Sunday, October 27, 2019

SQUANDERING AMERICA - STAGGERING TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT WITH NO WALL AGAINST NARCOMEX INVASION

TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE RICH…. and his parasitic family!
Report: Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit After He's Gone


 "Trump's alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect.  I'll leave you with 
this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."

TRUMPERNOMICS:

THE SUPER RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!

"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on top

of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of the supposed

recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent income


bracket."





Budget Deficit: Just Under $1 Trillion for 2019

Hundred dollar bills money pile.
Getty Images
2:59

The U.S. government spent $984 billion more than it collected in taxes and fees in fiscal year 2019, the Treasury Department said Friday.

That represents a 26 percent increase over last year’s $779 billion budget deficit.
When spending exceeds tax collections, as it has every year since 2002, the U.S. government borrows the difference. Interest rates on Treasurys have plummeted this year, suggesting that investors in the U.S. and abroad are eager to buy U.S. debt. A year ago, the yield on the 10-year Treasury was around 3.2 percent. It has since fallen to around 1.8 percent.
Higher spending pushed up the so-called budget deficit despite rising tax revenues. Government spending climbed 7.3 percent, to $4.4 trillion. Tax revenues climbed 3.9 percent, to $3.46 trillion, according to a report released by the Treasury Department Friday.
That brought the fiscal deficit to just under a trillion dollars for fiscal year 2019, which ended on September 30. A month ago, the fiscal deficit was running higher than $1 trillion. It fell in September because, as is typical in the final month of the fiscal year, the government collected more in taxes for the month than it spent.
Taxes subtract spending power from households and businesses, while government spending adds to overall demand–albeit often in ways that are very different from how the private sector would have spent the funds. When the government runs a budget deficit, it is essentially replacing demand subtracted from the domestic economy by spending that goes to buy imported goods and by Americans who save a portion of their income.
Some economists argue that higher deficits can cause households to increase their savings in anticipation of higher taxes to pay off the federal debt incurred. But the evidence for this is mixed at best. It seems unlikely that household savings decisions are actually driven by concerns that someday taxes might be higher because government deficits have increased.
What’s more, at least in recent decades, deficits do not appear to lead to higher tax rates. Deficits rose to record highs during the Obama administration, topping $1 trillion for the first time ever. But instead of rising under dollar Trump, taxes on households and businesses were cut.
The main economic danger posed by budget deficits is thought to be inflation, essentially the government driving prices up by competing with the private sector for resources. Data on inflation, which has failed to rise as high as the Fed’s 2 percent target, suggest that the recent rise in budget deficits poses no inflationary threat.
Deficits, particularly when interest rates are very low, may encourage the government to spend more, raising the risk of too much government intervention in the economy or wasted resources. Studies have shown that when households are made to pay for spending in the form of higher taxes, they are more likely to resist spending measures by voting for politicians who promise to rein in government. Deficits, because they rely on voluntary investment by savers rather than coerced taxes, appear to have the opposite effect.
In past years, high deficits have led to high stakes political showdowns and budget agreements aimed at cutting spending, increasing revenue, or both.

74 Miles of Border Wall Completed, 158 More Under Construction



Border Wall near the Calexico Port of Entry
Photo: U.S. Border Patrol/El Centro Sector
5:20

Border Patrol officials say communities along the border are safer following the completion of 74 miles of improved border wall systems. Those systems include 30-foot bollard walls, new border-access roads, lighting, and electronic surveillance. Construction on an additional 158 miles is underway with 450 miles scheduled to be completed by the end of 2020.

Construction crews under the direction of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued a report on Friday showing the completion of 74 miles of replacement border wall systems along the southwestern border with Mexico. Officials stated that 158 miles of additional walls are currently under construction and 276 miles are in a “pre-construction phase,” according to information provided to Breitbart News by CBP officials.
The new border wall system in Calexico, California, is the first section of replacement wall to be completed, El Centro Sector Assistant Chief Patrol Agent Joshua C. Devack said in a video presentation on Friday. “Since the border wall system was completed in this area, local business and commerce is thriving and areas once considered dangerous are now secure,” Devack stated. “In addition, overall crime in this area has been significantly reduced thus making our community a safer place to live and work.”
Since the completion of the border wall system in Calexico, CA, overall crime in the area has been reduced making the community a safer place to live and to work. Areas once considered dangerous are now secure. To learn more:







