SILVER LINING?

 Silver Lining?

Is there a silver lining to the Trump presidency? Well, maybe not silver, but perhaps pewter? I think all would agree that our government has been, at best, narcoleptic managing our affairs of late. It seems to only wake up when it gets violently poked into action. September 11, 2001, was one such poke. January 20, 2025, it got poked again.

On September 11, 2001, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were hit by two planes and collapsed into rubble in under two hours. This was the work of terrorists. America had been attacked. Our response would happen over the ensuing decades. We would spend $8 trillion on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria related to 9/11. Globally, nearly one million people died. Another 38 million were made refugees.

On January 20, 2025, America swore in its 47th president. He held this job once before. This time around, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Donald John Trump became only the second president to serve a split term. He shares this distinction with Grover Cleveland. Other similarities would be that they were both from New York and both dodged the draft. Cleveland paid George Benninsky, a Polish immigrant, to take his place in the Civil War. Where they differ would be that Cleveland was renowned for his rectitude. Trump would, in this regard, be his direct opposite.

After his second inauguration, Trump began to “drain the swamp.” To be more accurate, he sprayed the swamp with Round-Up, doused it with expensive gasoline, and set fire to all he surveyed. He would literally declare himself to be king and above all regulation. A recent Trump quote was, “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD, Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”

The wanton destruction of the government in an uncoordinated fashion, the firing of federal employees, the invasion of private information, the conflicts of interest, the overreach of power, the usurping of authority previously held by Congress, and the resultant lawsuits and challenges, are all designed for their shock and awe value. He and his fellow oligarchs are tipping the financial scales in their favor while convincing the bewildered public that this is all for their benefit. When the tax cuts are implemented and paid for by raising the debt ceiling and eliminating government programs relied upon by his own constituency, it will be too late. It will be too late for, “I didn’t vote for THIS.”

So, where is the silver/pewter lining in all this? Well, in order to have a lining at all, you have to have a large dark cloud. Trump and friends are that dark cloud. The benefits will come many years down the road when our offspring look back and realize why they are in this predicament. Hopefully, things will still be reparable, and they can learn from their/our mistakes. Perhaps they can “build back better.”

This assumes that there will be enough of our original platform left to do this. Our almost 250-year-old foundation served us well for most of this period. It was just flexible enough to protect us from the frailty of human greed and the temptations of corruption for two and a half centuries. It was overwhelmed by complacency. It was deceived with promised baubles of an ill-defined better future.

For the time being, be prepared for more chaos. Republicans in office fear the reprisals of a vengeful demagogue. Only if that fear is overcome with a greater fear of losing their lofty positions of power at the ballot box, could they grow a backbone. Only then would they have the fortitude to follow through with the removal of the tumor growing inside the Oval Office.

Until then, we will all have to suffer the rambling rants of a man without policy, only whims, likes, and dislikes. A man making decisions based on emotion and last-minute ideas. He is a man not unlike the Dr. Hill character in the movie, Malice. Dr. Hill: “You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something: I AM GOD.”

Postscript: As an aside, President Grover Cleveland had five children. His firstborn was named Ruth. She died of diphtheria at age 13. The Curtiss candy bar, the Baby Ruth, was named after her.

Dead People

In a Washington remake of the movie, The Sixth Sense, Elon Musk is playing the part of Haley Joel Osment when he says, “I see dead people.”  In fact, he claims to have seen tens of millions of dead people who are receiving Social Security checks.  Had he done his homework before opening his Oval Orifice in the Oval Office he might have found some real facts.  Instead he decided to use his other orifice to pull out some wild numbers.

Some facts:

The United States has an estimated 101,000 people who are over 100 years of age.  Social Security had around 89,000 retirees receiving benefits in the 99+ bracket as of December 2024.  The Social Security Administration has issued over 500 million SS numbers over the years and their database contains millions in this database who were born more than a century ago.

Last year the SSA paid benefits to around 68 million.  Instead of looking at those collecting benefits, Musk and company were looking at the “Numident” that has info on every person who has ever been registered since the first check was issued on January 31, 1940.  That check was paid to Ida May Fuller in Ludlow, Vermont in the amount of $22.54.

