(Coalition Creators of ISIL/Daesh Outed Flynn?) Still Wondering What the Appeal of Trump Was to the Hurting Middle Class? (Refiddling Definition of Employed) Fiddling While Valentine's Day Burns?

Senators Told Their Jobs At Risk After Confirming Wall Street Banker for Treasury. Republicans [and Democrat] in the Senate cannot excuse putting a lying foreclosure profiteer at the head of our economy.

Michael Flynn is out as National Security Adviser, and the Trump administration is currently trying to spin it as not that big a deal. It’s…not going well.

The White House would like you to know that Michael Flynn’s sin was lying. Flynn resigned late last night as President Donald Trump’s national-security adviser, after twenty-four days on the job.

Trump is no fascist. He is a champion for the forgotten millions

In the Trump Era, The Enemies of Our Enemy Are Not Our Friends

Who Needs the Dakota Access Pipeline?

UConn’s historic 100-win streak is a testament to the power of equality.In many ways, Monday night was Title IX’s masterpiece.

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. . . After several years of keeping Trump’s rantings about President Obama’s birth certificate on the front burner, media continued to highlight what it thought would entertain readers/viewers, get the highest ratings, and bring in the most advertising revenues.  Well described by Jack Newfield’s phrase “stenographers with amnesia,” media dutifully put its time into whatever fairy tales officials and aspiring officials wanted to tell.

Supporters of both Trump and Clinton peddled mythologies. Republicans continue to pretend that the solution to everything is what they call “the free market economy,” that mythical state of blissful utopia where government exists only to lock up criminals and celebrate its own existence by bombing the hell out of anybody business designated as enemies of its freedom. Most people choosing to vote Republican know better but it doesn’t keep them from repeating this nonsense to pollsters or their fellow citizens.

Democrats, on the other hand, have found this ideological snipe hunt as helpful among big corporate donors as the Republicans have, and Clinton campaigned on the promise to continue Obama’s “economic recovery.” John Weeks described the specifics of the Democratic victory in 2008:  “The enthusiasm for Obama arose from fervent hope for specific changes:  1) a universal, affordable health system; 2) the end of two disastrous wars (Afghanistan and Iraq); 3) economic recovery from the worst collapse in 80 years; and 4) action against banks and bankers to prevent a recurrence of the collapse.” (“By the numbers: Barack Obama’s contribution to the decline of US democracy,” OpenDemocracy, November 26, 2016.)  Although none of this happened, Democratic strategy has essentially turned on pretending that it did.

In fact, the Democratic embrace of innovative Nixonian ethics, the insanity of Reaganomics, and the stridently sinister clandestine activities of the Bush pair assured their failure.  The government still made virtually endless resources available to Wall Street based on the trickle-down assumption that it would revive Main Street, create jobs, and tap the energies of all those young people. As a result, over the last eight years, the Democrats made the greatest contribution to the record-breaking inequalities of wealth that have taken place in the U.S. – and its contribution to the greatest polarization in global history.  (See Gerry Mullany, “World’s 8 Richest Have as much Wealth as Bottom Half, Oxfam Says,” New York Times, January 16, 2017.)

True, we have had statistics on job growth repeatedly blasted into our homes and workplaces 24/7 on hundreds of channels.  Recent studies – including by former government officials – clarify that almost all of these numbers reflect part-time, temporary and similarly marginal “jobs.”

Just as the Republicans got the country out of the “Reagan recession” of the early 1980s by refiddling the definition of “employment,” the Democrats in the Obama White House reconfigured how they would count them.

Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger posted a serious study documenting The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015 (draft of September 2016.).  Krueger, who chaired Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors (2011-13) claimed to have been surprised himself by the numbers indicating that 94% of the jobs created were in such “alternative” kinds of work.  (See, for example, Ben Poppen, “Most Jobs Created Since 2005 Are Nontraditional,” NBC December 8, 2016.)

It can’t be too much of a surprise that people had a problem reconciling talk about how prosperous things are supposed with their experienced realities . . . that most of them tired of the media tsunami of “news” that isn’t substantiated or can’t be along with a faux outrage over “fake news” or pretended confusion at the successes of one of their own celebrities in getting coverage for every brain fart tweeted to the world.

This is really one of the biggest stories of 2016, but it was also probably one of the biggest stories of the preceding seven or eight years and will continue to be one of the biggest stories of the foreseeable future.

All the “organizational coaches” in the world won’t advise young people as a group around the realities of that job market, that economy, and that political system.

Then, too, the bipartisan agreement to let the banks do whatever they wanted has created a portion of the work force that is already grossly indebted even before they find work.  71.5% of the class of 2016 left school owing an average of over $37,000, which is up almost 66% from a decade before – when the problem was already awful.  Overall, student debt has reached $1.25 trillion, an increase of roughly a trillion over a mere dozen years.   (See Matt Lundi, “The trillion-dollar rise in U.S. student debt, explained in six charts,”  "The Globe and Mail," August 31, 2016.)