Embedded video



Prior to the new wall systems installed in January 2017, many sections of the border were relatively unsecured. Those areas consisted of landing mat walls that could easily be cut or climbed and other barriers designed only to stop vehicle traffic, Devack reported. The newly completed wall system includes 30-foot high bollard walls, new border-access roads allowing faster response by agents, additional lighting, and electronic surveillance systems, which provide advance warning and faster detection of border-crossing activities.
The new wall systems also provide safety for Border Patrol agents working alongside the wall.
In July, Border Patrol Agent Mike Matzke told Breitbart News in his capacity as president of the National Border Patrol Council’s Local 2554 in El Centro, California, “We’ve had people throw Molotov cocktails over the old landing mat fence and it was dangerous because we couldn’t see through it like we can with Trump’s new border barrier. Here in El Centro, we have the highest stretch of border wall on the entire Southwest border. Trump’s new wall section is 30-feet high,” Matzke said.
“A couple-mile stretch of Trump’s wall might not seem like a lot to some people, but it sure makes all the difference in the world to us,” Matzke said about the new wall in El Centro. “We are safer and our objectives are much easier to meet.”
Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan tweeted, “The frontline men and women of @CBP tell me walls work and help them do their job. That matters. And while not everyone who crosses the border is bad, this wall is important to protect USBP agents and to stop drugs and criminals from entering your communities.”
CBP spent approximately $292 million to construct 40 miles of new border wall systems in the San Diego, El Centro, and El Paso Sectors, officials stated. These walls replaced “dilapidated and outdated designs in high priority locations.” CBP funded an additional $49 million in the Rio Grande Valley Sector to build 35 border wall gates to close gaps in the existing wall systems. The gates are currently under construction, officials reported.
CBP officials report approximately 509 miles of new border wall systems are identified for construction projects. These projects will be funded by a combination of Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense funding and proceeds from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund. Those plans include approximately 141 miles of new primary walls, 24 miles of new primary levee walls, 68 miles of replacement primary walls for dilapidated designs, 205 miles for primary walls replacing existing vehicle barriers, 14 miles of secondary walls in place of dilapidated designs, and 57 miles of new secondary walls.
“Every new mile of new border wall system—including new barrier, technology, lighting, and roads—delivers new capability that will help my men and women immensely in their efforts to safely and effectively secure the border,” U.S. Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost said in a written statement.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for the Breitbart Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.


Trump’s Four Horsemen

The president is unleashing autocrats to create a Middle East apocalypse.

