TomCADem
TomCADem's JournalAfter North Korea Nuclear Test, Trump Saves Harshest Words for South Korea
Source: NY Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday called North Korea’s biggest nuclear test to date “very hostile and dangerous,” but his most significant rhetorical escalation was against South Korea, a close United States ally, which he accused of talking about “appeasement.”
Mr. Trump expressed his frustration in three sternly worded tweets early Sunday that were more muted than the previous taunts and threats he has directed at North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong-un.
“North Korea has conducted a major Nuclear Test. Their words and actions continue to be very hostile and dangerous to the United States,” he wrote at 7:30 a.m., about 10 hours after reports of a huge explosion, measured by the American authorities at a magnitude of 6.3, was detected in the area of a nuclear test site in the North. As he has done in the past, Mr. Trump placed responsibility for responding to the crisis on North Korea’s closest neighbors, China and South Korea.
But he took a notably harsh line on Twitter against the new liberal government of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, amid an escalating dispute over trade that threatens to weaken a central partnership in the region as North Korea races to develop a nuclear warhead capable of striking the continental United States.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/us/trump-north-south-korea-nuclear.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
Withdrawing from trade agreements, alienating allies, and ratcheting up tensions with enemies. Trump seems hellbent on making the U.S. a pariah. Then again, a lot of Trump's base, and perhaps even some on the left, support Trump's anti-trade and anti-immigration positions.
Vox: Its the citys third 500-year flood in the past three years.
Were the models regarding the frequency of flooding in various areas wrong from the get-go. Or, have the goal posts been moved due to circumstances such as, I don't know, climate change? Otherwise, Houston must be snake bit to experience several 500 year floods, which should only happen about once in a 500 year period.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/28/16211392/100-500-year-flood-meaning
It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of the flooding and devastation that Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath are wreaking on the Houston area. Weather experts call the storm unprecedented, and note that it’s gone beyond even the most pessimistic forecasts. In the final reckoning, it’s certain that Harvey will be classified a 500-year flood — and maybe even a 1,000-year flood.
But those terms can be a bit misleading — especially when high-profile people, like the president of the United States, confuse the issue by calling Harvey “a once in 500 year flood.”
In theory, a 500-year flood is something that has a 1-in-500 shot of happening in any given year — in other words, the sort of event that’s so rare that it might not make sense to plan around the possibility of it happening. The problem is that 500-year floods are happening more often than probability predicts — especially in Houston. And, especially in Houston, prevention planning hasn’t evolved to acknowledge that a “500-year” flood isn’t really a 1-in-500 chance anymore.
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Either Houston is incredibly unlucky or the risk of severe flooding is a lot more serious than the FEMA modeling has predicted — and the odds of a flood as bad as the ones Houston has seen for the past few years are actually much higher than 1 in 500.
It Is Understandable That Trump Would Push a Herbert Hoover Type of Trade Policy...
When campaigning for president during 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover's promise to help domestic industries from being undercut by cheaper foreign goods by increasing tariffs. He won, and was successful in increasing tariffs on many competing European goods, which help drive Europe into a depression. This depression helped plant the seeds for extremism.
I can see why Trump would would push a xenophobic, isolationist trade and immigration policy. It does resonate well with the fears of many Americans by scapegoating the "other" while ignoring the obvious targets of oppression, which are elites at home who enjoy low taxes and whose industries might also benefit from a competitive advantage relative to foreign competitors. Indeed, Brexit showed that trade and immigration were nice code words for demonizing non-white immigrants with the UK suddenly trying to maintain its trade agreements even as it heightens barriers to immigration. Populist rhetoric is about scapegoats and racism disguised as concern for American workers.