In 2023, when Musk was just building Tesla’s and blowing up rockets, the SS agency’s inspector general found 19 million people over 100 without a recorded death.  Almost none of whom were collecting benefits.  It wasn’t worth cleaning up the database for these people as many died before the advent of electronic records.  The IG decided this was an “issue” and not a problem because these people weren’t collecting benefits.

America Will Survive

Yes, America will survive, but it will never be the same. Great civilizations throughout history have come and gone. The Incas, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans came and went.

The Inca Empire fell due to disease, civil war, and the Spanish conquest. The ancient Egyptian empire fell from economic decline, political instability, and foreign invasions. The fall of Ancient Greece was due to war, social unrest, economic decline, and Rome's rise. Rome fell due to political instability, economic decline, overexpansion, military overspending, barbarian invasions, civil wars, corruption within the government, and a weakening Roman army.

The people from these once-great civilizations have descendants living today. The Quechua-speaking people living in the Andes region of Peru, are the modern descendants of the Incas. Likewise, there are people alive today who can trace their lineage to other great civilizations. Some, like the ancient Romans, have been intermixed with other populations, but some DNA certainly persists.

Where America will be in the centuries ahead is anybody’s guess, but the history books will surely write about this period in terms of tectonic change. If you read above the causes for the downfall of those great civilizations, you see a pattern. Much of that same pattern has been replayed over the last decade. Some over the past few weeks. Its enablement began much earlier.

Missing from the list of causality for the fall of all the great civilizations of the past is complacency. Surely the people in each of these societies had been lulled into thinking things are as they should be. So too, America was asleep at the wheel when a wealthy class of individuals decided that they wanted and deserved even more.

 

It has been a predictable perfect storm. The fruit of our democracy was ripe for the picking. The speed of the harvest has been like a blitzkrieg. A con man of great skill in his trade, pulled together a coalition of vastly diverse followers, each with its own agenda. He promised them all what they wanted and they drank his poison Kool-Aid with delight.

One group likely to get what they asked for is the oligarchs because the con man is of their persuasion. Evangelicals will be satisfied only because they accept almost anything as God’s will. They will forgive him, his transgressions. The testosterone-fueled toxic masculinity crowd will certainly have some exciting violence to achieve his ends. The average MAGA supporter, however, will be like the frog in the slowly warming pot. They will believe the lies until it is too late, and an oligarch is being served frog legs with a nice chianti.

At my age, I shouldn’t care but somehow, I do. That I should have lived through the Golden Age of the 1950s in a united America where achieving the American dream was a possibility, but to also have lived long enough to see that dream turn into a nightmare, is an unbelievable tragedy.

God bless America and may you live to see this wrong righted.

 

 

 

 

My Fellow Americans

 

That three-word title has been the opening line from most of the important presidential speeches in my lifetime. President Franklin D Roosevelt may have been the first to use “my fellow Americans” in his Inaugural Address in 1933 (before my time). Previously, most Presidents opened their Inaugural Addresses with “fellow citizens”, “my fellow citizens”, or “my countrymen”.

The idea is that our presidents serve ALL Americans, not just those who agree with them. They were elected to office to serve not just the wealthy, they were elected to serve young and old, rich and poor, healthy and infirm. Additionally, in service to “my fellow Americans” does not exclude by race, creed, or sex.

Donald Trump, in his inaugural address, after basking in the applause awith “Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. (more applause.) Wow. Thank you very, very much.” He went on to name his VP, the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority leader, and presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, and VP Harris. He then addressed “my fellow citizens.” All of which was appropriate. Then he stated, “The golden age of America begins right now.” (more applause)

As Trump is not a historian, we have a 50-50 chance he meant “the Golden Age” and not “the Gilded Age.” America’s “golden age” was the 1950s, a time of economic growth and prosperity where industry and the working class flourished. It was also a time of influx of millions of European immigrants. Contrast that with “the Gilded Age” of the late 1870s to the late 1890s which was marked by economic expansion, materialistic excesses, and political corruption. It was a period of high concentrations of wealth with income disparity that was flaunted and contentious.

Given Trump’s actions over the first several weeks, I would have to say that he is leaning toward an updated version of the Gilded Age. Railroads and factories will be replaced by high-tech in this newest edition. Income disparity will flourish at the expense of the poor and a diminishing middle class.