Texas tornadoes are potentially caused by the “flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil,” according to the Butterfly Effect theory. Determining the ultimate cause and effects in weather is a tough call, however, given how many random physical factors ultimately come into play. But it’s fascinating to think that a distant and peacefully fluttering butterfly has so much potential power.
Easier to determine is how one man’s wanton tongue wagging and temper tweeting can not only cause a political storm but has now unleashed the four horsemen of a modern regional apocalypse: Turkish President Recep ErdoÄŸan, Syrian President Bashir al Assad, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the ever-present Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Donald J. Trump, in his “great and unmatched wisdom,” has shown that not only can he distract a domestic electorate but that the power of his presidency can create limitless distant chaos, death and destruction with the tap of a thumb and the flip of a finger. Now that’s power.
Trump’s causal tweet-to-terror relationship reanimated the biblical fearsome four horsemen who, in their initial iteration, represented Conquest, War, Famine and Death. This is no small feat. In one feckless action, the president of the United States has whipped up the apocalyptic forces that one hoped the world’s most powerful man would instead be able to tamp down.
The first horseman rode in, chuffed and bare-chested on his nag, a vision of strength and wearing the religious symbols of a loving God. But in the form of Putin, this rider drew behind him a fierce and unmerciful flock of jet-powered birds dropping bombs on the sick and infirm, raining explosive charges on targeted Syrian hospitals both to sow fear and remind the beleaguered recipients of his desire for conquest—that he alone can decide individuals’ fate.
Turkey’s ErdoÄŸan galloped in as the second horseman, but always saw himself as the first to plow the field that borders his earthly realm. He, too, seeks conquest, but initiates this latest war against not only Kurds, but the rest of humanity. His steed leads both mechanized infantry and coordinated shelling. Irregular troops, mercenaries and retributive forces walk the plains to find families it can force to flee. Contemptible men seek the already suffering in order to show them the real meaning of torture. They reveal their true colors and cruelty when a bound and frightened prisoner must not only face a Geneva Convention-breaking level of humiliating indignity, but is ultimately put down like a dog in a ditch. For Armenians, this is a tragically familiar story.
Horseman Assad, the “Butcher of Damascus,” initially came to his people hidden, Trojan horse-like, in the form of a healer, an ophthalmologist who presumably once took the Hippocratic Oath to “First, do no harm.” Instead, he rode his father’s coattails and despotic style to defy the healing gods and apply his brutal hand to blind a nation to the distant freedoms it could once see. His marauders now ride roughshod with Russian ravagers over territory where a few short days ago American troops balanced a relative peace. Assad enforced a famine that starved his opponents and deprived them of medical supplies. He now has civilian enemies on the run while his starved dogs of war eat from the abandoned American tables. As a result, we all taste the bitterness of Trump’s dishonorable retreat.
Let us not forget the final of the four: Iran. America’s president effectively invited the Persian potentate to come to town, enlivening his proxies and apostles of death. Ayatollah Khamenei keeps his robes clean while he deploys merciless men who seek to extend his revolution from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. They never left Assad’s side and never lost sight of completing their Shia crescent. Iraq had already entered Iran’s sphere of influence; Assad was always Tehran’s partner in crime. A policy-indifferent Trump who, willy-nilly, dumps allies and revokes treaties has created another opening to an empire-oriented Iran with great ambitions, educated people, oil reserves aplenty and a willingness to flaunt its confederates’ firepower, whether with refinery-destroying drones or ship-sinking stealth. The Ayatollah is on a roll.
Lo and behold this prophesy: The four horsemen of the regional apocalypse are revealed to be upon us now. Neither the desire to rein them in by Trump’s handwringing congressional sycophants, nor the post-American retreat media spin, nor any post-tragedy justification from he who unleashed the beasts can lasso them back into the stable.
Trump catalyzed a war “7,000 miles away” in a “land that has nothing to do with us.” He let his tweet fly. The Butterfly Effect has whipped up the winds of war that are now sweeping across the Middle East in renewed violence. Let us pray that they do not grow and gust at biblical proportions.



