monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Something can be funny and true. The MSM is a bunch of calculated lies. Your one liners won't change that.

Only sources crap from the BBC.

An org that actively covered up for more career paedophiles than the Vatican.

Here is another religion being covered for. Only 6 minutes packed with unpleasant FACTS.

That's the great big lie that Donald Trump keeps telling us to try to get himself off the hook that his own lies have put him on. He's made more documented lies, mistruths, misleading statements, cooked statistics, and unfounded claims and accusations since his inauguration than the MSM has made last century and this. Many more. He's a one -man walking cloud of untruth. And that's the truth.

I do not see his lies hurting this country. I see the MSM as a globalist puppet. They are trying to talk us into believing we have to sign on to cultural suicide to be acceptable to other countries? I do not think people are buying it.

How does lying NOT hurt this country?

You don’t see his lies hurting this country??? But you know he lies, it just isn’t all that important to you.

How has he hurt this country?

Again, I do not see any damage.

Killary isn't in Office. Maybe that fact escapes you.

I see plenty of damage. And not much of his campaign promises come into play. Where's our Infrastructure? Where's the middle income tax cuts? Where's the jobs besides McDonald's?

Do you need a job? It is not Trumps fault people are not trained for some jobs. The jobs are out there.

People living in states with high taxes saw less than most people did. The middle did get a reduction in their taxes. You are upset that business got some too. Someone has to build those McDonald's.

As for infrastructure Trump is only beginning to strip the red tape of the process of getting anything done in a reasonable amount of time.

This article seems to be the prize of all the I=slam in Europe type stories for the last month or two. This is Muslim political action in the Netherlands:

https://www.rt.com/news/435609-willie-dille-muslim-rape/

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/travel/tourism-u-s-down-trump-took-office-costing-4-6-n840326

The page which Warner mentions, i.e. islamology:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YxaidYQyDm7SQBVmyFLf_aExhBItXx2a/view

The Shrinking Ambitions of Donald Trump’s ‘Infrastructure’ Plan
Eighteen months into his administration, no credible proposal has been made.
By William D. Hartung JULY 2, 2018

Other than shouting about building a wall on the US-Mexico border, one of Donald Trump’s most frequently proclaimed promises on the 2016 campaign trail was the launching of a half-trillion-dollar plan to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure (employing large numbers of workers in the process). Eighteen months into his administration, no credible proposal for anything near that scale has been made. To the extent that the Trump administration has a plan at all for public investment, it involves pumping up Pentagon spending, not investing in roads, bridges, transportation, better Internet access, or other pressing needs of the civilian economy.

Not that President Trump hasn’t talked about investing in infrastructure. Last February, he even proposed a scheme that, he claimed, would boost the country’s infrastructure with $1.5 trillion in spending over the next decade. With a typical dose of hyperbole, he described it as “the biggest and boldest infrastructure investment in American history.”

Analysts from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania—Trump’s alma mater—beg to differ. They note that the plan actually involves only $200 billion in direct federal investment, less than one-seventh of the total promised. According to Wharton’s experts, much of the extra spending, supposedly leveraged from the private sector as well as state and local governments, will never materialize. In addition, were such a plan launched, it would, they suggest, fall short of its goal by a cool trillion dollars. In the end, the spending levels Trump is proposing would have “little to no impact” on the nation’s gross domestic product. To add insult to injury, the president has exerted next to no effort to get even this anemic proposal through Congress, where it’s now dead in the water.

There is, however, one area of federal investment on which Trump and the Congress have worked overtime with remarkable unanimity to increase spending: the Pentagon, which is slated to receive more than $6 trillion over the next decade. This year alone increases will bring total spending on the Pentagon and related agencies (like the Department of Energy where work on nuclear warheads takes place) to $716 billion. That $6-trillion, 10-year figure represents more than 30 times as much direct spending as the president’s $200 billion infrastructure plan.

In reality, Pentagon spending is the Trump administration’s substitute for a true infrastructure program and it’s guaranteed to deliver public investments, but neglect just about every area of greatest civilian need from roads to water treatment facilities.

