Trump On Unions Quotes

They want us to be afraid. They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes. They want us to barricade our doors and hide our children. Their aim is to make us fear life itself! They want us to hate. They want us to hate 'the other'. They want us to practice aggression and perfect antagonism. Their aim is to divide us all! They want us to be inhuman. They want us to throw out our kindness. They want us to bury our love and burn our hope. Their aim is to take all our light! They think their bricked walls will separate us. They think their damned bombs will defeat us. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that my soul and your soul are old friends. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that when they cut you I bleed. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that we will never be afraid, we will never hate and we will never be silent for life is ours!

The Trump marriage veered furthest away from my concept of the union — and surprised me most as a student of American politics. Donald and Melania seem to inhabit separate realms and to come together when necessary, when one could not move forward without the other. The presidency was one instance in which they were forced into a joint undertaking. If my choice of language sounds businesslike, that’s because that’s how I’ve come to view the Trumps. Having learned more about each partner’s history, I believe they are two highly ambitious individuals who benefit from their partnership. It’s a transaction: he gains a beautiful woman on his arm, a solid-seeming marriage, a son, and a savvy adviser. She gains wealth and international cachet.

The "change" that Trump is likely to bring will be harmful or worse, but it is understandable that the consequences are not clear to isolated people in an atomized society lacking the kinds of associations (like unions) that can educate and organize.

But, the source explained, this fit Putin’s larger strategic vision: “to destroy NATO, destroy the European Union, and seriously harm the United States.

Now is not the time for bigots and racists. No time for sexists and homophobes. Now, more than ever, is the time for ARTISTS. It’s time for us to rise above and to create. To show humanity. To spread hope. We must prevent society from destroying itself, from losing its way. Now is the time for love.

It is my considered opinion, that for Britain and Europe, and for liberal democracy across the entire world as a whole, Britain’s departure from the European Union in the time of Donald Trump, and Britain’s consequent unqualified dependence on the United States in an era when the US is heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism, is an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none.

The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure. Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems.

It is going to be too easy for things to start feeling normal—especially if you are someone who is not directly impacted by his actions. So keep reminding yourself: This is not normal. Write it on a Post-It note and stick it on your refrigerator, hire a skywriter once a month, tattoo it on your ass. Because a Klan-backed misogynist internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address. And that is not normal. It is fucked up.

Did they know what Communism, “Bolshevism,” was? They did not; not my friends. Except for Herr Kessler, Teacher Hildebrandt, and young Horstmar Rupprecht (after he entered the university, in 1941), they knew Bolshevism as a specter which, as it took on body in their imaginings, embraced not only the Communists but the Social Democrats, the trade-unions, and, of course, the Jews, the gypsies, the neighbor next door whose dog had bit them, and his dog; the bundled root cause of all their past, present, and possible tribulations.

From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch-and-kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the President’s rise—I was an active and eager participant.

In modern politics, liberal leaders are forgiven for drone bombing as long as they’re cool with gay marriage, while on the right, enacting policies that devastate families and stable communities was cheered on at any cost as long as it dealt a satisfying blow to the trade unions, as we saw during the Reagan and Thatcher years.

Federalist No. 68, written by Alexander Hamilton, warned that the “most deadly adversaries of republican government” would come “chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” “How could they better gratify this,” he added, “than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?

Every one I talk to is in favor of putting negroes in the army and that immediately … I think slavery is now gone and what little there is left of it should be rendered as serviceable as possible.” For her part, Mary Chesnut lamented, “If we had only freed the negroes at first and put them in the army—that would have trumped [the Union’s] trick.

It is my considered opinion that for Britain and Europe, and for liberal democracy across the entire world as a whole, Britain’s departure from the European Union in the time of Donald Trump, and Britain’s consequent unqualified dependence on the United States in an era when the US is heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism, is an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none.

President Trump displays less finesse than a bull in a china shop. Just as Prime Minister May managed - after many months of bitter wrangling - to reach a degree of consensus on what Britain's future relationship with the EU should look like, in comes the marauding beast upending all the finely balanced Wedgwood. Britain may well need some form of future trade deal with the US but it certainly isn't one that should be struck with the co-author of a lame business book more appropriately named 'Art of the Steal'.

A billionaire plutocrat is now sitting in the White House. Democracy has been overthrown. A right wing coup d’état has taken place. The Confederacy has defeated the Union. Racist Nazis are now running America, calling themselves “patriots”. They are the enemies of the People, the enemies of America, and the enemies of the world. The time has come to get rid of the global elite and their brainwashed right wing puppets. The time has come for the people to take control of their own destiny. We need to reboot the world.

I talked to Llewellyn and got a thick briefing packet with the key arguments on both sides. The problem, for those who wanted to stay in the EU, was that many of the arguments for Brexit were built on lies: about how much the UK paid into the European Union; about how Brexit wouldn’t hurt the British economy. Another problem was that the Brexit campaign was tapping into the same sense of nationalism and nostalgia that the Trump campaign was promoting back home: the days of Churchill, the absence of immigrants and intrusive international institutions. The arguments for staying in the EU were grounded in facts, not emotion: The EU was Britain’s largest market. The EU offered Britain a stronger voice in global affairs. Even the name of the campaign—Remain—sounded like a concession that life wasn’t going to be all that you hoped it would be.

The United States now has the highest level of income inequality in the industrialized world, a fact that some regard as “a threat to American democracy.”5 Meanwhile, the public’s revolt against globalization, which many blame for the loss of jobs and the hollowing out of the middle class, culminated in the British vote to exit the European Union and the election of political neophyte and outsider Donald Trump as US president in 2016. Trump’s ascendancy, in particular, represented a rebuke of the deeply entrenched political establishment that had dominated US politics for decades.

Virtually every inner city of size in America—New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Newark, Atlanta—is 100 percent controlled by the Democrat Party and has been for fifty to a hundred years.5 These cities account for the majority of the homicides and robberies in America, for the lion’s share of urban poverty, welfare dependency, and drug addiction, and for a majority of the failed schools where, year in and year out, 40 percent of the students don’t graduate, and 40 percent of those who do are functionally illiterate. No reforms to remedy this unconscionable situation are possible, moreover, thanks to the iron grip of Democrat teacher unions who run the schools to benefit the adults in the system rather than their student charges.

