Tag Archives: Trump administration

Is the Trump Revolution Over? by Paul-Martin Foss

Posted on January 28, 2018 | 1 comment

Has the establishment taken over the Trump administration? From Paul-Martin Foss at ronpaulinstitute.org:

A year after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, analysts and commentators are assessing both his performance in the first year of his presidency as well as the outlook for the remainder of his first term. Entering office as a surprise winner and a political neophyte, many people didn’t know just what to expect from Trump. Would he do what he pledged to do as a candidate, or was his campaign rhetoric just a lot of hot air to bamboozle enough people into voting for him? One of Trump’s most popular promises was to “drain the swamp” and, while the President has tried to make some strides in that respect over the past year, there are concerning signs that any swamp draining may be coming to an end.

Personnel Is Policy

One of the primary rules in politics is “personnel is policy.” What a politician says he’ll do is less important than who he hires to implement his policies. In many cases, the people he hires may not agree with his policies and may work to surreptitiously (or not so surreptitiously) undermine and co-opt him. We certainly see this on Capitol Hill all the time, where class after class of freshman Congressmen enters Congress pledging to fix the way Congress works. Yet time after time they get corrupted by the system in Washington. Why is that? It’s because of the people they hire.

Coming into office often with no experience of how things operate in DC, they rely on their respective party apparatuses to staff their offices. They’ll hire Hill veterans as their chiefs of staff and legislative directors, staffers who are more concerned with the future of their careers and who consequently do everything they can not to upset party leadership so that they can maintain their ability to work on the Hill and work the government/lobbying revolving door. We’re seeing much the same thing happening in the White House today too, as Trump continues to hire establishment Republicans who wouldn’t be out of place in a Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, or John McCain White House.

To continue reading: Is the Trump Revolution Over?

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Pakistan Says The US Is No Longer Its Ally (And It’s A Much Bigger Deal Than You Think), by Darius Shahtahmasebi

Posted on January 11, 2018 | 1 comment

There are some countries that are important simply because of where they are. Turkey comes to mind. Pakistan is another. It’s bordered by Iran, Afghanistan, India, China, and Tajikstan, an interesting neighborhood. Oh, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. From Darius Shahtahmasebi at theantimedia.org:

Donald Trump’s decision to ring in the New Year by simultaneously demonizing both Iran and Pakistan on Twitter has already backfired tremendously. Following threats that the U.S. would withhold aid to Pakistan, the U.S. confirmed it would withhold $255 million in aid (which has now become $900 million) and is now reportedly threatening a roughly $2 billion more, as well.

“We’re hoping that Pakistan will see this as an incentive, not a punishment,” a State Department official told reporters.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this recent animosity towards Pakistan has not gone over well. Pakistani Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif said in an interview that the U.S. has failed to behave as an ally, and as a result, Pakistan no longer views it as one.

If anything, Washington’s recent behavior has only pushed Pakistan into the open arms of America’s traditional rivals, China and Iran. China has long been providing financial and economic assistance of its own to Pakistan with plans to expand an economic partnership in the years to come.

China has already pledged to invest $57 billion in Pakistani infrastructure as part of the so-called “Belt and Road” initiative. Just last month, Pakistan announced it was considering a proposal to replace the U.S. dollar with the Chinese yuan for bilateral trade between Pakistan and China.

Following the Trump administration’s recent attacks on Pakistan, Pakistan confirmed that dropping the dollar was no arbitrary threat and immediately replaced the dollar with the Chinese yuan.

“Chinese investment in Pakistan is expected to reach over $46 billion by 2030 with the creation of a [China-Pakistan Economic Corridor] connecting Balochistan’s Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea with Kashgar, in Western China,” Harrison Akins, a researcher at the Howard Baker Center who focuses on Pakistan and China, told Newsweek.

In the middle of last year, it was reported that China was considering establishing its own naval bases in Pakistan. These reports began to immediately resurface again in the past week, though Pakistan has vehemently denied that any such naval base will be built (even though Chinese military officials were the ones to expose the plan to build a naval base at Gwadar Port, in Balochistan).

To continue reading: Pakistan Says The US Is No Longer Its Ally (And It’s A Much Bigger Deal Than You Think)

 

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US Administration Defends Its Right to Start Wars on a Whim, by Andrei Akulov

Posted on November 2, 2017 | 2 comments

Forget that separation of powers of stuff that if you’re old enough, you may have learned in an American Government class somewhere. If the president wants to make war, he just makes war. From Andrei Akulov at strategic-culture.org:

US Administration Defends Its Right to Start Wars on a Whim

The US Constitution says that only Congress can declare war for an extended time but there is a workaround. Congress approved the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), giving the president the authority to track down and destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The resolution stipulates that “The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” The resolution’s 2002 version gave President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Only 25 percent of the current members of Congress in the House and Senate were present when the current AUMFs were passed.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and several other Democrats are asking whether a new law authorizing the use of military force should be written. They are planning to introduce legislation that would prohibit Trump from starting a pre-emptive war against North Korea, absent an imminent threat or without express authorization from Congress. They call for one without a sunset date, saying that Congress needs to have a voice.