Trump’s reference to “fellow citizens” did not mean “my fellow Americans.” His citizens are his fellow oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos. He has his SCOTUS-issued “Get out of jail free” card and his invertebrate congress cowering in the shadows hoping for some slice of the pie being baked with the Project 2025 recipe. That recipe includes copious amounts of lard for the anointed oligarchy to keep the crust flaky. Ours will be a gilded future, a thin outer layer of precious metal for the wealthy covering the surface of what lies hidden and silenced beneath.

Understanding Chaos

 

In math, chaos theory involves the study of how small factors influence the behavior of systems, the so-called butterfly effect. This non-linear dynamic idea analyzes the effects of systems moving from stability to instability with random outcomes. In politics, there is the absurd belief that disorder leads to strength. Toward that end, there is support for fascism, white nationalism, and even violence to “shake things up,” if for no other reason than to upset the status quo.

Chaos Theory explained:  Clear yet?

When chaos is your goal, your job is simple. A screaming toddler can bring chaos to almost any situation. Elect a person with an explosive temper and a reactional mindset, who sees the world only as a series of simple transactions, and the ensuing mayhem is assured.

Screaming toddler brings chaos

Add to that mixture, an unelected bored billionaire with no constituency, and chaos surely follows. Motivate that co-president with access to the government departments who are a major source of revenue for his businesses, and he will be like a spoiled kid in a candy store. If that billionaire is someone who grew up with white privilege in apartheid South Africa, who better to go after the racist boogeyman of DEI? Now give that chaos objective the cover story of eliminating waste in government and everybody is happy. Well, maybe not everybody.

Waste in government has been around since the beginning of, well, government. You can’t swing a dead cat around any government agency without hitting some wasteful spending. I’ve personally worked for city, county, state, and federal governments and always saw money wasted in one form or another. I also worked for General Motors and saw the same thing.

Since Donald Trump sees everything as transactional with winners and losers and lacks the emotional stability and skillset to solve a problem, his approach is predictable. Break out the wrecking ball, tear everything down, and start over. This works fine in real estate where you have a structure in disrepair. The simple solution is to raze the building and construct something bigger and better. The problem with our new landlord is that he is demolishing the building while it is still occupied. His psychopathy can’t be bothered with a little carnage and destruction.

Sherman's March Through Georgia

This president has begun his second term with a Sherman marching through Georgia attitude filled with spectacle, chaos, confusion, and abuse of power. His executive orders were outlined in the Project 2025 playbook and designed with shock and awe as an objective. These orders would defy common sense, were mostly unclear, and often illegal.

In his first term, he used tweets, and now he has resorted almost exclusively to Executive Orders. No more suggestions, hints, and wild rants on Twitter-X, now they are executive mandates. He has the added advantage of infallibility bestowed upon him by the Supreme Court as he cannot be held accountable outside impeachment. Even that measure could be fraught with danger and would require an invertebrate Congress to place themselves at risk. With jellyfish in the majority, impeachment is off the table

The toddler-in-charge just throws things up against the wall to see what sticks. I am reminded of the scene in The Odd Couple where Felix Unger corrects Oscar Madison who just called his dinner spaghetti. Felix tells him that it is not spaghetti but linguini. Oscar then throws the dinner plate against a nearby wall and declares, “Now it is garbage.” Today, much of what Trump “throws against the wall” also turns into garbage. Future generations will be left to clean up his mess.

Spaghetti, No, it's linguini.....Now it's garbage

Trump imposed tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico. There was outcry and mayhem. The tariff cover story was no longer about trade imbalance and jobs, it was now immigrants and fentanyl that was the problem. Both Canada and Mexico were hit with 25% tariffs even though total fentanyl seizures from Canada were 42 pounds for all of 2024, compared to 21,164 pounds from Mexico. Trump has since paused the Canada and Mexico tariffs.

The start-stop whiplash is still rippling in the marketplace. The stock market went down then back up. More chaos. The explanation for the on again off again with the Mexican and Canadian tariffs was that Trump got something in return. What he got was basically what the Mexican government promised to do under Biden and had been doing before the threat of a tariff.