Everyone in America understands ObamaCare is destroying jobs. It is driving up health care costs. It is killing health benefits. It is shattering the economy. All across the country in all 50 States--it doesn't matter what State you go to, you can go to any State in the Union, it doesn't matter if you are talking to Republicans or Democrats or Independents or Libertarians--Americans understand this thing is not working.   Yet Washington is pretending not to know. Washington is pretending to have no awareness. Instead we have politicians giving speeches about how wonderful ObamaCare is. At the same time they go to the President and ask for an exemption from ObamaCare for Members of Congress.   If ObamaCare is so wonderful, why is it that its loudest advocates don't want to be subject to it? I will confess that is a very difficult one to figure out.   DC

As we have seen, despite holdings by the European Court of Justice that EU law trumps member-state law, many national courts have insisted on retaining the final word as to whether a rule of European law conforms to their own constitutional requirements. And if this is so among nations committed to a measure of political and economic union, how much less likely is foreign law to impinge upon the sovereignty of one not so encumbered?

Putin was a former KGB intelligence officer who’d been stationed in East Germany at the Dresden headquarters of the Soviet secret service. Putin has said in interviews that he dreamed as a child of becoming a spy for the communist party in foreign lands, and his time in Dresden exceeded his imagination. Not only was he living out his boyhood fantasy, he and his then-wife also enjoyed the perks of a borderline-European existence. Even in communist East Germany, the standard of living was far more comfortable than life in Russia, and the young Putins were climbing KGB social circles, making influential connections, networking a power base. The present was bright, and the future looked downright luminous. Then, the Berlin wall fell, and down with it crashed Putin’s world. A few days after the fall, a group of East German protestors gathered at the door of the secret service headquarters building. Putin, fearing the headquarters would be overrun, dialed up a Red Army tank unit stationed nearby to ask for protection. A voice on the other end of the line told him the unit could not do anything without orders from Moscow. And, “Moscow is silent,” the man told Putin. Putin’s boyhood dream was dissolving before his eyes, and his country was impotent or unwilling to stop it. Putin despised his government’s weakness in the face of threat. It taught him a lesson that would inform his own rule: Power is easily lost when those in power allow it to be taken away. In Putin’s mind, the Soviet Union’s fatal flaw was not that its authoritarianism was unsustainable but that its leaders were not strong enough or brutal enough to maintain their authority. The lesson Putin learned was that power must be guarded with vigilance and maintained by any means necessary.

Trump brand in the former Soviet Union. I’d learned that Trump had a certain audience in the United States, mostly not at the higher levels of taste and society, but there were many who weren’t attracted to his gaudy blend of wealth, braggadocio, and machismo. Not so in Georgia, not by a long shot. The more boorish elements of Trump’s shtick were directly relatable to wealthy oligarchs ripping off the resources of their countries, as if he was a universal role model.

At a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s people applauded him for eleven consecutive minutes, fearing that the first to stop would be killed or sent to prison. Finally, one man stopped, the director of a paper factory. “To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” writes Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. That same night the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years.

Bush was showing the Muslim world the America that bin Laden depicted: both a bloodthirsty oppresser and a vulnerable one. The United States looked like a rampaging tyrant, ruling through fear and coercion, yet one which Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan were demonstrating could be defeated. Bin Laden explained his strategy as simply provoking America into being itself. Much as the Soviet Union had collapsed after the Afghanistan insurgency—which he neglected to mention had aligned him with the CIA—bin Laden said, “We are continuing this policy, in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” A

Some have argued that capitalism promotes democracy, because of common norms of transparency, rule of law, and free competition—for markets, for ideas, for votes. In some idealized world, capitalism may enhance democracy, but in the history of the West, democracy has expanded by limiting the power of capitalists. When that project fails, dark forces are often unleashed. In the twentieth century, capitalism coexisted nicely with dictatorships, which conveniently create friendly business climates and repress independent worker organizations. Western capitalists have enriched and propped up third-world despots who crush local democracy. Hitler had a nice understanding with German corporations and bankers, who thrived until the unfortunate miscalculation of World War II. Communist China works hand in glove with its capitalist business partners to destroy free trade unions and to preserve the political monopoly of the Party. Vladimir Putin presides over a rigged brand of capitalism and governs in harmony with kleptocrats. When push comes to shove, the story that capitalism and democracy are natural complements is a myth. Corporations are happy to make a separate peace with dictators—and short of that, to narrow the domain of civic deliberation even in democracies. After Trump’s election, we saw corporations standing up for immigrants and saluting the happy rainbow of identity politics, but lining up to back Trump’s program of gutting taxes and regulation. Some individual executives belatedly broke with Trump over his racist comments, but not a single large company has resisted the broad right-wing assault on democracy that began long before Trump, and all have been happy with the dismantling of regulation. If democracy is revived, the movement will come from empowered citizens, not from corporations.

The creation of more than fifteen million jobs and Biden’s support for unions—he was the first president to join a picket line alongside union members, as the United Auto Workers successfully negotiated new contracts with the Big Three automakers—began to break the hold on industrial workers Republicans had enjoyed since the 1980s. At the same time, the women and men who had been mobilizing since the day after Trump’s inauguration continued to organize, especially as abortion bans endangered women’s lives and right-wing leaders began to talk about limiting women’s participation in society and curtailing their voting rights.

Trump continued, “Now, you can say that that’s OK and Hillary can say that that’s OK. But it’s not OK with me, because based on what she’s saying, and based on where she’s going, and where she’s been, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month on the final day. And that’s not acceptable.”34 As improbable as it had once seemed, by the 2020 State of the Union address Trump had proven himself to be a thoroughly pro-life president. He had taken swift and decisive action to limit access to abortion, preventing tax dollars from funding abortions overseas and allowing states to cut federal funds to Planned Parenthood.

There is nothing surprising about the European Union. It’s the medieval Catholic Church resurrected as a secular institution. The British are Protestants who couldn’t stand being in a Catholic Union. That’s really why Brexit happened. In the America presidential election, why was Hillary Clinton so hated? It was because she was perceived as a kind of Pope (President) in charge of the Washington D.C. Establishment (the Church). She was an expert, and experts are hated by ordinary Americans. Why did Donald Trump prove so successful? It was because he was an extreme individualistic narcissist, exactly like so many Protestant Americans. Naturally, he himself is a Protestant.