This was generally a really sweet agreement for everybody who mattered.  The banks created a whole new way that vast numbers of people would owe their futures to them.  Government officials could do a great deal of backslapping over their facilitation of education funding.  Institutions of higher learning found the loans enabled students to pay outrageous tuition hikes – most of which had almost nothing to do with the costs of education. 

And, of course, it provides parents, grandparents, and older relatives generally a wonderfully gratifying sense of smug superiority over the young.  In doing so, they can not only pass on the same sort of crap they used to get from their elders, but they have a real concrete situation to vindicate their prejudices.

The most effective feature of American capitalism has been its capacity to rest the greatest burden of its injustices on some sections of the work force.  When Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, African slaves and their descendants carried the great weight of American prosperity.  To a great extent, they still do.

American capitalism has generations of experience benefiting from these hierarchies and managing to deflect responsibility for those arrangements.  Raise the fact that women perform the same work with less benefits and pay than men and watch how quickly someone will raise unisex bathrooms.  Talk about these structural changes in the society’s treatment of young people and you will quickly hear the ghost of Cotton Mather assign the responsibility to those who have the least control over the situation.   Conversely, if we talk directly to Republican or Democratic politicians about the need for jobs, it won’t take long before the dominant theme will become how to benefit corporate profits in the usually unstated faith that more of that will create more jobs.  Talk about student debt and the best you’ll get is some plan to refinance it.

* * *
To summarize, U.S. policies over the last 15 years simultaneously drove our young into unprecedented debt and offered them no escape other than a job market worse in orders of magnitude than that their parents or grandparents faced.  No wonder, so many of them have volunteered to shoot whatever variety of demonized foreigners are most irritating the masters.

Right off the bat, we need to start bringing student debt down to the levels they were ten, twenty, fifty years ago.  Tuition need to come down with them, as do the CEO salary levels paid the managers of colleges and universities and the elimination of the CEO-type concerns that go with them.  And existing debt should be written off.

. . . Most importantly, we need jobs.  Decent jobs at a living wage with sane benefits.  Under capitalism, jobs define one’s present and one’s future possibilities.  Under this system, they are (a) basic human right. 

. . . If government can’t manage for the private sector to make such jobs – which could have been one of the conditions of the bipartisan bailouts and stimuli of 2008-09 – then government needs to be the employer of last resort.  Although trade union seem to have entirely forgotten it, the time-honored solution of the labor movement has been to demand an adjustment in the length of the work week to permit full employment.   This also shares the benefit of increased productivity due to technological developments.  Let’s start at a 30-hour work week with no cut in pay.  That’d also help resolve the recently unprecedented increase in economic inequalities.

Reviving the old unemployed councils in one form or another would provide a good vehicle to fight for these goals, because they would permit us to raise these issues in our communities as well as statewide and nationally.

As is always the case, those with the most to gain and the greatest desire to be free must strike the first blow.  Nothing has been more gratifying than to see how readily young people have been taking to the streets.  Nobody needs to tell them that they have no saviors in politicians or big corporations.  Most of them already know it.

What they may not know – understandably, given the failures of their elders to pass it on – is that what they have been doing lately will always be their most effective response.  Stand up in vast numbers for what you want. Get into the streets.  Be noisy as hell.  And, if the authorities want to give you something to make you go away, dandy . . . but YOU do not need to get quiet or compromise in letting everyone know what you want.

__________________

The Donald, of course, knew what he was about when he won.

Or so he thought.

Donald Trump, whose adversaries portray him as an unpredictable character without any clear guide-line, has been indicating for a long time what he intends to do. He first of all demonstrated, then explained, first by allusion and then quite clearly – he intends to give back to the American People the Power that was confiscated on 11 September 2001 [1]

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Even before he took his place in the electoral campaign, Donald Trump had attempted to open the file on this usurped Power by sponsoring the movement for the truth about the birth of President Barack Obama [2]. He showed, basing his argument on the testimony of the President’s grandmother, then on the absence of registration in the Hawaï records, then again on the irregularities in the official certificate, that Obama was born a subject of the British Crown in Kenya.

And yet, during the electoral campaign, once he had realised that he had a chance of winning, he closed the file and abstained from any provocation against the President. He stopped making any allusion to the diarchy of Power. However, he did concentrate his message on the usurpation of real Power by a small exclusive group for whom Hillary Clinton is the visible spokeswoman.

His positions, which make no sense at all in terms of the traditional political differences, whether concerning foreign policy – is he an interventionist or an isolationist? - or the economy – is he a free-trader or a protectionist? - are on the contrary perfectly clear to those who are suffering from the usurpation of Power [3].