This is why people of color need to hold the left and Democrats accountable. Sadly, they too are starting to adopt and echo Trump's anti-trade and anti-immigration rhetoric. It is too easy to scapegoat foreigners for domestic ills resulting from a system that is tilted against American workers.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Smoot-Hawley-Tariff-Act
Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, formally United States Tariff Act of 1930, also called Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, U.S. legislation (June 17, 1930) that raised import duties to protect American businesses and farmers, adding considerable strain to the international economic climate of the Great Depression. The act takes its name from its chief sponsors, Senator Reed Smoot of Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Representative Willis Hawley of Oregon, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. It was the last legislation under which the U.S. Congress set actual tariff rates.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act raised the United States’s already high tariff rates. In 1922 Congress had enacted the Fordney-McCumber Act, which was among the most punitive protectionist tariffs passed in the country’s history, raising the average import tax to some 40 percent. The Fordney-McCumber tariff prompted retaliation from European governments but did little to dampen U.S. prosperity. Throughout the 1920s, however, as European farmers recovered from World War I and their American counterparts faced intense competition and declining prices because of overproduction, U.S. agricultural interests lobbied the federal government for protection against agricultural imports. In his 1928 campaign for the presidency, Republican candidate Herbert Hoover promised to increase tariffs on agricultural goods, but after he took office lobbyists from other economic sectors encouraged him to support a broader increase. Although an increase in tariffs was supported by most Republicans, an effort to raise import duties failed in 1929, largely because of opposition from centrist Republicans in the U.S. Senate. In response to the stock market crash of 1929, however, protectionism gained strength, and, though the tariff legislation subsequently passed only by a narrow margin (44–42) in the Senate, it passed easily in the House of Representatives. Despite a petition from more than 1,000 economists urging him to veto the legislation, Hoover signed the bill into law on June 17, 1930.
Smoot-Hawley contributed to the early loss of confidence on Wall Street and signaled U.S. isolationism. By raising the average tariff by some 20 percent, it also prompted retaliation from foreign governments, and many overseas banks began to fail. (Because the legislation set both specific and ad valorem tariff rates [i.e., rates based on the value of the product], determining the precise percentage increase in tariff levels is difficult and a subject of debate among economists.) Within two years some two dozen countries adopted similar “beggar-thy-neighbour” duties, making worse an already beleaguered world economy and reducing global trade. U.S. imports from and exports to Europe fell by some two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, while overall global trade declined by similar levels in the four years that the legislation was in effect.
In 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, reducing tariff levels and promoting trade liberalization and cooperation with foreign governments. Some observers have argued that by deepening the Great Depression the tariff may have contributed to the rise of political extremism, enabling leaders such as Adolf Hitler to improve their political strength and gain power.
Vox: How Trump both stokes and obscures his supporters racial resentment
Recently, Bernie Sanders again tried to discuss Trump in relatively race neutral terms by stating that Trump broke promise to ‘stand with the working people." In so doing, Bernie is attempting to grab Trump's base by trying to validate their reasons for voting for Trump as being based on economic concerns. However, in refusing to call out Trump's racism, Bernie's efforts to grab Trump's base are doomed to fail.
Both Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson noted how the powerful often used racism as a means to oppress whites by giving them a scapegoat. Rather than focus on the rich, powerful and elite, Trump lets them focus on their minorities and women that work side by side with them.
Progressives cannot ignore Trump's sexism and racism in an effort to focus on the economic well-being of the middle class. Instead, you have to call this out to show that Trump is using racism and sexism to oppress the working class and distract them from focusing on how Billionaires like himself benefit from the tax cuts that are paid for with the cuts in benefits to the working class.
Otherwise, when Bernie says that Trump has broke his promise to stand with the working people, working class whites will think, "No, he hasn't because look at how he has deported and cracked down on all of those minorities and immigrants that I compete with." Put another way, by attacking women, LGBT, minorities, immigrants, etc., Trump's supporters may believe that Trump is keeping his promise to stand with working (white) people.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/31/16226488/trump-identity-politics-racism
Over the past month, President Donald Trump has taken a series of steps that, at first glance, may not seem related: He characterized white supremacists who caused chaos and violence in Charlottesville and counterprotesters as equally violent. He pardoned the former Arizona sheriff, Joe Arpaio. He moved to give police greater access to military weapons. He’s considering revoking a program that shields undocumented immigrants from deportation.