This book makes the case that Trump’s election would not have been possible without 9/11 and the subsequent military interventions conceived by the national security state. Further, I argue that if the CIA had not spent over a billion dollars arming Islamist militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, empowering jihadist godfathers like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden in the process, the 9/11 attacks would have almost certainly not taken place. And if the Twin Towers were still standing today, it is not hard to imagine an alternate political universe in which a demagogue like Trump was still relegated to real estate and reality TV.

I hear that there are plans afoot to produce a remake of Hans Christian Andersen's classic - 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. Who better to star in the leading role than recently defrocked Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson ? A narcissist with such naked ambition; an opportunist with such threadbare morals; a disgraced politician with such thinly veiled contempt for the British electorate, and judging by the sycophantic praise they heap on each other, arguably cut from the very same cloth as Donald Trump. Despite laughable pretensions of having the stature and fortitude of a modern day Churchill, he cuts a now lonely figure, a mere insignificant shadow. Boris, you can't hide anymore. Your warts and all are exposed for the whole world to see.

I think the more accurate answer as to why Trump has won working-class support lies in the pain, desperation, and political alienation that millions of working-class Americans now experience and the degree to which the Democratic Party has abandoned them for wealthy campaign contributors and the “beautiful people.” These are Americans who, while the rich get much richer, have seen their real wages stagnate and their good union jobs go to China and Mexico. They can’t afford health care, they can’t afford childcare, they can’t afford to send their kids to college and are scared to death about a retirement with inadequate income. Because of what doctors call “diseases of despair,” their communities are even seeing a decline in life expectancy.

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.

seventeen conflicts, the monotheistic religions fought each other; in another eight, monotheists fought heathens.) And the common assertion that the two world wars were set off by the decline of religious morality (as in the former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon’s recent claim that World War II pitted “the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists”) is dunce-cap history.48 The belligerents on both sides of World War I were devoutly Christian, except for the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim theocracy. The only avowedly atheist power that fought in World War II was the Soviet Union, and for most of the war it fought on our side against the Nazi regime—which (contrary to another myth) was sympathetic to German Christianity and vice versa, the two factions united in their loathing of secular modernity.49 (Hitler himself was a deist who said, “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.”)

The RNC was easy for Trump to corrupt to his will, because it had already been corrupted with voter suppression, Frank Luntz messaging, the Hastert Rule, the selling of Sarah Palin, telling different lies to different voters just to gain their support, Mitch McConnell's theft of the supreme court (assisted by those justices prevaricating at their senate hearings), to name just a few. And how about the New York Times, and all those journalists country-wide who cared more about appearing "fair and balanced" than exposing lies and corruption? We watched them not know how to handle the vilification of facts, but that, too, started before Trump (think Joe Walsh calling out "You lie!" during Obama's State of the Union, when Obama was stating facts. They reported the lack of decorum, but not the lack of veracity.) Now we watch the legal system--and its avenues for motions and appeals before, during, and after conviction--be abused and corrupted by Trump's legal team, with an assist from judges who don't even try too hard to hide their partiality. We need those who participated whose eyes have now cleared to be as forthcoming as Michael Cohen has been in exposing how and why the deeds were done, and owning their culpability. They need to come clean, to help us find ways to strengthen the frayed and fraying institutions that are barely holding together. It may be the only way through.

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

On cue, Sarah Palin’s voice pops into my head. She’s always doing this, showing up when my spirits are lowest. It’s like I have a fairy godmother who hates me. “So,” she asks, “how’s that whole hopey, changey thing workin’ out for ya?” It’s a line she started using in 2010, when President Obama’s approval ratings were plummeting and the Tea Party was on the rise. And here’s the thing: if you ignore her mocking tone and that annoying dropped G, it’s a good question. I spent the lion’s share of my twenties in Obamaworld. Career-wise, it went well. But more broadly? Like so many people who fell in love with a candidate and then a president, the last eight years have been an emotional roller coaster. Groundbreaking elections marred by midterm shellackings. The exhilaration of passing a health care law followed by the exhaustion of defending it. Our first black president made our union more perfect simply by entering the White House, but a year from now he’ll vacate it for Donald Trump, America’s imperfections personified. The motorcade keeps skidding and sliding. For twenty miles we veer left and right, one close call after another, until we finally reach the South Lawn. Here, too, I have a routine: get out of the van, walk through the West Wing, head to my office across the street. It’s a trip I’ve made countless times before. It’s also one I will never make again. And as I walk past the Rose Garden, the flagstones of the colonnade pressing against the soles of my leather shoes, Sarah Palin’s question lingers in the January air. How has it all worked out?

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.

But most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon. The president couldn’t stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was obvious to everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked. He was ever uncomprehending about why everyone did not like him, or why it should be so difficult to get everyone to like him. He might be happy throughout the day as a parade of union steel workers or CEOs trooped into the White House, with the president praising his visitors and them praising him, but that good cheer would sour in the evening after several hours of cable television. Then he would get on the phone, and in unguarded ramblings to friends and others, conversations that would routinely last for thirty or forty minutes, and could go much longer, he would vent, largely at the media and his staff. In what was termed by some of the self-appointed Trump experts around him—and everyone was a Trump expert—he seemed intent on “poisoning the well,” in which he created a loop of suspicion, disgruntlement, and blame heaped on others.