While fentanyl is a scourge killing tens of thousands of Americans each year, tariffs aren’t paid by drug traffickers, they are paid by consumers. While Trump never mentioned that there would be pain associated with his immigration and tariff solutions, now he says that pain was always the plan. If these tariffs take effect and the retaliatory tariffs from these countries are put in place, they will be nothing more than a tax on consumer goods paid mostly by the middle class and poor. Billionaires won’t suffer much pain at all, oil imports were exempted so filling up their yachts won’t see much change.

Tariffs are merely revenue for the US General Fund that consumers will cover. They are just a tax by another name. Any slight reduction in income taxes would be offset by higher consumer prices. The income tax reductions for the wealthy, however, are another story. Shifting the tax burden to consumer goods while exempting selective big-ticket items, also shifts the tax burden away from the wealthy to be picked up by the non-wealthy.

Donald Trump has no ideology but does have an insatiable thirst for power and money. He has shown that he has ideas. Oh, he has so many ideas. They just pop into his genius head and his knee jerks with delight. They are just really bad ideas. These ideas are his solutions to problems, many of which are recognized by both political parties, but they are poorly considered “solutions” that do more damage than good. Other “solutions” are merely racist xenophobic red meat for a like-minded minority within the once-valid Republican party.

Chaos is the smokescreen providing cover for the wildfire beneath. When people bought into the wild promises of lowering inflation through government cost-cutting, removing immigrants from US jobs, and tariffs to bring manufacturing and industry back home, they were not told about the costs. Nobody told them their national parks would suffer. They weren’t warned that the social programs they relied on would go away. They weren’t told that controlling inflation would be forgotten in the wake of the tsunami of a man bent on revenge.

King Trump

Yes, the rogue wave of an angry man seeking reprisal and retribution on his perceived enemies has hit our shores, flowed up our mighty rivers, and destroyed all in its path. If waste in government was the tumor, most sane people would know that you break out the scalpel and remove it, you don’t eliminate it with a hand grenade. But our elected leader is not a surgeon and waste in government was never his real objective. He only needs to use a simplistic wrecking ball approach to provide the distraction for what is really happening. That is the removal of democratic principles and the establishment of his oligarchy where his financial supremacy is assured. In that light, chaos is beautiful. It is so good to be king.

A President Who Will Go Down in Infamy

 

FDR used the phrase, “a date which will live in infamy,” to describe the December 7, 1941, devastating attack by the Empire of Japan on US naval and air forces at Pearl Harbor at the start of World War II. Now we have a president who will live in infamy, but only if there are still accurate historical records. This assumes those records haven’t been destroyed or altered to present this current history in a more favorable light.

We have seen a plethora of irresponsible presidential directives that bend or break laws, violate the Constitution, or which are morally reprehensible, being advanced by our new leader. He has already abandoned his promise to fight inflation, now saying it is too complicated and that it was never going to be his priority.

He began his purge of government employees in keeping with the Project 2025 playbook that he claimed ignorance of during his campaign. Now he plans to eliminate IRS auditor positions, eliminate bank examiners at FDIC, and leave FAA air traffic controller positions vacant, all on the pretext of saving taxpayers money when the true beneficiaries are the billionaire class. If your goal is to dodge taxes, make risky get-rich-quick banking moves, and fly safely in your private jet, this might work out for you. Average Joe/Joanne, not so much.

He has enacted tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, the results of which have not been felt. Next up on his agenda will be his tax cuts, 50% of which will go to America’s wealthiest individuals at the expense of the nation’s poorest. This is not because the not-so-wealthy aren’t getting a modest tax break, but because this will all need to be worked into the budget. If you suggested that we could cut the defense budget, the sound you should hear is the wrong answer-buzzer. No, Medicare and Medicaid would be on the chopping block.

No matter how you spin this cut to the nation’s healthcare system, there is no way that it doesn’t gobsmack, astound, or flabbergast some of Trump’s poorest supporters. You don’t close down rural hospitals and avoid the repercussions. When people begin having a harder time accessing life-saving medications, chronic condition treatments, and acute illness care, those minuscule tax cuts won’t offset the losses of financial security and the burdens of more medical debt.

