Tag Archives: U.S. politics

Trump and organized crime

Here’s a long article on BillMoyers.com, with links to a lot of other articles, about Donald Trump’s alleged mob links.

While there are some financial subjects on which the media has dared to grill the billionaire — ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last month got Trump to deliver a blunt “no” when he asked about the Republican nominee-apparent’s repeated refusal to release his recent tax returns, something every other recent presidential candidate has done — there has been remarkably little interest shown in some of Trump’s less-than-savory connections.

One of the exceptions is Johnston, who, over the course of 27 years, has had ample occasion to pay attention to Trump’s finances and mob ties. He was not the first investigative reporter to do so. In 1992, Johnston favorably reviewed the longtime Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett’s highly unauthorized biography, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, which, in Johnston’s words, “asserts that throughout his adult life, Donald Trump has done business with major organized-crime figures and performed favors for their associates.” As Barrett said not long after Trump declared for the presidency last year, Trump’s life “intertwines with the underworld.” Barrett updates his treatment of Trump in a new digital edition calledTrump, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention…

Beyond ABC News’ Ross, TV has been even less eager to press inquires about Trump’s history of relations with organized crime. Nor have questions of Trump’s mob ties been much explored in other major news outlets. A notable exception: Johnston, who, in Politico last month, raised yet more questions. One was why Trump relied on ready-mix reinforced concrete construction (mob-controlled) to build his eponymous Fifth Avenue tower and subsequent New York buildings, although steel girders were the usual choice. Another was why, when seeking a license to build casinos in Atlantic City, Trump received special treatment from New Jersey gaming investigators, “Thanks in part to the laxity of New Jersey gaming investigators,” Johnston wrote, “Trump has never had to address his dealings with mobsters and swindlers head-on.” Wayne Barrett calls Trump Tower “a monument to the mob.” He writes of the “sweetheart deals” that delivered the concrete, and the special tax abatements that have continued to roll in for Trump. There, so far as the public is concerned, the matter has rested. Why do the major media, ordinarily eager to fight for their own angles on big stories, lag? Why do the dogs not bark and the chambers not echo?

where the money goes

I am somewhat familiar with how the U.S. federal government spends its money, but it is still instructive to see it broken down occasionally. Once social security, medicare, and interest are taken care of, the discretionary spending that is left is less than a third of the total. Of that, more than half is military. Veterans’ benefits make up another sizable chunk, nuclear weapons are partially funded under the energy budget, and it is not clear (to me at least) where intelligence and homeland security funding fall, so the real total for military and security is even larger than it appears.

May 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • There are scary and seemingly reckless confrontations going on between U.S. and Russian planes and ships in the Indian Ocean. And yet, it is bizarrely humorous when real life imitates Top Gun.
  • The situation in Venezuela may be a preview of what the collapse of a modern country looks like.
  • Obama went to Hiroshima, where he said we can “chart a course that leads to the destruction” of nuclear weapons, only not in his lifetime. Obama out.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • I try not to let this blog get too political, really I do. But in an election season I just can’t help myself. This is a blog about the future of civilization, and the behavior of U.S. political, bureaucratic, and military elites obviously has some bearing on that. In May I mused on whether the U.S. could possibly be suffering from “too much democracy“, Dick Cheney, equality and equal opportunity, and what’s wrong with Pennsylvania. And yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, TRUMP IS A FASCIST!
  • The world has about a billion dogs.
  • It turns out coffee grounds may not make good compost.

What is the U.S. up to in Japan?

Well, Marines and sailors on Okinawa are raping and killing women, as usual. And President Obama is visiting Hiroshima and sort of mentioning but not really apologizing for dropping nuclear weapons on it.

I think it’s nice that Obama visited Hiroshima. I thought it would have been a nice place to announce a major nuclear stockpile reduction effort early in his second term. Here’s what he had to say about that:

among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.

We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics.

