This Week in Trumpworld (3/12)
David Shasha
Julian Assange Wants to “Help” Silicon Valley Tech Firms!
After Assange did his usual due diligence for his handler Vladimir Putin and his ally Donald Trump he announced that he was ready to “help” tech firms in Silicon Valley fight the CIA:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/assange-enlists-silicon-valley-anti-secrecy-fight
So it is that Assange is not only a useful idiot for Trump and Putin, he serves as his own useful idiot by trying to distract from all the accusations that WikiLeaks is working to aid and abet the New World Fascism.
While Assange is going after the US Intelligence community, he is not touching either Trump or Putin.
Indeed, where are those tax returns?
One assumes that Assange does not care.
The Hard Left Continues to Defend Assange, Russia, and Putin
For those who still do not believe that the radical Left is still on the wrong side, there is this from Friday’s Counterpunch:
Dave Lindorff’s article seeks to attack the Democratic Party while defending Assange and Russia, and, by implication, Trump.
It is yet another example of the delusions of the radicals and shows where their true priorities lay.
“Fake News” and the Arrest of Juan Thompson
As Trumpworld Anti-Semitism continues unabated we have learned of an arrest in the bomb threat scares involving the ADL and American JCCs:
Thompson is a copycat who imitated those who actually thought up the idea in the first place.
We still do not know who those people are.
It is intriguing that the nut-job Thompson has been identified with the “Fake News” industry, which has been connected to Trumpworld:
So now we have a connection between the Trumpworld Anti-Semitism and “Fake News” which stands as a sign of the new deranged times that we are now living in.
Who believed that we would be talking about these things at this point in American history?
This is What Happens When You Do a Photo-Op with Trump
There has been much debate over whether people summoned by the New Duce should actually visit with him, even when it appears that the meeting is being used as a photo-op without any real serious intent.
Such seems to have been the case with Trump’s photo-op with the presidents of over 100 Historic Black Colleges:
http://www.theroot.com/morehouse-college-president-we-got-played-1792916254
The president of Morehouse College puts it this way:
Many had high hopes about this meeting. There was much advance chatter about it being “historic,” and there were many signals from key Trump administration officials that they would surprise HBCUs with favorable treatment. Given my experience in the Obama administration, I knew this would require an extraordinary announcement. Why? Because I knew that President Obama had invested $3 billion more in HBCUs in his first six years than President Bush invested in his final six years. Therefore, since President Trump pledged to “do more for HBCUs than any other president has done before,” we could have reasonably expected him to get started by announcing at least an additional $500 million to HBCUs…this year! And beside the expectation of new funding, there was advance talk of changes like an aspirational goal of 5 to 10 percent for federal agency funding to HBCUs, a special HBCU innovation fund, large boosts in Pell Grant and Title III funding, and extra tax breaks for those in the private sector who contribute to HBCUs. But, instead of the long-awaited executive order containing or signaling any of those outcomes, the key change is a symbolic shift of the White House HBCU Initiative from the Department of Education to the White House. It is not possible to measure the impact of this gesture anytime soon, if ever.
The students of these colleges have taken notice and called their presidents out for attending the meeting:
What a mess.
This is how things go when you trust Donald Trump!
Republicans Formally Reject the Healthcare Plan They Created
The racist drumbeat coming from Republicans to kill Obamacare, the plan incubated in Republican-Conservative thinktanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and instituted by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, has finally led to a purported replacement plan by House Republicans:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/affordable-care-act-obamacare-health.html
The first Republican plan, tantalizing misnamed “Obamacare” in order to sow antagonism against it among the White racists, was indeed deeply confusing and cumbersome, but it did attempt to ameliorate some of the problems in our dysfunctional healthcare system, the most expensive and underperforming in the developed world.
The new “plan,” perhaps better called a massacre, benefits the rich through a system of tax credits based on age and not income. Insurance premiums must be paid out of pocket without any direct government subsidies as beleaguered working Americans will have to wait for the tax credits to kick in.
More than this, the plan is a boon to insurance companies.
The proposal allows big companies not to insure their employees, will force many people who cannot afford their premiums off their current plans and then fine them for lapses in coverage, and raise rates for many, especially older Americans.
We continue to lament the fact that there was no attempt to institute a Single-Payer system, as President Obama adopted the previous Republican plan, which now leaves us with an even worse Republican plan!
Here is a breakdown of the winners and losers from The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/american-health-care-act-obamacare-cliff/518769/
I was particularly intrigued to read David Brooks’ discussion of the matter:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/opinion/the-republican-health-care-crackup.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
While he generally gets Trump’s duplicity right, he does not seem to know that there has in fact been government healthcare for a very long time. It is called Medicare. Senior citizens love it. And it works very well thank you very much. It works much better than private sector insurance which has helped to undermine the American economy while providing some of the most inefficient healthcare coverage when compared to other systems in the developed world.
As Brooks correctly states, the proposed Republican plan will in the end help those who need it the least while once again sticking it to the poor and Middle Class. It has been designed to allow insurance companies to continue to jack up rates and do mostly whatever they want.
It is in effect the Republican Death Panels that have been promised:
We will of course recall that heartwarming moment in the 2011 Tea Party presidential debate when the crowd chanted “Let Him Die!” referring to an uninsured American.
With all the blather from Republicans over Obamacare “death panels,” it is clear that it was simply a duplicitous transference of their own wish to see their fellow Americans suffer as they continue to serve the 1%.
Indeed, it is all about the rationing of healthcare in a way that will provide maximum profit for the commercial providers and insurance companies.
This is how low America has descended in the Age of Trump.
David Shasha