The president couldn’t stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was obvious to everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked. He was ever uncomprehending about why everyone did not like him, or why it should be so difficult to get everyone to like him. He might be happy throughout the day as a parade of union steel workers or CEOs trooped into the White House, with the president praising his visitors and them praising him, but that good cheer would sour in the evening after several hours of cable television. Then he would get on the phone, and in unguarded ramblings to friends and others, conversations that would routinely last for thirty or forty minutes, and could go much longer, he would vent, largely at the media and his staff. In what was termed by some of the self-appointed Trump experts around him—and everyone was a Trump expert—he seemed intent on “poisoning the well,” in which he created a loop of suspicion, disgruntlement, and blame heaped on others. When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or sadistic fashion, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short—a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington. His callers, largely because they found his conversation

Here is the secret source of my joy: I simply realized that I have been crucified with Christ! Nothing strange or elusive about it whatsoever! Everything that separated me from God (Mr. Pleasure) was abolished once and for all. No matter what I’m feeling at the moment about myself or my circumstances, this single truth trumps it all. When I wake up everyday, I just know that my old depressed self went into the grave with Jesus. It is difficult for a dead man to be worried about his bank statement or a bad doctor’s report. No circumstance can dictate my emotional state. The gospel tells me that my old critically religious self no longer exists! If I’m feeling bored with my Christian walk, the message of the gospel quickly snaps me out of that lie. My old boring self is dead. The new me is intoxicated on the wine of the New Covenant. I can “reckon myself dead” with Christ … simply realizing that I do not own those negative feelings any longer. Simply stated: we drink by faith! The way you drink the wine of the New Covenant is just to believe it is flowing freely to you right now.

Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences, deny paroles, determine immigrant detention laws, and impose minimum-sentence and Three-Strikes laws, which mandate life sentences after three felony convictions. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, earned $1.7 billion in revenues and collected $300 million in profits in 2013.50 CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day.51 Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services, provides food for six hundred correctional institutions across the United States.52 Goldman Sachs and other investors acquired it in 2007 for $8.3 billion.53 The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an estimated $45 million over a recent ten-year period for lobbying to keep the prison business flush.54 The resource center In the Public Interest documented in its report “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations” that private prison companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of 90 percent.55 If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations for the empty beds. CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties, and so-called 527 groups (PACs and super PACs), the American Civil Liberties Union reported.56 The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials plus undisclosed sums to lobby state officials.57 The GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison management companies, donated $250,000 to Donald Trump in 2017.58 The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, the ACLU reported.59 Private prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons.60 And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.61

When you find necessary to say you're not a vassal, it means you are.

Whatever world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin has given a historical, lesson and the silent defeat to the United States of America in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategy. After, retreating from Afghanistan by the American made Taliban including Bin Laden. Since that and the Iraq war till present, USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is its destiny that, may collapse the unity within states of it, as in the Soviet Union.

By the time Steele left Moscow in April 1993, the Soviet Union had gone. A new country led by Yeltsin had replaced it: the Russian Federation. The KGB had been dissolved. But its officers hadn’t exactly disappeared. They loathed the United States still. And were merely biding their time.

Republicans’ cultural and racial appeals. Union membership, once a bulwark for Democrats in states like West Virginia, declined. Being part of a union is an important part of someone’s personal identity. It helps shape the way you view the world and think about politics. When that’s gone, it means a lot of people stop identifying primarily as workers—and voting accordingly—and start identifying and voting more as white, male, rural, or all of the above. Just look at Don Blankenship, the coal boss who joined the protest against me on his way to prison. In recent years, even as the coal industry has struggled and workers have been laid off, top executives like him have pocketed huge pay increases, with compensation rising 60 percent between 2004 and 2016. Blankenship endangered his workers, undermined their union, and polluted their rivers and streams, all while making big profits and contributing millions to Republican candidates. He should have been the least popular man in West Virginia even before he was convicted in the wake of the death of twenty-nine miners. Instead, he was welcomed by the pro-Trump protesters in Williamson. One of them told a reporter that he’d vote for Blankenship for President if he ran. Meanwhile, I pledged to strengthen the laws to protect workers and hold bosses like Blankenship accountable—the fact that he received a jail sentence of just one year was appalling—yet I was the one being protested.

Labor unions have more and more been expressing their dismay about ObamaCare as they have realized in practice the thing isn't working. Recently the labor unions came to the Obama administration and said, We want an exemption too. Big businesses got an exemption, Members of Congress got an exemption. Shouldn't labor unions, shouldn't union bosses get an exemption? And with much fanfare the administration reportedly told them, No.   I am going to make a prediction right here and now. If the Congress does not act, if we don't show leadership in defunding ObamaCare, if we don't stand together in imposing cloture on Friday, if we don't act to avert this train wreck for the American people, before the end of this President's term we are going to see him grant an exemption for labor unions. That has been the pattern. Friends, political buddies--they get a slap on the back. They get special treatment.   It

The US is no longer sure whether its priorities lie across the Atlantic, on the other side of the Pacific or, following the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, at home rather than abroad. Indeed, President Trump confirmed as much in his January 2017 inauguration speech, stating that ‘From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.’ Free markets have been found wanting, particularly following the global financial crisis. Support and respect for the international organizations that provided the foundations and set the ‘rules’ for post-war globalization – most obviously, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the United Nations Security Council (whose permanent members anachronistically include the UK and France, but not Germany, Japan, India or Indonesia) – are rapidly fading. Political narratives are becoming increasingly protectionist. It is easier, it seems, for politicians of both left and right to blame ‘the other’ – the immigrant, the foreigner, the stranger in their midst – for a nation’s problems. Voters, meanwhile, no longer fit into neat political boxes. Neglected by the mainstream left and right, many have opted instead to vote for populist and nativist politicians typically opposed to globalization. Isolationism is, once again, becoming a credible political alternative. Without it, there would have been no Brexit and no Trump.

An image-based culture communicates through narratives, pictures, and pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs, hurricanes, untimely deaths, train wrecks—these events play well on computer screens and television. International diplomacy, labor union negotiations, and convoluted bailout packages do not yield exciting personal narratives or stimulating images … Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion … We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery.

fourth text Kushner advised was necessary to understand Trump was Scott Adams’s book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, explains in Win Bigly that Trump’s misstatements of fact are not regrettable errors or ethical lapses, but part of a technique called “intentional wrongness persuasion.” Adams argues Trump “can invent any reality” for most voters on most issues, and “all you will remember is that he provided his reasons, he didn’t apologize, and his opponents called him a liar like they always do.” Kushner said that Scott Adams’s approach could be applied to Trump’s recent February 4 State of the Union speech when he had claimed, “Our economy is the best it has ever been.” The economy was indeed in excellent shape then, but not the best in history, Kushner acknowledged.