That’s a bit disappointing to me. We could drastically scale them back, creating good will around the world and giving us some moral high ground to work with other countries to scale them back. We could tackle the emerging and possibly far scarier biological weapons threat. We could scale back our footprints in Japan and Korea and leave those rich, modern, democratic nations to provide for their own defense while staying engaged with them through trade and diplomacy.

I am an Obama fan though. He is someone who chose to do as much good as he could within the constraints of the system. It is possible that if he had pushed the system harder he might have gotten more done, but it is also possible it would have been counterproductive. We will never know. I like his last minute attempts to begin the process of putting some thorny historical issues to bed with Cuba, Iran, Japan, and Vietnam. In Vietnam in particular I am struck by how little ill will the public seems to bear us, when they might have the most reason to of all those countries. These efforts build some good will internationally and provide a better starting point for future leaders to build on than the same old stale Cold War positions we’ve had for the last 50 years.

Whitewater

Politico says Trump plans to dredge up the Whitewater scandal that dogged the Bill Clinton White House in the 1990s. The Whitewater scandal is just tiresome – you can read about it here. Basically it was a failed deal to develop some vacation homes in the hills of Arkansas. The actual scandal had something to do with the Clintons maybe twisting some arms to get loans to the developers. It was investigated throughout the 90s, a few people actually went to jail for short periods of time related to the loans or obstruction of justice, but there really was nothing even close to a case made against either Clinton.

Compare this to the plots to murder Fidel Castro, the U.S.-backed military coups against elected governments in Central and South America and all over Asia, the secret and illegal wars in Laos and Cambodia, Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, the invasion of Iraq, and this little “scandal” looks really silly. I hope the 90s are not starting up again, but you can see the beginnings of that with the “email scandal” and the “Bengazi scandal”. It has been refreshing that there has really been no whiff of scandal in relation to Obama, unless you count “Obama is a Muslim” or the birth certificate thing, but those are beyond silly, just childish. The drone strikes and special forces activity around the world are questionable of course, but then political “scandals” don’t usually involve these matters of actual life and death, do they?

“take on Wall Street”

According to the Washington Post, there is a new movement forming called “take on Wall Street”.

the group expects to galvanize support for breaking up the big banks and reviving a version of the Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented the combination of commercial and investment banks. It is also expected to push for a transaction tax, which would force some Wall Street traders, particularly high-frequency traders, to pay a fee every time they buy or sell a stock or bond.

 

terrorism and U.S. elections

This Washington Post article was written after the Paris attacks of fall 2015. It says that after a terrorist attack these things happen:

  • concerns about terrorism increase suspicion and even intolerance directed at migrants, refugees and Muslims.

  • On average, leaders who are Republican, male, and have relevant national security experience tend to be viewed as more competent.

  • terrorist threat advantages Republicans more than Democrats, in part because Republicans are traditionally perceived as better able to handle issues related to national defense.

  • Leaders who are both female and Democratic may…experience the most negative political consequences of terrorist attacks.

  • Hillary Clinton is likely to be bolstered by the foreign policy experience she gained as secretary of state and by her tendency to take stands that are more hawkish than those of Bernie Sanders.

  • Trump is a bit of a wild card, however. His bold style may be appealing in a context of threat. However, he may be hurt by his lack of any significant foreign policy experience

In other words, nobody knows. The general election is going to be interesting, and if god forbid there were to be major terrorist or geopolitical events it will be even more interesting.

Trumpism, fascism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, etc.

This article, from Salon write Robert Sharp, makes some interesting points about the Trump phenomenon. Even if he falls flat in the general election, what the experts say is inevitable (and I want to agree, but we have all been wrong about everything so far…), his success raises some disturbing questions about the mindset of the population and where the country could be headed in future decades. To summarize, the article says that by offering a return to past glory, but offering no specifics, Trump allows each person to hear what they want to hear, visualize their own personal utopia, and imagine that everyone around them agrees.