But there’s a common thread linking all of these moves together. “It’s identity politics,” Paul Frymer, director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University, told me. “[Trump]’s playing to a group of voters who feel disaffected as whites. It’s not their only identity, but it’s an identity that they identify with and that he’s targeting and exploiting.”
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To understand what Trump is doing, it’s important to first understand how many conservative white Americans feel about the state of US politics. The best description of that comes from sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.
Hochschild spent years with Tea Party members in Louisiana. Out of that experience, she came up with a theory to explain how many of them feel: As they see it, they are all in this line toward a hill with prosperity at the top. But over the past few years, globalization and income stagnation have caused the line to stop moving. And from their perspective, other groups — black and brown Americans, women — are now cutting in the line, because they’re getting new (and more equal) opportunities through various government services, new anti-discrimination laws, and policies like affirmative action. All of that builds resentment.
Trump Weighs Cuts to Coast Guard, T.S.A. and FEMA to Bolster Border Plan (March 2017)
With Trump's controversial moves and Hurricane Harvey, no one is mentioning that Trump was proposing to gut FEMA to build his wall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/us/politics/trump-budget-coast-guard.html
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering deep cuts in the budgets of the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency as it looks for money to ratchet up security along the southern border, according to a person familiar with the administration’s draft budget request.
The goal is to shift about $5 billion toward hiring scores of additional agents for Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as toward infrastructure to support a crackdown on illegal immigration at the border. A significant portion of the money would go toward erecting a wall along the border with Mexico, one of President Trump’s signature campaign promises.
To fund those efforts, though, the plan would seek significant reductions in other areas, including a 14 percent cut to the Coast Guard’s $9.1 billion budget and 11 percent cuts to both the T.S.A. and FEMA. The three agencies have played high-profile roles in the Department of Homeland Security’s post-Sept. 11 security architecture.
All told, the plan would increase the department’s budget by 6.4 percent, to $43.8 billion, for the 2018 fiscal year, also using savings from other executive branch departments to fund it.
Vox - Trump's idea that jobs will solve racism is just wrong
This idea is not just pushed members of the right. Some members of the left have argued that progressives should ignore social justice causes as "identity politics," and focus on economic issues pointing, ironically enough, to Trump's campaign even though Trump relied heavily on white nationalist themes.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/16/16153616/trumps-idea-that-jobs-will-solve-racism-is-just-wrong
President Donald Trump has a theory about how to overcome America’s racial divides — and no, it doesn’t involve him clearly and forthrightly condemning the violent white supremacist rallies being carried out in his name by avowed racists and neo-Nazis. It involves jobs.
“I really think jobs are going to have a big impact,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “If we continue to create jobs — over a million — substantially more than a million, and you see just the other day, the car companies come in with Foxconn, I think if we continue to create jobs at levels that I'm creating jobs, I think that's going to have a tremendous impact — positive impact — on race relations.”
In the context of Trump’s others remarks at that press conference — which saw him empathizing with white nationalist rioters in Charlottesville, Virginia, and defending monuments to the Confederacy — this might sound reasonable. It’s not a totally implausible theory, that the country becomes more tolerant during economic booms and that white Americans become more racially prejudiced during recessions or stagnation.
But the evidence for the theory is mixed at best. In many cases, it’s hard to see much correlation between objective economic conditions and the status of race relations.
538 - Democrats Have Their Own Challenges In Talking About Racial Issues In The Trump Era
After last year's election, there were many progressives who argued that Trump's victory was due to his focus on the concerns of the working class and that it was Democrats who were overly focused on "identity politics." In other words, white male resentment of the progress made by women, immigrants, and minorities was really based on their "legitimate" economic insecurities. Thus, for Democrats to win, they had to de-emphasize social justice and equal rights, and primarily focus on a populist economic agenda.
