesn’t just mean clicking the share button, and it doesn’t mean sharing Trump memes. We need real Americans with real opinions and experience to take personal responsibility for the things that they expose others to through their social media account shares. There would be no false incentive if it were not for our propensity to believe and spread these falsehoods. Congress has been asleep for three decades on this front, and at least in the very near term cannot be counted on to make meaningful legislation that can protect our elections and so it is up to us as citizens to take back our dialogue.