Who wants to be the congressman or congresswoman who needs to explain why such things happened on their watch? When the wealthiest presidential administration of all time, led by a sociopathic billionaire president, weighs the advantages of a tax benefit for them versus taking care of the economically disadvantaged populations, how do you think they will act? Will they take one for the team?

-insert canned laughter here-

[Fact: Medicare physicians have had their adjusted-for-inflation pay cut by 29% since 2001]

Banning books from libraries because you don’t like the contents. Removing public references to documents that may contain certain words you don’t like, such as equality, diversity, and inclusion. Rewriting history to eliminate the achievements of individuals who may have also contributed to advancements in equality or issues you now find distasteful. These are the acts of tyrannical leaders throughout history.

Efforts are currently underway to make our government better and more efficient with a Fox News host to head the military, a former heroin addict in charge of healthcare, and a backer of the January 6th insurrection in charge of the FBI. It looks like DEI now stands for Deranged, Egotistical, and Ignorant.

That the United States of America has now joined the infamous group of countries with tyrannical leaders who have abandoned the principles of freedom, is a sign of our democratic frailty. It exposes the risks inherent in an open and free society. Free speech means all speech, not just the ideology of the current leader. The fact that these values were part of our founding principles and our original purpose, and are now being abandoned, is maddening.

We might just sit back and say this will all be over in four years, he can’t legally run again. What makes anyone think that something as insignificant as the US Constitution would stand in the way of the new Fuhrer? My crystal ball is a bit cloudy and the flux capacitor in my DeLorean refuses to take me to January 20, 2030.

DIVIDE ET IMPERA

 DIVIDE ET IMPERA

The title is commonly known as divide and conquer. The more literal translation from the Latin is divide and rule. In warfare, it is a strategy to better your odds of conquest by dealing with a smaller resistance force. In politics, it is a strategy of gaining and maintaining power through divisive tactics. This approach can either exploit natural differences or create new ones to widen the divide. Divide et impera is the last of three political adages outlined in Perpetual Peace written by Immanuel Kant in 1795. The other maxims are Fac et excusa (Act now, apologize later) and Si fecisti, nega (If you commit a crime, deny it).

There is a one-hour short film produced in 1943 covering how Nazi Germany used the technique to its advantage. [the YourTube link is provided] Hitler told through his propaganda machine, his neighboring countries to the west that he had no intention of invading each of them to make them feel secure as individuals to keep them from uniting with Great Britain. He then invaded each of them. It describes his utilization of Fifth Column techniques where a smaller group infiltrates and weakens the larger group from within. It also describes his leveraging political corruption and greedy self-interest to weaken resistance to his advances.

YouTube Film

While I doubt that our current American Führer has read Kant, the authors of Project 2025 may have highlighted a few Perpetual Peace strategies. Some may have read the original Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf. They would not have read Kant for his stance against autocracy, but for his methodology to achieve democratic peace so they could exploit those for their own objectives.

In some adaptations of Kant’s theories, it was suggested that capitalism promoted peace because war was costly and unproductive. Conquest and imperialism were the antithesis of modern capitalism. Some envisioned a perpetual peace because public opinion would favor peaceful democracy over absolute monarchy. Such thoughts may have been good in theory, but current observations would prove them wrong.

Whatever their motivations, known only to them, the objective seems clear; the creation of a new all-powerful monarchy that could rightly be called the United States, Inc. There would be a CEO and a board of directors that would answer only to the shareholders and not the customers. This would be a financial entity created for profit where customers are merely consumers who provide the labor and income for the landed gentry (aka shareholders).

To accomplish this objective within the existing restrictions of a democracy, the divide-and-conquer method is expedient. Toward that end, religious enmity would be exploited pitting evangelicals against regular Christians, all religions against non-believers, and existing rifts between Muslims, Jews, Christians, atheists, etc. Racism, xenophobia, and the like would also be There would be name-calling with Dems, libs, et.al. as the enemy and the oligarchs labeled as the “good guys“ who will save the faithful from the demon left.

Beyond divide and conquer there are other strategies afoot that eliminate enforcement of existing laws. Get rid of the federal police force, aka The FBI. Stack the judiciary to include “friends with benefits.“ Control the message by marginalizing the traditional media and replacing it with corporate-owned social media. Turn the heat up slowly on the cooking pot and the frog (the people) won’t realize it is the main course.