That's not to say that Trump didn't say or do unwise things... But whenever great challenges have faced American presidents, the question is whether they achieve the big things, not the little things. When Roosevelt began commanding U.S. forces in World War II, or when the Manhattan Project began, or when Abraham Lincoln defended the Union, they made mistakes, some of them major. But these presidents were still credited for the big things they got right. But the media obsessed over mistakes made by Trump, failing to credit him for tearing down the bureaucratic barriers preventing a quick development of a vaccine and devoting considerable resources to Operation Warp Speed... (and developing) a lifesaving vaccine in record time.

Gise had deep experience in the way the government worked and was privy to some of the most advanced and secretive technology of his day. During those summers on the ranch, Bezos says that his grandfather would tell him stories about the missile defense systems he worked on during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a deep impression on the young Bezos. Today, among the Silicon Valley titans, he is one of the most pro-government CEOs. Amazon’s cloud computing business has won multibillion-dollar contracts from the Pentagon and the CIA. The significance of that business to Amazon is one reason why, in 2018, Bezos put his new second headquarters in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and why he paid $23 million for an old textile museum in D.C.’s swish Kalorama area—his neighbors are the Obamas and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump

In the weeks since Trump had been elected there had been a quick proliferation of vocabulary: authoritarian, strongman, autocracy, kleptocracy.... It was as if everyone had taken Introduction to Political Philosophy and wanted to impress the hot professor, who had grown up in the Soviet Union.... but as it was the language felt wrong, ripped from the past and pasted on the present, its rough edges visible and curling, though I couldn't find a way to pin down getting educated as a bad thing.

With this election, Vladimir Putin, the former director of Russia’s intelligence agency, sees the election of Donald Trump as the fastest way to destabilize the United States, damage its economy, as well as fracture both the European Union and NATO. These events, which start with the election of Trump, would allow Russia to become the strongest of the world’s three Superpowers and reorder the globe with a dominant Russia at the helm.

the question is not “Are you flawed?” It’s “What do you do about your flaws?” Do you learn from your mistakes so you can do and be better in the future? Or do you reject the hard work of self-improvement and instead tear others down so you can assert they’re as bad or worse than you are? I’ve always tried to do the former. And, by and large, so has our country, with our long march toward a more perfect union. But Donald Trump does the latter. Instead of admitting mistakes, he lashes out, demeans, and insults others—often projecting by accusing others of doing what he himself has done or is about to do. So if he knows that the Donald J. Trump Foundation is little more than a personal piggy bank, he’ll turn around and accuse, with no evidence, the well-respected Clinton Foundation of being corrupt. There’s a method to this madness. For Trump, if everyone’s down in the mud with him, then he’s no dirtier than anyone else. He doesn’t have to do better if everyone else does worse. I think that’s why he seems to relish humiliating people around him. And it’s why he must have been delighted when Marco Rubio tried to match him in slinging crude personal insults during the primaries. Of course, it hurt Rubio much more than Trump. As Bill likes to say, never wrestle a pig in the mud. They have cloven hooves, which give them superior traction, and they love getting dirty. Sadly, Trump’s strategy works. When people start believing that all politicians are liars and crooks, the truly corrupt escape scrutiny, and cynicism grows.

union of opposites to form human nature was just what human beings told themselves to rationalize away their imperfections. Maybe it was just too neat, and the truth was that evil deeds trumped good ones. It didn’t matter, for example, that Hitler was kind to dogs.

Breaking Tweet Whatever world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin has given, a historical lesson and silent defeat, to the United States of America, in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategic, after retreating from Afghanistan by the American made Taliban including Usama Bin Laden. Since that and the Iraq war till present, USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is its destiny that may collapse the unity within its states, as in the Soviet Union.

Whatever the world would say, however, as a fact, Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, has given a historical lesson and a silent defeat to the United States of America, in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategic, after retreating from Afghanistan by the American-made Taliban, including Usama Bin Laden. Since then and the Iraq War until the present, the USA has lost its incredibility in the eyes of the world and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, seems to restore and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, failure is its destiny and may collapse the unity within its states, as in the Soviet Union.

Imagine being the ‘party of law and order’ and having a convicted felon at the top of your ticket. - Unions, Equality, and Kamala: Why This Election Matters to Me (Medium Story)

Trump didn’t despise Obama. It was much, much stronger than that. I figured that Obama was the only person on the planet whom Trump actually envied—truly, madly, deeply. Air Force One, walking the carpet to deliver the State of the Union, the way Angela Merkel and other world leaders obviously admired and listened to Obama—it drove Trump out of his mind.

Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country. ----- President Donald J. Trump - State of the Union Address - February 5, 2019

We are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States,’ Obama said in 2005. ‘But those who enter the country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law, and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.’ He added: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants into this country.’ A few years later, in a 2013 State of the Union address, Obama promised to put illegal immigrants ‘to the back of the line.’ He even once told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: ‘Our direct message to families is ‘do not send your children to the border.’ If they do make it, they’ll be sent back. But they may not make it [at all].’ Yes, that’s progressive hero, Mr. Hope and Change himself, Barack Obama, sounding an awful lot like evil, racist Republican Donald Trump, wouldn’t you say?

When he arrived in Buffalo, two weeks before the election, the local Republicans were set to charge $25 for a picture of a handshake with him at a campaign event. It was a dismal gathering, men shuffling into a small, dim meeting hall and standing around the coffee urn. These were hardworking union guys—or they once were union guys. They were smokers. Veterans. In work shirts and work boots. They looked like America the way America looked in 1965, said Bannon, sentimental at the sight of his deplorables. “I’m not going to have these people pay twenty-five bucks for my picture,” Bannon told the event organizers. “My parents would go nuts.” Instead, he said he would pay the local party organization $25 for each picture and handshake.

There was a popular notion among my generation—a belief shattered with finality under Trump—that no matter how bad the economy got, the US government would always have jobs and seek out people with regional expertise. As it turned out, my expertise on the former Soviet Union would indeed be of interest to the US government, but not in the way I had imagined.

Vote Leave messaging delivered misinformation and fake news about countries such as Turkey, which was negotiating its accession to the European Union. They riled up swing voters by suggesting that a vote to remain was a vote to impoverish Britain’s sacred National Health Service.

