Since taking office as the Nation’s 45th President, Donald Trump has attacked or undermined one public or private institution after another.
Among these:
- The Secret Service: Trump has kept his longtime private security force, and combined its members with those of the elite federal agency. By marginalizing the Secret Service, he has clearly sent the message: You’re not good enough, and I don’t trust you.
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): As a Presidential candidate Trump slammed the agency’s employment numbers that showed the economy improving under the Obama administration. His response on March 12, 2016: “The numbers are phony. These are all phony numbers. Numbers given to politicians to look good. These are phony numbers.”
- In February, 2017, the BLS said that American businesses had added 235,000 workers to their payrolls.
- On March 10, a reporter asked Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, whether, given his past statements, Trump thought this jobs report was “accurate.” Spicer replied: “I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.’”
- The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): Trump believes that climate change is a hoax. He didn’t offer any proof for this. Instead, he appointed an EPA director–Scott Pruitt–who claimed that climate change wasn’t caused by human activity.
- Pruitt ordered EPA staffers to remove pages from the agency’s website concerning climate change, threatened to review all of the agency’s data and publications, and cut the budgets of all scientific research in government.
- The Congressional Budget Office (CBO): Fearing the CBO’s verdict on the costs and coverage of his proposed Trumpcare replacement for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Trump ordered a preemptive strike on the agency’s credibility. Said Sean Spicer to assembled reporters: “If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place.”
- The director of the CBO is a Republican economist and former George W. Bush administration official who was chosen for his position by the Republican Congress in 2015.
- President Barack Obama: For five years, Trump, more than anyone else, popularized the slander that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya–and was therefore not an American citizen.
- On March 23, 2011, Trump said: “I want him to show his birth certificate. I want him to show his birth certificate. …There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.”
- Even after Obama released the long-form version of his birth certificate–on April 27, 2011–Trump tweeted, on August 6, 2012: “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama‘s birth certificate is a fraud.”
- On November 23, 2014, he tweeted this: “@futureicon: @pinksugar61 Obama also fabricated his own birth certificate after being pressured to produce one by @realDonaldTrump“.
- Then, in June, 2015, Trump declared himself a candidate for President. By September, 2016, he found his popularity steadily dropping among black voters. Even the managers of Trump’s campaign urged him to put the “birther” issue behind him.
- On September 16, 2016–10 days before his scheduled first debate with Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton–Trump made his version of a reversal: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. “I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.”
Barack Obama
- On March 4, 2017, in a series of unhinged tweets, Trump accused former President Obama of tapping his Trump Tower phones prior to the election: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
- “Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!”
- “I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!”
- “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Thus, without offering a shred of evidence to back it up, Trump accused his predecessor of committing an impeachable offense.
* * * * *
Donald Trump isn’t crazy, as many of his critics charge. He knows what he’s doing. His strategy is two-fold–both immediate and long-term.
In the short-term, he’s attacking anyone who dares to disagree with him. Much of this is driven by his own natural aggression–he can’t tolerate criticism or dissent.
The long-term reason for his assaults on public and private institutions is far more sinister.
He intends to strip every potential challenger to his authority–or his version of reality–of any credibility with the public.
If he succeeds, there will be:
- No independent press to reveal his failures and crimes.
- No independent law enforcement agencies to investigate his abuses of office.
- No independent judiciary to hold him accountable.
- No independent military authorities to dissent as he recklessly hurtles toward potential nuclear showdowns.
- No candidate–Democrat or Republican–to challenge him for re-election in 2010.
- No candidate–Democrat or Republican–to challenge his remaining in office as “President-for-Life.”
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AMERICA’S WEALTH CLUB: “GO TO WORK–AND DIE FOR ME”
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on March 31, 2020 at 12:09 am“Capitalism Kills” could have been a headline in Pravda, the official “newspaper” of the former Soviet Union.
Instead, it’s billionaires themselves who are responsible for such a sentiment. They are doing their level best to persuade workers: “I regret that I have only one life to give for my CEO.”
Richard Kovacevich is the former CEO of Norwest Bank (1966 – 1998) and Wells Fargo (1998 – 2007). He wants healthy people under age 55 to return to work in late April if the outbreak is contained enough.
There are two major problems with this:
“We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die. I don’t know,” said Kovacevich.
He might just as well have added: “I don’t care.”
“Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you’ll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”
If President Donald Trump gets to choose, the nationwide social distancing practices that health professionals say are essential to saving lives during the Coronavirus outbreak will end on April 30.
He originally chose Easter as a pretext for doing this: “You’ll have packed churches all over our country. I think it would be a beautiful time.”
The real reason: He wants to return to return to holding his mass public rallies—which some have compared to the Nuremberg rallies hosted by Adolf Hitler. There he can spew hatred at everyone he dislikes and bask in the worshipful glow of his fanatical base.
Fortunately, the rising tide of COVID-19 cases forced him to abandon his original April 12 date.
And many highly-paid executives in American corporations are itching to put their employees back at work—and on the Coronavirus firing line.
“The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people,” Tom Golisano, the founder and chairman of the payroll processor Paychex Inc. told Bloomberg. “I have a very large concern that if businesses keep going along the way they’re going then so many of them will have to fold.”
Forbes estimates Golisano’s net worth to be $3 billion.
Like Richard Kovacevich, he wants states that haven’t been hit hard by the virus to return to normalcy.
Tom Golisano
Penale52 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
Lloyd Blankfein, the former head of Goldman Sachs, wrote on Twitter: “Crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue—and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.”
There’s no question that keeping businesses closed across the country—as scientists and health professionals are urging—will inflict large-scale economic damage.
But rushing people back to work would prolong the outbreak and overwhelm the healthcare system. And it would certainly increase—perhaps exponentially—the number of dead and infected casualties of the pandemic. Economists from Northwestern University calculated that keeping social distancing practices in place until cases decline could save 600,000 lives nationwide.
Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warns that the United States could experience 100,000 deaths and millions of viral infections from the Coronavirus pandemic.
Ignoring these facts is Right-wing TV and radio host Glenn Beck, who, according to Forbes, was worth $90 million in 2014.
“I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working. Even if we all get sick, I’d rather die than kill the country,” Beck, 56, said on his show “The Blaze.”
Of course, Beck works alone in his own studio—and is thus highly unlikely to come in contact with an infected carrier.
Glenn Beck
George Skidmore photo
Like Beck, millionaires and billionaires can afford to socially distance themselves from others and still accumulate huge piles of wealth.
“I think what we are doing with the shutdown is good but in a few weeks people will need to be around people,” said billionaire Tilman Fertitta, owner of a casino, hotel and restaurant empire.
He certainly needs “people to be around people.” His businesses depend heavily on huge numbers of customers willing to spend money.
And, in this case, to risk their lives doing so.
Adds Fertotta: “Otherwise you are going to go into an economic crisis that is going to take us years to dig ourselves out of.”
Fertitta’s income is estimated at $4.4 billion, according to Forbes.
For men like Richard Kovacevich, Tom Golisano, Lloyd Blankfein, Glenn Beck and Tilman Fertitta,, the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt have no meaning: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”
For Republicans and their wealthy benefactors, “pro-life” means strictly anti-abortion. Any other form of life—the elderly, the ill, victims of pollution, those slaughtered with military-style weaponry used by criminals—are totally expendable.
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