He has never stopped repeating, clearly enough so that he is supported by his compatriots, but allusively enough to avoid head-on conflict, that all the decisions taken since 9/11 are illegitimate. This has nothing to do with the antagonism between Republicans and Democrats, since these decisions were approved by the Republican Bush Jr. and the Democrat Obama. On the contrary, it has to do with an ancient cleavage in civilisation between the caste who closed their eyes to 9/11, and those who were crushed by it, between the adepts of Mayflower Puritanism and the adepts of Freedom [4].

Contrary to his predecessors, he wrote his speech of investiture himself, and centred it around this - «Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning because today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another – but transferring it from Washington DC and giving it back to you the people... What truly matters is not what party controls our government but that this government is controlled by the people.» [5].

As from the first day, and contrary to US tradition, he set up a National Security team composed of notable soldiers - Generals James Mattis, John Kelly and Michaël Flynn. Despite the fact that the Press presents them as an incoherent grab-bag of personalities chosen independently of one another, he has in truth chosen them to take back the Power confiscated by a faction of the military-industrial complex.

The new Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, was confirmed by the Senate and has been sworn in. He is considered by his peers as a learned man and one of the best strategists of his generation. During the electoral campaign, he had been asked to present himself, in the name of the Republican party, to run against Trump. He hesitated for a moment, having discovered the dark side of politics in Washington, then retired from the competition without explanation [6]. His return was warmly welcomed by the army, particularly since two thirds of the military had voted for Donald Trump. Over the last two years, Mattis was a researcher at the Hoover Institution (a Republican think-tank based at Stanford University). He pursued his studies on the relations between civilians and the military, which attests to his will to place the armed forces back in service of the People.

. . . Since the director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, is still waiting for his confirmation by Congress, President Trump went to the CIA himself. While they talked of one thing and another, he clearly set the course - «to eradicate Islamic terrorism from the surface of the Earth» [8]. He seems to be aware of the debates that have shaken the Agency over the last four years about the folly of supporting Daesh – debates which earned his National Security advisor, General Michaël Flynn, his post as director of Military Intelligence. Trump made no mention of the controversy about alleged Russian interference in the US electoral campaign, and even less about the rôle of «Russian agents» that the Press had attributed to his ex-campaign director, Paul Manafort, and two other of his advisors, Carter Page and Roger Stone.

. . . President Trump has named his Homeland Security secretary, General John Kelly, who has been confirmed by the Senate and has assumed his functions. According to the US Press - usually an untrustworthy source of information, to be taken with great precaution – this ex-CEO of SouthCom was chosen for his knowledge of the Mexican border and the stakes involved. Maybe.

However, there may be another reason for this choice - Kelly was Mattis’s assistant in Iraq. In 2003, both of them entered into conflict with Paul Bremer III, the boss of the Coalition Provisional Authority - which, contrary to what the title might suggest, did not depend on the Coalition, but on the men who organised 9/11 [9].

They also opposed the civil war that John Negroponte had decided to organise in order to head the Iraqi Resistance away from fighting the Occupier, by creating the Islamic Emirate in Iraq (future Daesh). On the contrary, Mattis & Kelly attempted to honour the heads of the tribes of central Iraq in order to no longer be perceived as occupiers. They sought the help of the head of US Military Intelligence in Iraq, Michaël Flynn. The three men finally submitted to the orders of the White House.

General Michaël Flynn was nominated as Donald Trump’s National SecurityAdvisor. Since this post had not been approved by the Senate, he immediately assumed his functions. We have already presented this man as the defender of the United States as a Nation, and as such, as the principal opponent of the use of Islamic terrorism by the CIA [10].

So, there's that.

Seeking any way they could of diminishing his authority, Hillary Clinton and her campaign director John Podesta started a rumour that he or his son, Michaël Flynn Jr., were unable to keep their mouths shut, and had helped us write an article on the reform of Intelligence [11]. In case this charge would not be enough, they used one of Michaël Jr’s Tweets, which linked to one of our articles, to accuse the two men of «conspirationism» - in other words, seeking the truth about the events of 9/11 [12].

Contrary to what the US Press pretends, Generals Flynn, Mattis & Kelly have known each other for a long time, and serve the same objective – which does not mean that relations between them are always easy. Only senior officers of this status are capable of helping President Donald Trump to take back the Power that has been usurped since 11 September 2001. In order to succeed, they will have to clean out the Pentagon, CIA and the international institutions which have been corrupted - NATO, the European Union and the UNO.

The millions of people who demonstrated against President Donald Trump were right to howl their fear. Not that the new inhabitant of the White House is a misogynist, a racist and a homophobe – which he is not – but because we are approaching a moment when the knots will be untied. It is more than probable that the usurped Power structure will not allow itself to be unravelled without reacting.

This confrontation will not take place in the Middle East this time, but in the West, and particularly in the United States.

Happy Valentine's Day?