-Whatever the world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin, has given historical lessons and the silent defeat to the United States of America in both ways; the diplomatic and war strategy. After retreating from Afghanistan by the American-made Taliban, including Bin Laden since that and the Iraq war till present, the USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is the destiny that may collapse the unity within states of it, as in the Soviet Union.

Out of those cracks, hidden socialists crawled. I’m not sure anyone was paying attention in 1988, for example, when Bernie Sanders took a little jaunt over to the Soviet Union to meet with some of the party leaders he admired so much. Anyway, why would they have noticed? In those days, Comrade Bernie was still just the hippie mayor of Burlington, Vermont. No one took him seriously.

The destruction of democratic institutions, places where the citizen has agency and a voice, is far graver than the ascendancy to the White House of the demagogue Trump. The coup destroyed our two-party system. It destroyed labor unions. It destroyed public education. It destroyed the judiciary. It destroyed the press. It destroyed academia. It destroyed consumer and environmental protection. It destroyed our industrial base. It destroyed communities and cities. And it destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that provides a living wage, cursed to live in chronic poverty or locked in cages in our monstrous system of mass incarceration. This coup also destroyed the credibility of liberal democracy. Self-identified liberals such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama mouthed the words of liberal democratic values while making war on these values in the service of corporate power. The revolt we see rippling across the country is a revolt not only against a corporate system that has betrayed workers, but also, for many, liberal democracy itself. This is very dangerous. It will allow the radical right to cement into place an Americanized fascism.

Even God could not create a rational will not oriented toward deifying union with himself, any more than he could create a square circle, a married bachelor, a two-dimensional cube, or a morally and intellectually competent supporter of Donald Trump.

The Christian right, driven by what it claimed was the undermining of Christian values during the Obama era, began looking toward the very same autocrats who had captivated the alt-right. These political figures were also using “family values” such as opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights as a means to merge Christian nationalism with ethnic nationalism, creating a potent bloc against European Union “elites.” These two parts of the bloc were further drawn together by the migrant crisis that escalated in 2015, which was caused, the alt-right claimed, by the needless wars in the Middle East launched by their ideological enemy, the neoconservatives. Because many of the migrants were from Muslim countries, the situation seemed to embody long-standing conspiracy theories in the Christian right about invasions of the West by Muslim hordes. For both the Christian right and the alt-right, the reaction of Europe’s xenophobes to an influx of refugees and asylum seekers served as a template for what Trump portrayed as an “invasion” on the U.S. southern border.

Both the alt-right and Christian right claim to be saving “Western civilization” or “the Judeo-Christian West.” But what those slogans really mean is that America and the western European countries that dominate the European Union are already dead, having succumbed to “globalists” and “political correctness.” What both the Christian right and the white nationalist right are looking toward now—with or without Trump—is a new locus of power in the world, one defined by a rejection of the hard-won and fragile American values of democracy and human rights, and by an exaltation of authoritarian natalism, xenophobia, and homophobia.

He concluded by addressing his father directly: “Dad, my sitting here today in the U.S. Capitol talking to our elected officials is proof that you made the right decision forty years ago to leave the Soviet Union, to come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry. I will be fine for telling the truth.

Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, declared that all governments of European Union member states were united on the issue of Jerusalem, and reaffirmed their commitment to a Palestinian State with East Jerusalem as its capital.

At one point the Fox News PR department dispatched an intern to strike up a relationship with me. We went out a couple of times in New York City—we went to the late great Coffee Shop restaurant in Union Square, we rode the subway uptown, we even spent a late evening on her rooftop. There were moments when I thought these were dates—but her flirtatiousness was all part of the ruse. Years later I found out the intern was assigned to take copious notes and feed information back to her bosses. One email I viewed, dated Tuesday, September 6, 2005, was delivered at 11: 30 p.m. and listed what I told her during our faux-date; who called me during dinner (a PR person from a rival network); and what I said on the phone. Early the next morning the young woman was hauled into Ailes’s office because he wanted a full debrief. She was also tasked with friending me on Facebook and scouring my page for any evidence of anti-Fox bias or other material that could be used against me.

In their authoritative 1995 work, Voice and Equality, political scientists Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady demonstrated that political activity varied by class. Their study found that 86 percent of high-income people reported having voted, but only 52 percent of low-income people said they voted. And 73 percent of high-income people were involved with a political organization, compared to 29 percent of low-income people. A 2012 sequel by the same authors showed a widening of these patterns, as institutions of working-class participation such as trade unions continued to decline, while the influence of the wealthy concentrated. The affluent go to meetings, are active members of groups concerned with public issues, and develop “civic skills” far more than the poor do—and that disparity has been widening. The iconic Norman Rockwell painting of an ordinary working fellow standing up to speak his mind at a town meeting, meant to depict one of FDR’s Four Freedoms, belongs to another era. And yet, in the Trump rebellion, regular working people who had little regard for civic norms abruptly recovered their voices in a fashion characteristic of mass society—disaffected people sharing not always rational rage with an irrational leader. They even formed new, Tocqueville-style associations, the Tea Parties. Voice and Equality concluded that lower-income people participate at lower rates for three reasons: “they can’t” (because they lack the time or money); “they don’t want to” (because they don’t believe that politics will make a positive difference in their lives); and “nobody asked them” (the political system has few avenues of recruitment for lower-income people). In a survey of why so many people avoided politics, one key reason was that politics felt irrelevant. This view, of course, was also correlated by social class. Nobody in large corporations believes that politics is irrelevant. Trust in government—and in all major institutions—has been falling for half a century. When the American National Election Study first asked the question in 1958, 73 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” That sense of trust peaked in 1964, at 78 percent, and has been steadily dropping ever since. By 2015, it was down to just 19 percent. The

5. The most important sort of union that obtains among things, pragmatically speaking, is their GENERIC UNITY. Things exist in kinds, there are many specimens in each kind, and what the 'kind' implies for one specimen, it implies also for every other specimen of that kind. We can easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular, that is, unlike any other fact and sole of its kind. In such a world of singulars our logic would be useless, for logic works by predicating of the single instance what is true of all its kind. With no two things alike in the world, we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our future ones. The existence of so much generic unity in things is thus perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean to say 'the world is One.' ABSOLUTE generic unity would obtain if there were one summum genus under which all things without exception could be eventually subsumed. 'Beings,' 'thinkables,' 'experiences,' would be candidates for this position. Whether the alternatives expressed by such words have any pragmatic significance or not, is another question which I prefer to leave unsettled just now. 6. Another specification of what the phrase 'the world is One' may mean is UNITY OF PURPOSE. An enormous number of things in the world subserve a common purpose. All the man-made systems, administrative, industrial, military, or what not, exist each for its controlling purpose. Every living being pursues its own peculiar purposes. They co-operate, according to the degree of their development, in collective or tribal purposes, larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones, until an absolutely single, final and climacteric purpose subserved by all things without exception might conceivably be reached. It is needless to say that the appearances conflict with such a view. Any resultant, as I said in my third lecture, MAY have been purposed in advance, but none of the results we actually know in is world have in point of fact been purposed in advance in all their details. Men and nations start with a vague notion of being rich, or great, or good. Each step they make brings unforeseen chances into sight, and shuts out older vistas, and the specifications of the general purpose have to be daily changed. What is reached in the end may be better or worse than what was proposed, but it is always more complex and different. Our different purposes also are at war with each other. Where one can't crush the other out, they compromise; and the result is again different from what anyone distinctly proposed beforehand. Vaguely and generally, much of what was purposed may be gained; but everything makes strongly for the view that our world is incompletely unified teleologically and is still trying to get its unification better organized. Whoever claims ABSOLUTE teleological unity, saying that there is one purpose that every detail of the universe subserves, dogmatizes at his own risk. Theologians who dogmalize thus find it more and more impossible, as our acquaintance with the warring interests of the world's parts grows more concrete, to imagine what the one climacteric purpose may possibly be like. We see indeed that certain evils minister to ulterior goods, that the bitter makes the cocktail better, and that a bit of danger or hardship puts us agreeably to our trumps. We can vaguely generalize this into the doctrine that all the evil in the universe is but instrumental to its greater perfection. But the scale of the evil actually in sight defies all human tolerance; and transcendental idealism, in the pages of a Bradley or a Royce, brings us no farther than the book of Job did—God's ways are not our ways, so let us put our hands upon our mouth. A God who can relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human beings to appeal to. His animal spirits are too high. In other words the 'Absolute' with his one purpose, is not the man-like God of common people.

If the union breaks apart, game over. No fine disputes of policy or progress matter after that. Act accordingly. Measure every act and word by how far, or how close, it brings us to that apocalypse.

A billionaire plutocrat is now sitting in the White House. Democracy has been overthrown. A right wing coup d’état has taken place. The Confederacy has defeated the Union. Racist Nazis are now running America, calling themselves “patriots”. They are the enemies of the People, the enemies of America, and the enemies of the world. We need to reboot the world.

The facile explanation for this apparently improbable union between the proponents of “faith,” “values,” and “family” and the profoundly impious real estate huckster and serial philanderer is that the Christian right hypocritically sacrificed its principles in exchange for raw political power.

Compare photographs of Jimmy Swaggart and Donald Trump, and they look like brothers from some strange union of Mardi Gras floats: huge heads, strange colors, balloon bodies, mouths disconnected from brains.

Fourth, on November 11, 2018, President Trump attended the Paris Peace Forum to observe the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. French President Macron called nationalism (putting America first) treason. He defended the United Nations and the European Union, saying patriotism means putting world government first.

labyrinths actually began in mythology with the story of Queen Pasiphae and her amorous affair with a sacrificial bull. The union resulted in the birth of the transgenic Minotaur, a creature that

Kushner said that Scott Adam's approach could be applied to Trump's recent February 4 State of the Union speech when he had claimed, "Our economy is the best it has ever been." The economy was indeed in excellent shape then, but not the best in history Kushner acknowledged. "Controversy elevated the message," Kusher said. This was his core understanding of communication strategy in the age of internet and Trump. A controversy over the economy, Kushner argued - and how good it is - only helps Trump because it reminds voters that the economy is good. A hair-splitting, fact-checking debate in the media about whether the numbers were technically better decades ago or in the 1950's is irrelevant, he said.

For four decades Trump’s property empire effectively functioned as a laundromat for Moscow money. Funds from the former Soviet Union poured into condominiums and Trump apartments. Even as Trump was campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, his associates were chasing Kremlin permission—and cash—for the candidate’s elusive Moscow tower.

Trump has also lived a life of thumbing his nose at conventions and law enforcement, learning lessons as a boy from his father, Fred, whose business partner was an associate of the Gambino and Genovese crime families. He has long been in deep with mobsters, domestic and foreign, along with corrupt union bosses and assorted swindlers. Trump even spent years deeply entangled with a major international drug trafficker who, like many of the others, enjoyed their mutually lucrative arrangements.

it should give us pause if the elites who govern Americans are not as loyal to their countrymen as they are to the rising institutions of global governance that emerged in the twentieth century, such as the United Nations or the European Union—institutions that have come to be distrusted by many people within and beyond the United States in the twenty-first century. The fact that Americans take pride in their country has long been viewed as a bit of an embarrassment by the global elite, something Trump tapped into with small but meaningful gestures as simple as his red “Make America Great Again” hat. He knew intuitively, even when his ideological opponents thought they had all the statistics and expertise on their side, that regular Americans resented being told that there was nothing they could do in the face of the great globalist tide that was robbing them of their livelihood. Americans don’t like being told that their loyalty to country, their patriotism, is retrograde or hateful.

And just as nearly 200 years earlier the Founding Fathers had declared that ‘all men are created equal’ while surrounded by their slaves, so the United States in the early 1960s was berating the Soviet Union for not being a ‘free society’ when millions of its own citizens were still facing the most deeply ingrained, legally sanctioned racial discrimination. The hypocrisy was crystal clear

I wrote Dr. Allen Guelzo for his perspective. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and the director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College. He is one of the great students of Lincoln and one of the great historians in the country. Frankly, I expected Allen to respond, “Have you just lost your mind!?” But he didn’t. Guelzo responded: Your points are entirely on the mark. I have done a quick comparative outline of both inaugural addresses, and while the existential situation of the two are different, on March 4th, 1861, Lincoln was already facing the secession of seven states, the official creation of a Confederate States of America, and demands for the surrender of federal property, there is this common thread, the sovereignty of the people. Lincoln used that principle to deny that one part of the nation, the seven seceding states, could break up the union without the consent of the American people, as well as denying that one branch of the government, the Supreme Court, could overrule the American people’s will. This was enough to make me feel better. But Guelzo continued. Trump invokes that principle. To deny that a federal bureaucracy can enrich and empower itself at the expense of the people, as well as denying that identity enclaves can overrule the fundamental unity of the American people.

