Doubling Down On Getting Cosy With Putin And Russia

You really have to wonder about the brazen disregard our President Elect has for rubbing our noses into his obvious sellout to Putin and the Russians. It's like he doesn't only not care if people know, he just assumes he's going to get away with it regardless.

This really is stepping into ground where the rest of what is left of our representational government needs to actively push for a Congressional declaration of Trump's being unfit for office (there actually is a provision in the Constitution for that), or outright impeachment. Where it needs to ask itself just how much more is it going to take before you see his total disregard for propriety for what it really is. an absolute commitment only to his own self interest, and the rest of what that office is supposed to stand for be damned.

In this pick for Secretary of State there can be no doubt that the criteria used to go with Rex Tillerson has nothing to do with actual qualifications demanded for someone who would represent the best interests of this nation, and everything to do with paying for services rendered in getting you elected. And in that, of course, it's a two for one deal because there's also the oil industry that's getting a shill placed into a seat of power.

If you value an government unsullied by the machinations of a foreign power, a power that has no regard for our best interests, then you will be urging your Congressional delegation to take action to remove Trump from the office of the President. If you don't then I guess you just don't care, and Trump has every right to be this brazen and more.

Rex Tillerson of ExxonMobil Expected to Be Named Trump's Secretary of State: Sources

by ANDREA MITCHELL

See Also:

CIA Concludes Russia Mounted Operation to Help Trump Win: Source

by KEN DILANIAN, PHIL HELSEL and ROBERT WINDREM

Inconvenient Truths

The Trump spin team has been forced to put in a little overtime it would seem. The Russian hacking angle into our elections just won't go away. And now they have to, once again, criticize our own intelligence community in order to try and divert attention that from the fact that the hacking was real, and had an effect on the election.

What is interesting now, however, is that their latest little sound bite (quoted from the nbcnews.com article linked below):

Donald Trump's transition team appeared to take a swipe at the Central Intelligence Agency Friday and call the spy agency "the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."

 This is, in fact, the opposite of the truth. The Bush Administration, and in particular Vice President Cheney,  went to some significant pains to cherry pick elements of what the intelligence community, as a whole, was trying to tell them. And despite the leadership of the CIA going along with Cheney's oil interest's infused crusade against Saddam, both CIA and DIA, insiders were trying to tell them that several of the main elements suggesting WMDs were not credible (see here). The problem, of course, was that Cheney's oil buddies had already decided, years prior to the actual Iraq war, that Saddam had to go in order to get at the oil. It also didn't hurt that Cheney's friends saw enormous profit potential in the contracts that would have to let out to support the war.

What will really be telling, going into the future however, is what Trump does as a Quid Pro Quo for Putin's help in getting him elected. And if indications so far hold up Putin is likely to get paid handsomely with the weakening of NATO, and our caving in to what Putin wants in the Ukraine.

So, just to review folks, not only is Trump not going to be the champion of populist issues, he is also quite likely to be the first President to sell out his own country for personal gain. Any questions?

DEC 10 2016, 4:33 AM ET

Trump Team Dismisses Report Russian Hacking Was to Help Trump Win

by PHIL HELSEL

Trump Had Help Besides The Russians of Course:

NEWS

DEC 9 2016, 7:17 AM ET

Fake News: How a Partying Macedonian Teen Earns Thousands Publishing Lies

by ALEXANDER SMITH and VLADIMIR BANIC

No Friend Of Labor

Another note on Trump's cabinet choices: Don't expect a sympathetic ear for issues important to working people.

HE LIKES HIS WAGES LIKE HIS GOVERNMENT

What You Need To Know About Andrew Puzder — Trump's Pick For Secretary Of Labor

By Benjamin Goggin
Dec 8 2016, 6:10 PM

Another Dose Of Reality For Those Who See Recent Jobs Growth As A Vindication...

...Of an economy that's got itself back on track to a rosey future.

Despite the overall numbers of people being down to the point where Fed policymakers consider it "full employment," the situation, as it usually is, is a good deal more complex. To quote the nbcnews.com article below:

"...a recently updated study by Harvard and Princeton economists shows that 94 percent of "net job growth" -- the number of jobs created minus the number of jobs lost -- from 2005-2015 was in "alternative work."