Trump shifts from ending “forever wars” to sending tanks into Syria’s oil fields
US Defense Secretary Mark Esper Friday confirmed that Washington would leave military forces in Syria to maintain control of the country’s principal oil and gas fields.
The Pentagon is “considering how we might reposition forces in the area in order to make sure that we secure the oil fields,” Esper said. His remarks came at the close of a meeting of NATO defense ministers that expressed bitter resentment within Europe over US President Donald Trump’s green lighting of a Turkish invasion of northeast Syria earlier this month along with his announcement that US troops would be pulled out of the region.
American military convoy stops near the town of Tel Tamr, northern Syria [Source: AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad]
While refusing to “get into details,” Esper said the oil field deployment “would include some mechanized units.”
Newsweek magazine has reported that the plan drafted by the Pentagon calls for the deployment of “half of an Army armored brigade combat team battalion that includes as many as 30 Abrams tanks” along with roughly 500 US troops.
The Pentagon’s plan makes a mockery of Trump’s demagogic claim that his administration was putting an end to Washington’s “forever wars” and pulling US forces out of Syria.
The escalation of the US military presence in oil fields located in Syria’s eastern province of Deir al-Zour will also create a situation of extreme instability and the threat of a potentially catastrophic war under conditions in which Russia is deploying forces to the Turkish-Syrian border. Syrian government troops are also moving into areas that had previously been controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces—consisting primarily of the Kurdish YPG militia—which served as the Pentagon’s proxy ground troops in the so-called war on ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria).
Moscow announced on Friday that some 300 more Russian military police had arrived in northeastern Syria after having been transferred from Russia’s southern republic of Chechnya. They are to patrol most of the 273-mile Syrian-Turkish border, outside of the areas that were seized by Turkey's armed forces during the invasion carried out earlier this month in the northeast, along with the northwestern Afrin district that was occupied by Turkey during a previous invasion last year.
Under an agreement reached earlier this week between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, the Russian troops are also tasked with overseeing the pullback of Kurdish YPG militia units to positions 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of Syria’s border with Turkey. Erdogan has vowed that after next Tuesday, if the Kurdish units remain in the border area, Ankara will resume its military offensive.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed that if the Kurdish forces did not withdraw, they would be left “face to face with the Turkish military,” because the Russian troops “wouldn’t stand between them.”
Other Russian units, equipped with armored vehicles, have already taken up positions in the border area, as have columns of Syrian government soldiers. Moscow has declined to say precisely how many troops it has deployed in the area.
Trump signaled his shift over keeping US troops in northeast Syria after coming under a barrage of criticism directed at his pullout order by both the leadership of the Democratic Party, which is committed to continuing the Syrian intervention initiated under the Obama administration, and sections of the Republican Party. This was joined with an unprecedented wave of denunciations by retired US military commanders, whose intervention expressed a near-mutinous reaction within sections of top brass.
According to NBC news, the US president was convinced to change his decision after a briefing by Jack Keane, a right-wing retired general who served as an adviser in the US “surge” in Iraq under President George W. Bush and has since become a multimillionaire as the chairman of the company that manufactures Humvee military vehicles as well as by sitting on the boards of other arms corporations. Keane is also a paid commentator on Fox News.
Keane was one of those who denounced Trump’s withdrawal order as a “betrayal” of the Kurds and a “strategic blunder”. The principal concern is that it would weaken the offensive against Iran and Russia, the powers that constitute the main impediment to the unfettered control over the oil-rich and strategically vital Middle East, sought by Washington through successive wars since 1991.
According to NBC, Keane pitched the proposal to maintain a US presence by showing Trump a map of the area being evacuated by US troops, highlighting the oil and gas fields. The US president, who previously suggested that Washington should have kept the oil fields in Iraq to “reimburse” itself for its invasion and destruction of that country, responded favorably.
Trump first signaled his about-face on Syria on Monday, when he announced at a cabinet meeting: “I always said if you’re going in, keep the oil. We’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, so that they have some cash flow. Maybe we’ll get one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”
The idea that a major US oil company has an interest in going into Syria to illegally exploit its rather modest resources in a war zone is as absurd as the claim by Defense Secretary Esper that US troops are being deployed to the oil fields to prevent them falling into the hands of an already defeated ISIS.
The purpose of the US deployment is to deny these resources to the Syrian government and stymie any attempt to reunify and reconstruct the war-torn country. It is also aimed at confronting Russia and Iran, which have backed the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
From the outset of the CIA-orchestrated war for regime change in Syria, Washington and its allies have sought to deny Damascus access to Syria’s domestic energy supplies. Initially, the oil and gas fields fell under control of Islamist militias led by the Al Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, which served as the main shock troops in the drive to overthrow Assad.
While Al Nusra controlled the fields, the European Union lifted sanctions on Syrian oil, allowing the Al Qaeda affiliate to finance itself by exporting Syrian oil at rock-bottom prices.
The fields subsequently fell under the control of ISIS and then were taken by Washington’s Kurdish proxies.
The movement of US tank units into the oil fields is the clearest demonstration that the Trump administration is committed to continuing the more than eight-year-old war for regime change that has claimed the lives of over half a million people, while forcing nearly half the population, some 11 million people, from their homes.
At the same time, the US deployment is directed at escalating US military aggression against Iran, pushing the Middle East further toward the brink of a region-wide war.
The threat of a direct confrontation with Russia under the conditions of destabilization created by the Turkish invasion and partial US withdrawal, along with the strengthened Russian presence in northeast Syria, will now be greater than ever.
In February of last year, an attempt by a column of Syrian government forces supported by Russian military contractors to move into the area of the oil fields was meant by devastating US air strikes in which at least 100 were killed. Under the present conditions, a similar action could provoke a direct military conflict between the world’s two major nuclear powers.