While Totalitarian regimes present themselves as harbingers of a better future, they do so by appealing to the perception of a glorious past that has since been lost due to the mismanagement of the existing politicians. Thus Hitler referenced a Wagnerian vision of Germany as the source of two of the world’s great Reichs in order to present his Third Reich as a continuation of German greatness. Similarly, Mussolini invoked the orderliness and domination of Ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy in order to restore an ancient pride that would lead to a new prominence on the world stage. Such leaders follow a common pattern, in which they blame any failures of their society on the incursion of Others, who lack the purity of the true members of the nation-state.

While the details differ, the call to action carries a consistent refrain: the totalitarian leader promises to make the country great again, to return it to past glories that have long since been lost.

In many ways, calling Trump supporters an analog to the rise of Nazi Germany is too easy, and far too dismissive. However, there is this one obvious similarity. Hitler and the Nazi party appealed to a people who believed that their Golden Age was past them, and that the world was moving on without them. The appeal of the nationalism that was offered was that it would allow a return to greatness, a necessary repeal of all of the policies, both externally imposed and internally permitted, that had led to their fall. Trump offers a very similar message, and he couches it in a way that allows his followers to fill in the blank. Whatever version of the good life they believe existed in their parents’ or grandparents’ day, that is the world that Trump plans to recreate. It is a compelling narrative, because it is their own narrative, and each individual gets to tell his or her own story while simultaneously believing that everyone else around them is thinking the same thing.

Scandinavian equality

Recently I wrote a post about how it seems ludicrous to blame the United States’s problems on an excess of democracy, if democracy is defined as equality. I also suggested that a reasonable definition of democracy should include a consensus building process, which is not just rule by majority vote, but a method to choose policies that almost everyone can accept even if they are not everyone’s first choice.

Well, the Scandinavian democracies at first glance seem to achieve equality, consensus, wealth, and peace. I want to believe in that, and to believe that we could learn its secrets and bring them to the United States. Here is a dissenting view though, in a new book about the Anders Breivik massacre in Norway:

After the Second World War, Scandinavia seemed to create model societies, free of corruption and intolerance, moral, compassionate and fair. The Danish people had bravely defied their Nazi occupiers throughout the war and saved almost all of the nation’s Jews. In 1944, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published a groundbreaking critique of the racism faced by African-­Americans in the United States. Myrdal’s study, “An American Dilemma,” greatly influenced President Truman’s executive order to integrate the United States military, the Supreme Court’s ruling on behalf of school desegregation, and the creation of the modern civil rights movement. In 1964, Gunnar Jahn, a former leader of the Norwegian resistance to the Nazis, handed Martin Luther King Jr. the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo. Jahn expressed the hope that “conflicts between races, nations and political systems can be solved, not by fire and sword, but in a spirit of true brotherly love.”

Today, the third-largest political party in Sweden has the support of racists and neo-Nazis. The leading political party in Denmark is not only anti-immigrant but also anti-Muslim. And the finance minister of Norway, a member of the right-wing Progress Party, once suggested that all the Romany people in her country should be deported by bus. In “One of Us,” the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad explores a dark side of contemporary Scandinavia through the life and crimes of Anders Behring Breivik, a mass murderer who killed 77 people, most of them teenagers, as a protest against women’s rights, cultural diversity and the growing influence of Islam.

I don’t necessarily buy this. There are problems in every country, and I think the countries of northern Europe (I would throw Germany and the Netherlands into the mix) have quite possibly done the most anywhere to try to solve them and create the best human societies they can. I don’t think they claim to be utopian, only to be striving for utopian ideals. Most impressively to me, they try to build consensus not by keeping outsiders at bay and trying to remain homogeneous, but by allowing diversity and then trying to deal with it, which is the harder path. Because they have chosen the harder but potentially more rewarding path, there is a visible right-wing backlash developing. I think something similar has happened in the United States – the intolerant minority has become more vocal and visible as we have become more tolerant and pluralistic overall. This doesn’t mean there aren’t vulnerabilities – if the intolerant element becomes large and active enough to gain real power, bad outcomes are obviously possible. Economic stagnation, violence and fear can all increase the risk of bad outcomes.