And in that "alternative work" category do we see how working people, even when they supposedly have a job, actually have a very tenuous hold on dependable, full time income. This is so because so much of that "alternative work" is in contracting, part time, or on call work. A situation where not only is the paycheck week to week quite variable, but the benefits full time working folks get are most likely non existent. The bottom line then being that your "better off" index becomes quite questionable even as the powers that be congratulate themselves on the beautiful resiliency of Capitalism. Parallel to the fact, of course, that most social services, and basic public needs, go begging for resources because government at all levels has suffered the results of round after round of tax cuts, benefiting mostly the wealthy, not to mention the tax breaks local governments have to make to get businesses to even stay where they are, let alone bring in new ones.

DEC 8 2016, 2:16 PM ET

Most Jobs Created Since 2005 Are Nontraditional

by BEN POPKEN

A Dose of Reality For Those of You Who Felt Trump Would Be Your Populist Champion

This story certainly speaks for itself:

Trump's Cabinet Picks Have a Combined Wealth of $14.5B. How Did They All Make Their Money?

by BEN POPKEN

See Also:

Let’s Take a Look at Trump’s Cabinet of Villains | The Resistance with Keith Olbermann | GQ

GQ

If They're Starting To Even Consider This...

...Then you know more and more of the folks who make decisions in the halls of power are seeing cracks in the current economic operating system.

And as they are desperate to preserve it no matter what you can imagine the depth of their concern if they are willing to start sending trial balloons like this into the air. I mean, seriously? Free money in the land of "hard work" trumps all?

And whether it would work or not, as a practical matter, especially if the holders of capital, and large stakes in specific commerce, were not also willing to take a corresponding cut in profit margins (however you might do that through taxes or outright legislative limits to prices), is a very big, questionable proposition. And the thing is, something like that would have to be contemplated because Capitalism works within a specific range of parameters. That is just the way it is. This is why so many other attempts to keep it while also pursuing more socially equitable redistributions of output (as with Communism, or the various flavors of Socialism -- the two are quite different no matter what the Right Wing of politics tries to tell you) rarely work, or rarely work for very long; especially when overall global competition is always ratcheting up.

This is why you truly have to start over in coming up with a viable alternative to this operating system. Starting over so that you can take the technological change that has put those cracks into the current system and use it in a completely different, and more advantageous way for everyone. And in that there must necessarily be a complete rethink on how we do production and distribution; indeed a rethink on the ongoing viability of money itself and the factory mentality of social organization that has been the mark of Capitalism.

This is where we are at. A precipice of some very stark choices. More and more of those in the halls of power know this, even if you do not. You would do well to educate yourself if you don't understand this. Those cracks are true fault lines and the pressure is building. It is not a question of if they will release that pressure, only rather of when.

MACH
DEC 7 2016, 2:59 PM ET

Is Universal Basic Income the Answer to an Automated Future?

by DYLAN LOVE

A Must Read Work Of Fiction

I have just finished the book Daemon, by Daniel Suarez and I have to say, if you value cutting edge technical thrillers, this is definitely for you. Especially if you like your thrillers to be scary by the very fact of the plausibility of the book's main premise: That a sufficiently gifted computer/gaming genius could create a very widely dispersed, event response system, set up much like a game AI, to handle specific events, and reactions to events, all in coordination towards a specific goal; which in this case is to bring corporate, commercialized society down.

And because the genius involved here made billions as a wildly successful game developer, noted far and wide for the ability of his game's decision systems to be in another league beyond the competition, the popularity of his games is huge. Important here because not only does it give him the chops to make his dispersed daemon mind boggling clever in running rings around all of our security agencies, it gives him a ready made portal with which to recruit very intelligent, disaffected misfits all around the planet; in a sense then hacking society itself. Giving his new "game" motivated actors that are a great deal more than just NPC bots to act as cannon fodder.

What is even more tantalizing about this premise is the fact that this Daemon gets launched upon the death of the genius developer from cancer; rising metaphorically from the grave to demonstrate an amazing gift of anticipating evolving contingencies and having the decision logic in place to handle them.

Just as important as this being a very good story, though, it is also an intriguing commentary, from a technological view, of the over commercialization of life now (prisons and the military being the main institutions here), and how the monied class has rigged the game to not only keep them at the top, but to make effective, fundamental change virtually impossible. This despite the fact that the new technology of information retrieval and disbursement has made that same game absolutely vulnerable to the diffusion of the ability to project powerful disruptive force.

Mr. Suarez, of course, stretches credulity a bit here in how far even a genius could anticipate contingencies with ever increasing variables the farther out in time this "game" continued to play out; especially as we're talking about a play environment a great deal more complex than a specifically themed, traditional game world. I can tell you, though, that with an excellent mix of believable technical elements, and more importantly, believable characters, you don't care about the imaginative license at all. The story is taught, well paced and spiced with the right kind of action.

This is one good read and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Daemon