538 has a great article that states what should be obvious, that Trump won in large part by stoking racial and gender based resentments, rather than based on his economic agenda. This is why areas that were largely white that were not affected by immigration or trade still voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
Perhaps Democrats and Progressives need to stop running away from the subject of race and gender, but instead confront the issue head-on and inform people about how Trump is using racism, sexism and xenophobia to oppress working class white males by giving them a scapegoat and allowing them to feel superior even as Trump and Republicans take away their healthcare and benefits to fund tax cuts to the rich. Put another way, perhaps social justice is just the other side of the economic populism coin, and if we do not address Trump's hate honestly and with courage, Trump will simply blame the economic injustice we are trying to address on society's most vulnerable members.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-have-their-own-challenges-in-talking-about-racial-issues-in-the-trump-era/
The proposals themselves — and the FDR-style rhetoric surrounding them — show the Democrats trying to capture the populist appeal that seemed to drive both Trump and Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs last year. The “Better Deal” ideas are almost exclusively about economic issues and largely do not address subjects like immigration, abortion or racial discrimination.
Economic populism could work for Democrats. Trump, as FiveThirtyEight detailed after the election, was particularly strong in areas where residents had lower credit scores, men had stopped working, and where jobs are vulnerable to automation and outsourcing. Areas, in other words, where people have reason to worry about their economic future.
But here’s the big potential problem for Democrats: What if Trump’s victory — carrying more than 200 counties where former President Barack Obama had won in 2008 and 2012 — was not primarily driven by his populist economic appeals, but by his rhetoric and policies around race and identity issues instead? Trump’s denunciations of Black Lives Matter, his embrace of building a wall to keep Mexicans from coming to the U.S., and his proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the country were just as much a part of his campaign as his promises to bring back coal jobs.
In short, what if the Democrats’ problems with white working-class voters are more about them being white than working-class?
Salon - Stop blaming identity politics: With white liberals like these, who needs the right wing?
Bill Maher is another racial apologist who refuses to acknowledge that Trump is race baiting. Instead, Maher blames Democrats and minorities. How are Democrats going to win if they pretend that what happened in Virginia was not motivated by racial hatred and a white supremacist agenda?
This reminds of Republicans blaming rape victims for dressing inappropriately. Likewise, Maher and Sanders blame minorities, women and religious minorities for demanding equal rights, thus buying into Trump's idea that equality comes at the expense of white males.
In the 1960s, Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson both successfully addressed this issue head on and acknowledged that racism and scapegoating were used to oppress white males. Ignoring racism is not going to make it go away.
http://www.salon.com/2017/05/07/stop-blaming-identity-politics-with-liberals-like-these-who-needs-the-right-wing/
Is there any problem in America not the fault of liberal progressives? Has anyone actually ever met a liberal? What do these people do for fun? Sneer about cultural appropriation, burn American flags, and mock old women wearing crosses?
The idea that every political, social and financial crisis in the United States has a liberal origin is not only the propaganda of right-wing tantrums, but increasingly since the surreal election of Donald Trump, an obsession of liberals themselves. Myopically fixated on their own masochism and pathetic insecurity, they have wasted precious airtime, intellectual energy and freelance budgets of popular publications in attempts to explain how exactly they are to blame for 62 million Americans driving or walking to the polls to vote for a historically illiterate fool whose character actually appears in worse shape than his acumen.
Bernie Sanders, a leftist rather than a liberal, was one of the first to incoherently assign the presidential loss to the failure of “identity politics,” failing to recognize that Donald Trump is the most powerful practitioner of identity politics in the world. Mark Lilla, a Columbia University professor, acted as eloquent parrot to Sanders when he wrote that the Democrats’ fixation on diversity cost them the election. Recently, Bill Maher, whose derangement seems to advance with every television appearance, told Jack Tapper that the Democratic Party failed in 2016 because its leaders “made white people feel like a minority.”
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One has to wonder: With liberals like these, who needs reactionaries? Trump voters told pollsters that “diversity comes at the expense of whites” and that the federal government, throughout American history, has provided too much assistance to black citizens. Maher, Lilla and Sanders would not identify the problem with the white electorate as racism, but insufficient coddling and pandering from Democrats. The crucial aim of American politics, according to the increasingly widespread view of opposition to “identity politics,” is to make white cowards and bigots feel that they have no need for growth, and that they are the center of the universe.
Vox: Bernie Sanders and many Democrats keep confusing identity politics with tokenism
The tragedy in Virginia underscores what Trump and Republicans hide, and many on the left like Bernie Sanders ignores, Trump is practicing the ultimate form of identity politics and that is promoting the idea of white male supremacy. Yet, many on the left, choose to ignore this and give Trump and his supporters a free pass arguing that Trump is being a populist and listening to the economic fears of the working class. This is BS. What Trump is selling is not inclusion, but exclusivity:
Hopefully, folks on the left will not continue to minimize the degree to which Trump has relied on race and not to just oppress minorities, women and immigrants. Instead, the largest group being oppressed are white males who are being bamboozled by Trump selling them on scapegoats. In return, they happily give up their benefits, health care and job protections in return for the being allowed to feel superior and privileged.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/23/13715164/bernie-sanders-identity-politics-democrats-progressives
Sanders suggested something close to that in his speech, when he characterized “identity politics” as something Democrats might want to consider going “beyond.” He elaborated on this idea by warning that while having an African-American CEO is a “step forward,” it’s a very limited step if that CEO is also “shipping jobs out of his country and exploiting his workers.”
But to people who actually practice “identity politics,” Sanders is presenting a straw man. He’s describing tokenism — the idea that you need a certain quota of “token” members of marginalized groups for the sake of “diversity,” regardless of whether those members are actually qualified or actually represent their group’s interests.
The very idea of tokenism has some offensive implications, though. And it’s not at all what identity politics are really about.
Generally speaking, identity politics is about recognizing and acting on the fact that different groups can have different interests, goals, and policy needs. It doesn’t require pitting those groups against each other, although it’s often presented that way. Rather, it’s about acknowledging that American politics tends to treat the “white male” identity as the default — and every other identity as some sort of optional bonus feature.
NY Times - Many Politicians Lie. But Trump Has Elevated the Art of Fabrication.
My take is that Trump is simply taking advantage of the media bubble created by the corporate right wing media. For years, the corporate advertisers had fueled a right wing media bubble that was able to operate independent of the truth for the pure purpose of pushing propaganda. This allowed Republicans to push memes like "death panels" with relative impunity, though most still shied away from the daily, easily disapprovable lies that Trump traffics in. However, by the time Trump arrived, he realized that with this media apparatus, he could totally gaslight the Republican base by overtly pushing lies that appeal to their resentment and hatred.
The only way that Trump and Republicans will be defeated is if Trump's white male base wakes up to the fact that Trump is manipulating them and using racism not to grant them more privilege, but to oppress them by taking away their benefits and offering scapegoats in return.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/many-politicians-lie-but-trump-has-elevated-the-art-of-fabrication/ar-AApBjQc?li=AA5a8k&ocid=spartandhp
Fabrications have long been a part of American politics. Politicians lie to puff themselves up, to burnish their résumés and to cover up misdeeds, including sexual affairs. (See: Bill Clinton.) Sometimes they cite false information for what they believe are justifiable policy reasons. (See: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.)
But President Trump, historians and consultants in both political parties agree, appears to have taken what the writer Hannah Arendt once called “the conflict between truth and politics” to an entirely new level.
From his days peddling the false notion that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, to his inflated claims about how many people attended his inaugural, to his description just last week of receiving two phone calls — one from the president of Mexico and another from the head of the Boy Scouts — that never happened, Mr. Trump is trafficking in hyperbole, distortion and fabrication on practically a daily basis.
In part, this represents yet another way that Mr. Trump is operating on his own terms, but it also reflects a broader decline in standards of truth for political discourse. A look at politicians over the past half-century makes it clear that lying in office did not begin with Donald J. Trump. Still, the scope of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods raises questions about whether the brakes on straying from the truth and the consequences for politicians’ being caught saying things that just are not true have diminished over time.
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