THE PENTAGON’S COVERT INDUSTRIAL POLICY
One reason the Trump administration has chosen to pump money into the Pentagon is that it’s the path of least political resistance in Washington. A combination of fear, ideology, and influence peddling radically skews “debate” there in favor of military outlays above all else. Fear—whether of terrorism, Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea—provides one pillar of support for the habitual overfunding of the Pentagon and the rest of the national-security state (which in these years has had a combined trillion-dollar annual budget). In addition, it’s generally accepted in Washington that being tagged “soft on defense” is the equivalent of political suicide, particularly for Democrats. Add to that the millions of dollars spent by the weapons industry on lobbying and campaign contributions, its routine practice of hiring former Pentagon and military officials, and the way it strategically places defense-related jobs in key states and districts, and it’s easy to see how the president and Congress might turn to arms spending as the basis for a covert industrial policy.

The Trump plan builds on the Pentagon’s already prominent role in the economy. By now, it’s the largest landowner in the country, the biggest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, the most significant source of funds for advanced government research and development, and a major investor in the manufacturing sector. As it happens, though, expanding the Pentagon’s economic role is the least efficient way to boost jobs, innovation, and economic growth.

Unfortunately, there is no organized lobby or accepted bipartisan rationale for domestic funding that can come close to matching the levers of influence that the Pentagon and the arms industry have at their command. This only increases the difficulty Congress has when it comes to investing in infrastructure, clean energy, education, or other direct paths toward increasing employment and economic growth.

Former congressman Barney Frank once labeled the penchant for using the Pentagon as the government’s main economic tool “weaponized Keynesianism” after economist John Maynard Keynes’s theory that government spending should pick up the slack in investment when private-sector spending is insufficient to support full employment. Currently, of course, the official unemployment rate is low by historical standards. However, key localities and constituencies, including the industrial Midwest, rural areas, and urban ones with significant numbers of black and Hispanic workers, have largely been left behind. In addition, millions of “discouraged workers” who want a job but have given up actively looking for one aren’t even counted in the official unemployment figures, wage growth has been stagnant for years, and the inequality gap between the 1 percent and the rest of America is already in Gilded Age territory.

Such economic distress was crucial to Donald Trump’s rise to power. In campaign 2016, of course, he endlessly denounced unfair trade agreements, immigrants, and corporate flight as key factors in the plight of what became a significant part of his political base: downwardly mobile and displaced industrial workers (or those who feared that this might be their future fate).

THE TRUMP DIFFERENCE
Although insufficient, increases in defense manufacturing and construction can help areas where employment in civilian manufacturing has been lagging. Even as it’s expanded, however, defense spending has come to play an ever-smaller role in the US economy, falling from 8 percent–10 percent of the gross domestic product in the 1950s and 1960s to under 4 percent today. Still, it remains crucial to the economic base in defense-dependent locales like Southern California, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington State. Such places, in turn, play an outsize political role in Washington because their congressional representatives tend to cluster on the armed services, defense appropriations, and other key committees, and because of their significance on the electoral map.

A long-awaited Trump administration “defense industrial base” study should be considered a tip-off that the president and his key officials see Pentagon spending as the way to economically prime the pump. Note, as a start, that the study was overseen not by a defense official but by the president’s economics and trade czar, Peter Navarro, whose formal title is White House director of trade and industrial policy. A main aim of the study is to find a way to bolster smaller defense firms that subcontract to giants like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin.

Although Trump touted the study as a way to “rebuild” the US military when he ordered it in May 2017, economic motives were clearly a crucial factor. Navarro typically cited the importance of a “healthy, growing economy and a resilient industrial base,” identifying weapons spending as a key element in achieving such goals. The CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, one of the defense lobby’s most powerful trade groups, underscored Navarro’s point when, in July 2017, he insisted that “our industry’s contributions to US national security and economic well-being can’t be taken for granted.” (He failed to explain how an industry that absorbs more than $300 billion per year in Pentagon contracts could ever be “taken for granted.”)

Trump’s defense-industrial-base policy tracks closely with proposals put forward by Daniel Goure of the military-contractor-funded Lexington Institute in a December 2016 article titled “How Trump Can Invest in Infrastructure and Make America Great Again.” Goure’s main point: that Trump should make military investments—like building naval shipyards and ammunition plants—part and parcel of his infrastructure plan. In doing so, he caught the essence of the arms industry’s case regarding the salutary effects of defense spending on the economy:

“Every major military activity, whether production of a new weapons system, sustainment of an existing one or support for the troops, is imbedded in a web of economic activities and supports an array of businesses. These include not only major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, but a host of middle-tier and even mom-and-pop businesses. Money spent at the top ripples through the economy. Most of it is spent not on unique defense items, but on products and services that have commercial markets too.”

What Goure’s analysis neglects, however, is not just that every government investment stimulates multiple sectors of the economy, but that virtually any other kind would have a greater ripple effect on employment and economic growth than military spending does. Underwritten by the defense industry, his analysis is yet another example of how the arms lobby has distorted economic policy and debate in this country.

These days, it seems as if there’s nothing the military won’t get involved in. Take another recent set of “security” expenditures in what has already become a billion-dollar-plus business: building and maintaining detention centers for children, mainly unaccompanied minors from Central America, caught up in the Trump administration’s brutal security crackdown on the US-Mexico border. One company, Southwest Key, has already received a $955 million government contract to work on such facilities. Among the other beneficiaries is the major defense contractor General Dynamics, normally known for making tanks, ballistic-missile-firing submarines, and the like, not ordinarily ideal qualifications for taking care of children.

Last but not least, President Trump has worked overtime to tout his promotion of US arms sales as a jobs program. In a May 2018 meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House (with reporters in attendance), he typically brandished a map that laid out just where US jobs from Saudi arms sales would be located. Not coincidentally, many of them would be in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida that had provided him with his margin of victory in the 2016 elections. Trump had already crowed about such Saudi deals as a source of “jobs, jobs, jobs” during his May 2017 visit to Riyadh, that country’s capital. And he claimed on one occasion—against all evidence—that his deals with the Saudi regime for arms and other equipment could create “millions of jobs.”

The Trump administration’s decision to blatantly put jobs and economic benefits for US corporations above human rights considerations and strategic concerns is likely to have disastrous consequences. Its continued sales of bombs and other weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, for example, allows them to go on prosecuting a brutal war in Yemen that has already killed thousands of civilians and put millions more at risk of death from famine and disease. In addition to being morally reprehensible, such an approach could turn untold numbers of Yemenis and others across the Middle East into US enemies—a high price to pay for a few thousand jobs in the arms sector.

PENTAGON SPENDING VERSUS A REAL INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN
While the Trump administration’s Pentagon spending will infuse new money into the economy, it’s certainly a misguided way to spur economic growth. As University of Massachusetts economist Heidi Garrett-Peltier has demonstrated, when it comes to creating jobs, military spending lags far behind investment in civilian infrastructure, clean energy, health care, or education. Nonetheless, the administration is moving full speed ahead with its military-driven planning.

In addition, Trump’s approach will prove hopeless when it comes to addressing the fast-multiplying problems of the country’s ailing infrastructure. The $683 billion extra that the administration proposes putting into Pentagon spending over the next 10 years pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars the American Society of Civil Engineers claims are needed to modernize US infrastructure. Nor will all of that Pentagon increase even be directed toward construction or manufacturing activities (not to speak of basic infrastructural needs like roads and bridges). A significant chunk of it will, for instance, be dedicated to paying the salaries of the military’s massive cadre of civilian and military personnel or health care and other benefits.

In their study, the civil engineers suggest that failing to engage in a major infrastructure program could cost the economy $4 trillion and 2.5 million jobs by 2025, something no Pentagon pump-priming could begin to offset. In other words, using the Pentagon as America’s main conduit for public investment will prove a woeful approach when it comes to the health of the larger society.

One era in which government spending did directly stimulate increased growth, infrastructural development, and the creation of well-paying jobs was the 1950s, a period for which Donald Trump is visibly nostalgic. For him, those years were evidently the last in which America was truly “great.” Many things were deeply wrong with the country in the ’50s—from rampant racism, sexism, and the denial of basic human rights to McCarthyite witch hunts—but on the economic front the government did indeed play a positive role.

In those years, public investment went far beyond Pentagon spending, which President Dwight Eisenhower (of “military-industrial complex” fame) actually tried to rein in. It was civilian investments—from the G.I. Bill to increased incentives for housing construction to the building of an interstate highway system—that contributed in crucial ways to the economic boom of that era. Whatever its failures and drawbacks, including the ways in which African-Americans and other minorities were grossly under-represented when it came to sharing the benefits, the Eisenhower investment strategy did boost the overall economy in a fashion the Trump plan never will.

The notion that the Pentagon can play a primary role in boosting employment to any significant degree is largely a myth that serves the needs of the military-industrial complex, not American workers or Donald Trump’s base. Until the political gridlock in Washington that prevents large-scale new civilian investments of just about any sort is broken, however, the Pentagon will continue to seem like the only game in town. And we will all pay a price for those skewed priorities, in both blood and treasure.

Trump’s infrastructure plan to be pushed to 2019

By Pamela Glass on MAY 1, 2018

President Trump’s plan to pass a comprehensive infrastructure plan – which was a cornerstone of his campaign and rolled out with much fanfare in February, appears to be dead for this year, as lawmakers run skittish before the fall mid-term elections.

With the departure in April of DJ Gribbin, the president’s infrastructure adviser, and divisions in Congress over how to fund a massively expensive plan to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, ports and waterways, there doesn’t seem to be the political push anymore to pass such a complicated and costly plan.

At a rally in Ohio a few weeks ago, Trump acknowledged the challenges and said his proposal would “probably have to wait until after the election” in November, and he blamed Democrats for not working with him. Top leaders in both the House and Senate have made similar statements about the bill’s fate this year.

Instead, lawmakers are focusing on two transportation sectors that need immediate legislative attention and can garner bipartisan support in an election year – aviation and waterways – rather than tackling the more controversial issues involved in the broader infrastructure package.

House Republican leaders, led by Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, have made action on a bill to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration, which expires Sept. 30, and another to authorize federal water projects through the Water Resources Development Act, top priorities for passage in the months ahead. Shuster, who is retiring after this year, wants to keep WRDA on a two-year reauthorization track, which he says is important to provide certainty to waterways projects.

“Congress appears to be approaching the president’s infrastructure proposal in piecemeal fashion,” said Mike Toohey, president and CEO of the Waterways Council, Inc., an industry-supported group that supports strong funding for the nation’s lock and dam system.

“The House cleared the first “R” in transportation infrastructure last Friday with the passage of the “Runway” initiative (FAA reauthorization). Next “R” up is rivers, with WRDA heading for mark-up in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee the fourth week of May,” he said in a statement to WorkBoat.

WRDA will be an important bill for advancing key policies on waterways funding. WCI is seeking to increase the federal contribution paid into the dedicated trust fund that finances river navigation construction. They want the current 50-50 arrangement to be 75% federal and 25% from industry gasoline taxes in order to maintain the current $400 million construction level that is being largely consumed for completion of the Olmsted Lock and Dam project on the Ohio River in Illinois, located near one of the busiest spots on the inland river system.

“That project will finish in August and we’ll drop back to a $220 million program, which will further extend timelines on other priority waterways projects,” said Deb Calhoun, WCI’s senior vice president. The group is also proposing that 10% of revenue from federal hydropower be placed in the trust fund.

It’s not yet clear how WRDA’s passage might affect what is eventually included in a broader infrastructure plan involving waterways funding. The tug and barge industry, which uses the river system to move an array of commodities, was unhappy with parts of the plan rolled out by Trump in February.

They objected to proposals to charge user or lockage fees on commercial users of the rivers, and to shift away from the traditional federal responsibility for inland navigation to private investment. The fees would be in addition to the 29-cent-per-gallon diesel fuel tax that barge operations already pay into the federal trust fund. The plan was a big disappointment to the industry, which had high hopes for the infrastructure package and had largely supported the president’s election.

Delaying the proposal to next year would be a plus for the industry, as it gives lawmakers and barge companies more time to address the industry’s concerns, and to concentrate on making positive policy changes in WRDA for waterways funding.

“We look at it as potentially two bites at an infrastructure apple,” Calhoun said. “WRDA has a better chance of moving this year successfully and the administration proposal is not helpful in its current form.”

Michigan frets as Trump infrastructure plan idles
Keith Laing, The Detroit News Published 11:54 p.m. ET June 26, 2018

Washington — Uncertainty surrounding President Donald Trump's plans for infrastructure funding is making it difficult for Michigan to plan long-term construction projects.

A five-year, $305 billion transportation funding law signed by former President Barack Obama in 2015 that distributes money collected at fuel pumps by the federal government is set to expire in 2020. And Trump's proposal for a $1 trillion replacement — funded mostly by private investment — is stuck in neutral.

Trump has called for federal spending of $200 billion over 10 years that administration officials say can be used to “incentivize” up to $800 billion in private, state and local spending on infrastructure. At the plan’s core is the assumption that private companies would enter into “public-private” partnerships with local and state governments.

The prospects for the president's proposed transportation bill are so dire that "infrastructure week" has become a running joke in Washington. Nearly every time the Trump administration designates a week to promote his plan to rebuild the nation’s deteriorating highways and roads, the message is abandoned as the president goes off-script.

Michigan typically receives about $1 billion per year from the transportation department's Highway Trust Fund, which has to be renewed each time the law known in Washington as the highway bill is set to expire. The highway fund is supported by the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gasoline tax.

The Michigan Department of Transportation says it counts on federal money to pay for 65 percent of its Highway Capital Program.

Jeff Cranson, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Transportation, said the uncertainty is making it difficult for state officials to plan for long-term construction projects. He cited the fact that the Trump administration has not put much meat on the bones since the president released his proposed budget in February.

"Not only is the proposal still vague, much of it involves discretionary or competitive grants," Cranson said. "That makes it difficult for us to figure out how Michigan would be affected."

Cranson continued: "As you know, Michigan’s infrastructure is in desperate need of more investment at all levels — city, village and county road systems as well as state trunklines. And (public-private partnerships) hold promise in some specific applications but are not the sole answer to make up for decades of under-investment."

The Trump infrastructure plan calls for private investment, but there is little clarity on what that might look like. Critics say privatization of public assets could lead to increased use of tolls and other mechanisms that will allow private companies to generate profits in exchange for financing projects. They cite examples of companies that have entered into agreements with state and local governments and later gone bankrupt or charged higher than expected tolls for the use of roads and bridges.

The federal government usually spends about $50 billion per year on roads, but the 18.4-cents-per-gallon gas tax only brings in $34 billion. The gas tax has not been raised since 1993, and there is little appetite in Washington for taking a vote to do so now. Congress has turned to other areas of the federal budget in recent years to close the infrastructure funding gap, most recently transferring $70 billion to help cover five years' worth of transportation spending that will run out in 2020.

Michigan adds its own gasoline tax. The state increased its local gas tax by 7.3 cents in 2017 to 26.3 cents per gallon; the diesel tax went up 11.3 cents to 26.3 cents. But the state could be forced to dig deeper into its own coffers to pay for highway improvements if the federal spigot is turned off in 2020.

Jim Tymon, chief operating officer and director of policy and management for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, which represents state transportation departments, said states have a bit of breathing room because federal transportation is secured until September 2020.

"Unfortunately, 2020 is closer than it was a year ago," said Tymon, "and we still don't have a fix for the Highway Trust Fund, so we're starting to get back to the mode of wondering what Congress is going to do."

The White House has admitted Trump's plan, which called for spending $200 billion in an effort to elicit $800 billion in private sector investment, is likely shelved for the rest of the year.

When asked in May about the prospects for an infrastructure bill, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters, “I don't know that there will be one by the end of this year.”

Congressional leaders also rarely mention the possibility of placing such a bill before the November elections.

Tymon is pessimistic about the prospects for Trump's big $1 trillion proposal this year with elections coming up in November, however.

"It's unlikely that Congress is going to pick up the proposal that was proposed by the Trump administration and just move it through," he said. "I think it's likely that you'll see some of these concepts work their way into other bills."

Larry Willis, president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department, said the Trump administration proposal relies too heavily on private sector investment in place of federal dollars and places heavy burden on state and local governments.

"The plan spent a lot of time devolving responsibility to the states," Willis said. "There's a significant over reliance on the private sector. We thought it was a little unrealistic. We're going to turn $200 billion into $1 trillion with some sort of magic pixie dust."

A sad commentary about trump's lie on infrastructure when a pizza delivery company is more concerned about our roads than he is.