The deadly incident in Niger last month ignited a push among many members of Congress to update the legal parameters for combat operations overseas. The revelation that the US is at war in Niger, without Congress even knowing, was startling. This is the perfect illustration of the US’s permanent war posture around the world, where battles are waged with little or no public scrutiny and no congressional authorization. All previous attempts to ditch the old authorization and force Congress to craft a new one have failed. For years now, Congress has abdicated its responsibility to debate and vote on US wars.

This time lawmakers mentioned the possibility of using military force in crises involving North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, as well as the ongoing efforts against multiple militant groups that did not exist at the time the AUMF came into force. The AUMF authorized military actions only against al Qaeda, the Taliban and other perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

To continue reading: US Administration Defends Its Right to Start Wars on a Whim

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The Goldman Sachs Regency, by David Stockman

Posted on August 23, 2017 | Leave a comment

SLL doesn’t believe the current chorus that the sky is falling in on the Trump administration, but we’ll throw up a few representative articles. This ones from David Stockman via lewrockwell.com:

We aren’t shedding many tears over Steve Bannon’s departure. His ethno-nationalist and protectionist worldview are anathema to true notions of liberty, free markets and a minimalist state.

While Bannonism presented itself as a coherent alternative ideology to mainstream Big Government and globalism, it actually boiled down to a superficial and incoherent potpourri of cultural resentments and prejudices, economic shibboleths and amateur historical theorizing. Indeed, it appealed to the lumpen-intelligentsia of the alt-Right precisely because it proposed to replace the oppressive statism of the liberal status quo with a more virulent right-wing statism rooted in protectionism and nativism.

Notwithstanding the rotten essence of Bannonism, however, the firebrand self-promoter who was Donald’s chief strategist got it right in his parting shots at his internal White House enemies. In so many words, he correctly asserted that the nation will now be ruled by a Goldman Sachs Regency and a team of three generals—Kelly, McMasters and Mattis—–who embody the essence of Albert Einstein’s famous definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Time to buy old US gold coins

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon told the conservative Weekly Standard on Friday after his White House departure. “We will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over.”

So in the interim, the Donald will function, as Robert Wenzel aptly described it, as “something of a tweet master frontman” with the Vampire Squid seemingly riding higher than ever before—-even higher than in September 2008 when the clueless George W. Bush handed a blank check to the Wall Street bailout brigade at the Treasury led by former Goldman CEO (and Big Government liberal), Hank Paulson.

To continue reading: The Goldman Sachs Regency

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The Kagans Are Back; Wars to Follow, by Robert Parry

Posted on March 23, 2017 | 1 comment

Scientists should delve into the question of whether a proclivity to advocate for senseless, costly, and ultimately counterproductive foreign intervention is genetically or environmentally based. The Kagan family would be evidence of the former. From Robert Parry at strategic-culture.org:

The Kagan family, America’s neoconservative aristocracy, has reemerged having recovered from the letdown over not gaining its expected influence from the election of Hillary Clinton and from its loss of official power at the start of the Trump presidency.

Former Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders. (She is the wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan.)

Back pontificating on prominent op-ed pages, the Family Kagan now is pushing for an expanded U.S. military invasion of Syria and baiting Republicans for not joining more enthusiastically in the anti-Russian witch hunt over Moscow’s alleged help in electing Donald Trump.

In a Washington Post op-ed on March 7, Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a key architect of the Iraq War, jabbed at Republicans for serving as “Russia’s accomplices after the fact” by not investigating more aggressively.

Then, Frederick Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly Kagan, president of her own think tank, Institute for the Study of War, touted the idea of a bigger U.S. invasion of Syria in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on March 15.

Yet, as much standing as the Kagans retain in Official Washington’s world of think tanks and op-ed placements, they remain mostly outside the new Trump-era power centers looking in, although they seem to have detected a door being forced open.

Still, a year ago, their prospects looked much brighter. They could pick from a large field of neocon-oriented Republican presidential contenders or – like Robert Kagan – they could support the establishment Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, whose “liberal interventionism” matched closely with neoconservatism, differing only slightly in the rationalizations used for justifying wars and more wars.

To continue reading: The Kagans Are Back; Wars to Follow

 

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