That raises the most serious threat to the liberal international order—which is not China’s expansionism but America’s abdication. The architect of this system is rapidly losing interest in its own creation. As the scholar Walter Russell Mead has pointed out, Trump’s instincts are Jacksonian, in that he is largely uninterested in the world except insofar as he believes that most countries are always swindling the United States, including and especially its allies. Trump is a nationalist, a protectionist, and a populist, determined to put “America first.” But truthfully, more than anything else, he is an isolationist who has abandoned the field. Trump has withdrawn the United States from more organizations, treaties, and accords than any president in American history. Not only has he slow-rolled a trade deal with the European Union but he has also started a trade war against the bloc and moved to pull troops from European bases—seemingly heralding the end of a seventy-year Atlantic partnership.

In attacking populism, the object is not merely to resist President Donald Trump, the nation’s thinkers say. Nor is the conflict of our times some grand showdown of Left and Right. Questions like that, they tell us, were settled long ago when the Soviet Union collapsed. No, the political face-off of today is something different: it pits the center against the periphery, the competent insider against the disgruntled sorehead. In this conflict, the side of right is supposed to be obvious. Ordinary people are agitated, everyone knows this, but the ones whose well-being must concern us most are the elites whom the people threaten to topple.

Russia’s fake news story about Incirlik didn’t move markets or start a war, but it did infiltrate the highest levels of the Trump campaign. Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort repeated the falsehood during an August 14 appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. When host Jake Tapper asked Manafort about controversial comments Trump had made, Manafort asked Tapper why he wasn’t covering other, more important news, such as “the NATO base in Turkey being under attack by terrorists.” Well, because that attack never happened. Where did Manafort get that information? That wasn’t hard to figure out. The only places it appeared were on Sputnik News and RT.

This is not a system ruined by a few bad apples. This is a system that creates and protects bad apples by design. Most people who become police officers enter the profession because it is held in high esteem and because they wish to provide a public service. But individual good intentions cannot overcome a system carefully designed to render them meaningless. Trying to be a good cop can actually get you in trouble with your superiors, your fellow officers, and the union that represents you.

Such, then, was the political analysis that the proto-Alt-Rightist paleoconservatives bequeathed to the early twenty-first century. Liberal democracy, they argued, is totalitarian, despotic, illiberal, and in reality undemocratic. Hard regimes on the model of fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany are alternatives worth considering, they said. Political ideas are mere tools of elite domination, with the sole exception of far-right ideas, which are pure science and mere realism. Racial and ethnic differences trump human rights and the rule of law. Politics is no more than an unending power struggle in which values count for nothing and victory for everything.

And so, the grift continued. Between 2007 and 2018, buyers tied to the former Soviet Union made eighty-six cash purchases at Trump properties.

A second effort to debilitate the unions occurred soon after with the purge of Communists from unions, and government pressure on the two major union federations, the American Federation of Unions (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), to eject the Communist-Socialist led unions from their ranks, which they did.

In hindsight, the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum in 2016 were intended to divide the 99%, thus diverting attention from the real authors of human misery… money power and centralised control. Prior to both Trump and Brexit, more people were awakening to the reality of centralised power but since then, the “99%” have turned on each other. Meanwhile, the trajectory towards one world government and the new world order continues. Trump is not his own man and Brexit is an illusion and theatrical distraction; the UK’s military, financial, legal, social and legal arrangements are being woven ever tighter into the dictatorship of the European Union, NATO and the United Nations.

The British bankers at that time also controlled the fledgling American banks which offered to loan Abraham Lincoln money to fight the war. Lincoln wisely refused and created the famous Lincoln greenbacks with which he financed the Civil War.38 Abraham Lincoln, in a famous address, declared: “At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.” 39 Lincoln’s refusal to finance the Union through debt to the internationalists demonstrated his keen insight into their strategy for global dominion. Hence, he financed the Civil War by printing the Lincoln greenbacks. In both respects—with regard to the Civil War and the British bankers’ attempt to seize control of the economics of America—once again the aims of the globalists were frustrated. This is what caused Lincoln’s assassination. Nonetheless, America remained in control of her own credit. The result of this victory was low interest loans for entrepreneurs, which led to great business expansion. This great expansion in the post-Civil War era enhanced the fears of those who sought to bring the world into a One World Order. If America was allowed to continue to expand, she would be a major—perhaps insurmountable—obstacle in the way of their goal. For one hundred years, America was able to avoid total control of her capital by the international bankers. Lincoln was most certainly a great irritant and obstacle to the aspirations of the globalists. He was the last president to seek categorically a halting of the globalists’ drive toward a Global One World Government. It cost him his life; he was murdered by John Wilkes Booth, also an agent of the internationalists.40 America’s emergence from the Civil War as a great industrial power was due to the effective centralization of capital and credit within the Federal Government, thanks to Lincoln. It was America’s control over her own capital that was making her prosperous. It was the aim of the international bankers to change all that. Lincoln was the victim of a major conspiracy—a conspiracy so important that even the European bankers were involved. Lincoln had to be eliminated because he dared to oppose their attempt to force a central bank on the United States. He became an example to those who would later oppose such machinations in high places. Could it be that, one hundred years later, John F.

This became apparent when it emerged that Alex Acosta, then-serving as Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration, had disclosed to the Trump transition team that he had previously signed off on Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” because Epstein “had belonged to intelligence.” Acosta, then serving as US attorney for Southern Florida, had also been told by unspecified figures at the time that he needed to give Epstein a lenient sentence because of his links to “intelligence.” When Acosta was later asked if Epstein was indeed an intelligence asset in 2019, Acosta chose to neither confirm nor deny the claim.