Trump Breaks His Pattern 

and Retreats on All Fronts
When acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney stepped to the mic on Thursday to address the press corps, he thought he’d be creating controversy by announcing that the 2020 G-7 conference would be held in one of the president’s own resorts. He was correct about that, but he did far more damage by his admission that there had been a quid pro quo of dirt on the Democrats in exchange for military aid to Ukraine, and that we should all just “get over it.”
White House ally Sean Hannity was unimpressed:
“What is Mulvaney even talking about?” Sean Hannity, a Fox News host and confidant of the president’s, said on his radio show Thursday afternoon, referring to what he called the acting chief of staff’s “idiotic interpretation of things.”
“I just think he’s dumb, I really do. I don’t even think he knows what he’s talking about,” Mr. Hannity said.
It won’t be possible to undo the damage from the Ukraine admission, although Mulvaney made a very unsuccessful attempt to reverse his position during a Sunday appearance on Fox News. Yet, as the New York Times reports, the decision on the G-7 conference proved even more immediately untenable.
The president first heard the criticism of his choice of the Doral watching TV, where even some Fox News personalities were disapproving. By Saturday afternoon, his concerns had deepened when he put in a call to Camp David, where Mr. Mulvaney was hosting moderate congressional Republicans for a discussion of issues facing them, including impeachment, and was told the consensus was he should reverse himself. Those moderates are among the votes Mr. Trump would need to stick with him during an impeachment.
By Saturday night, the president was convinced they he couldn’t stick by his decision on the G-7 and reversed himself on Twitter. He blamed the media and the Democrats, of course, but it was Republican pushback that forced his hand. The same can be said of his decision to leave some troops in Syria, where his announced withdrawal had caused immediate humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophes.
These three reversals, on Syria, Ukraine and his Doral resort are significant because they represent a break from the crisis management style Trump learned from his old friend Roy Cohn.
Beneath the surface, though, Trump had connections that help explain how he came to launch a demagogic political career based on the racist and transparently inane theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to serve as our president.
First among them was Trump’s long relationship with the lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn is most famous for his role as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In that role, he led the aggressive and unethical red-baiting Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations until the U.S. Army pushed back and he was forced to resign in August 1954. In private practice, Cohn represented prominent New Yorkers like la cosa nostra crime boss Carlo Gambino, Francis Cardinal Spellman and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, but was frequently at odds with the law. Over the years, he won four separate acquittals on charges varying from conspiracy, securities fraud, bribery, and obstruction of justice before finally being disbarred in 1986 as he was dying of HIV. What Cohn learned from McCarthy was the value of being dramatic and the utility of exaggerated claims and accusations. He passed these lessons along to Donald Trump.
According to Trump, he first met Roy Cohn in a members-only Midtown establishment called Le Club. It was 1973, and the government was accusing the Trumps of discriminatory housing practices. He asked Cohn, “The government has just filed suit against our company saying that we discriminated against blacks. What do you think I should do?” Cohn advised him to “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove you discriminated.”
The Trumps retained Cohn to represent them and Donald became his student. According to author Sam Roberts, it was from Cohn that Trump learned his now familiar three-part strategy for handling litigation which he has now transferred to political combat: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.
If nothing else, it’s fair to say that Donald Trump doesn’t like to reverse decisions or admit mistakes. It goes against his training and he considers it a losing strategy. Even when he is convinced that surrender is the best option, he resents the advice and eventually turns on the advisers.
Yet, the president finds himself in a very vulnerable position now, and he can’t afford to ignore the opinions of congressional Republicans if he hopes to win an acquittal in his inevitable trial in the Senate. Already, he’s almost certain to see some defections from House Republicans during the vote on impeachment. The more bipartisan the impeachment vote is, the harder it will be for Republican senators to paint the whole things as a partisan witch-hunt.
This is why Trump has been in full retreat over the last week. Congressional Republicans did not consider his positions on Syria, Ukraine and the G-7 defensible and so the lines were abandoned and mitigation efforts were attempted.
It’s not a promising place to begin what will probably prove to be the worst week yet for Trump and his horrid presidency.



No comments: