Darvick Family (oldest daughter.)
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Dick ... With all due respect to your friend, my theory goes beyond his ... the young are moving toward socialism through ignorance ... history, social studies, geography education have been sadly lacking in schools for too many years!! They don't know what they are headed toward! J.
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Abbas is an impediment to peace but it is easier to blame Kushner. Hate and cowardliness are powerful albatrosses. (See 1 below.)
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A dear friend and fellow memo reader comments about recent New York primary. "Dick:
The recent primary victory in New York by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a committed Democratic Socialist has gotten a lot of attention as she defeated a long-time Democrat incumbent and political boss. Ocasio-Cotez was an organizer for Bernie Sanders and espouses the same anti-capitalist views even extending them to wanting ICE abolished along with our borders. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Who are they?
The DSA is a not-for-profit organization, and not a political party. Until August 2017, it was part of The Socialist International (SI) a worldwide organization of social democratic, socialist and labour parties. It currently brings together 140 radical political parties and organizations from all continents. The DSA withdrew membership from SI in August of 2017, but was a founding member in 1982. The reasons are unclear, but more than likely this move was to present a more acceptable image to American voters and the media.
One “notable” SI leader was Carol Browner, Obama’s Energy Czar. Just one week prior to her appointment, she was listed as one of 14 leaders of the socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.
This from the DSA website:
“I Have Sworn Upon the Altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
L----"
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Trump's ultimate goal regarding trade if he can pull it off.
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Every once in a while an honest Democrat can be found out there in the weeds and muck of the swamp who has the guts to speak in a rational manner to his fellow Democrats.. (See 2 below.)
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Our Republic is fragile. It rests upon a foundation of collective faith that government serves the people, that the people will obey the law and that those who govern place the interests of the nation above their own.
In the last decade our government has not served the nation well. Several key agencies have been corrupted from the top and many of their most senior administrators have intruded their biases in ways that are unimaginable. The public has lost faith in their ability and willingness to conduct themselves in a faithful manner. This is equally true of the mass media which has lost all sense of objective reporting.
The hatred towards a duly elected president has gone beyond all bounds of reason and legitimacy.
Where all of the bile leads and when, if ever, it ends, is unclear. There are those who fan the flames of discord with billions of their dollars for their own agenda. They benefit from chaos and they want our nation to disintegrate.
Historically, for whatever reason, most nations begin to break apart after several hundred years and there is nothing in the Bible or Shakespeare that would suggest the same could befall our own nation.
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Humor: "A soldier ran up to a nun. Out of breath he asked, 'Please, may I hide under your skirt. I'll explain later.' The nun agreed. A moment later two Military Police ran up and asked, Sister, have you seen a soldier?' The nun replied, 'He went that way.' After the MP's ran off, the soldier crawled out from under her skirt and said, 'I can't thank you enough Sister. You see, I don't want to go to Iraq ...' The nun said, 'I understand completely.' The soldier added, 'I hope I'm not rude, but you have a great pair of legs!' The nun replied, 'If you had looked a little higher, you would have seen a great pair of balls....I don't want to go to Iraq either !! "
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Dick
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1)
The latest comments from Ramallah come after a year in which the PA has sought to obstruct and work against the US administration and its efforts at a new peace push. The comments by advisers to PA President Mahmoud Abbas are part of a pattern in which the PA leadership appears out of touch with both the region and its own people. It continues to harass local journalists, crack down on freedom of expression online, and recently sent police to beat protesters who challenged its sanctions on Gaza. It also refuses to hold elections, preferring to govern indefinitely while billions of dollars in Western support fill its coffers. Increasingly it appears as if Abbas, who has had health problems, is clinging to power. Ordinary Palestinians are paying the price for his lack of leadership and the policies of the oligarchs who surround him.
In an interview with Al-Quds newspaper this week, Trump adviser Jared Kushner questioned Abbas’s ability to agree to a new deal put forward by Washington. “He has his talking points, which have not changed in the last 25 years. There has been no peace deal achieved in that time. To make a deal, both sides will have to take a leap and meet somewhere between their stated positions,” Kushner said.
The PA response to the interview was to accuse Kushner of “incitement,” as The Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh reported. The officials claimed the fact that Kushner had to address the Palestinian public through a newspaper was an indication the US administration had failed to win Arab support for the plan. This claim is similar to the one made by PA officials that improving lives in Gaza would “undermine the Palestinian national project.” In both cases the PA seeks to keep the Palestinian people from deciding for themselves what they want and whether a new peace plan is acceptable.
The aging leadership in the PA has fought against change for decades, and many of those who still make decisions and give statements, such as Saeb Erekat, haven’t moved from their chairs since the 1990s. They have systematically undermined and denied a new generation of Palestinians from rising to the top. When the leadership convened the Palestinian National Council in Ramallah in April – after 22 years – there were few young faces or women among the ossifying speech-makers. Abbas spoke for two hours, reiterating the same “talking points” that Kushner mentioned.
For years, the Palestinian leadership benefited from convincing Western leaders that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the key to peace in the whole region. However, leading regional states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan have come to realize there are more pressing issues in the region in their own countries such as poverty, the Iranian threat and extremism. The Trump administration has tried to get these key states on board for a peace plan.
The PA hopes that by bypassing the US it can wait until the Trump administration leaves office and get a better deal from the next administration or from the Europeans. It hopes to continue to receive foreign largesse, including aid for its security forces, which are trained and supported by the US. It thinks the US has no other option and no one else to talk to.
Many Palestinians today are concerned about their economic situation. The younger generation has grown up in the wake of the Oslo Accords and has not seen their lives improve. People have been denied a say as elections are continuously postponed. Increasingly, they are more frustrated with the PA’s leadership than with Israel.
It is time for the PA to find new leadership who can talk about peace and give the next generation a real chance.
Dick
1)
Abbas, go
Amid growing pressure from Palestinian protests in the West Bank over the last few weeks, Palestinian Authority officials slammed the US administration for its efforts to improve living conditions in the Gaza Strip. On Monday, a member of the PLO Executive Committee also said the Trump administration was “living in an illusion if it thinks it would be able to find Arab or Palestinian support for its suspicious [peace] plan.”The latest comments from Ramallah come after a year in which the PA has sought to obstruct and work against the US administration and its efforts at a new peace push. The comments by advisers to PA President Mahmoud Abbas are part of a pattern in which the PA leadership appears out of touch with both the region and its own people. It continues to harass local journalists, crack down on freedom of expression online, and recently sent police to beat protesters who challenged its sanctions on Gaza. It also refuses to hold elections, preferring to govern indefinitely while billions of dollars in Western support fill its coffers. Increasingly it appears as if Abbas, who has had health problems, is clinging to power. Ordinary Palestinians are paying the price for his lack of leadership and the policies of the oligarchs who surround him.
In an interview with Al-Quds newspaper this week, Trump adviser Jared Kushner questioned Abbas’s ability to agree to a new deal put forward by Washington. “He has his talking points, which have not changed in the last 25 years. There has been no peace deal achieved in that time. To make a deal, both sides will have to take a leap and meet somewhere between their stated positions,” Kushner said.
The aging leadership in the PA has fought against change for decades, and many of those who still make decisions and give statements, such as Saeb Erekat, haven’t moved from their chairs since the 1990s. They have systematically undermined and denied a new generation of Palestinians from rising to the top. When the leadership convened the Palestinian National Council in Ramallah in April – after 22 years – there were few young faces or women among the ossifying speech-makers. Abbas spoke for two hours, reiterating the same “talking points” that Kushner mentioned.
For years, the Palestinian leadership benefited from convincing Western leaders that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the key to peace in the whole region. However, leading regional states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan have come to realize there are more pressing issues in the region in their own countries such as poverty, the Iranian threat and extremism. The Trump administration has tried to get these key states on board for a peace plan.
The PA hopes that by bypassing the US it can wait until the Trump administration leaves office and get a better deal from the next administration or from the Europeans. It hopes to continue to receive foreign largesse, including aid for its security forces, which are trained and supported by the US. It thinks the US has no other option and no one else to talk to.
Many Palestinians today are concerned about their economic situation. The younger generation has grown up in the wake of the Oslo Accords and has not seen their lives improve. People have been denied a say as elections are continuously postponed. Increasingly, they are more frustrated with the PA’s leadership than with Israel.
It is time for the PA to find new leadership who can talk about peace and give the next generation a real chance.
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2)
2)
Go for Growth, Fellow Dems
To counter Trump, become the party of inclusive prosperity.
By Tony James
Economic growth, hourly wages, consumer confidence and personal spending are accelerating. Unemployment is the lowest in two decades. For the first time, job openings exceed the number of unemployed. Some of the current expansion is built on the foundation laid by the Obama administration. And although Mr. Trump’s lack of fiscal discipline risks ballooning deficits, Democrats cannot dismiss the critical importance of new policies that have helped propel the economy.
Many Trump voters—high-school-educated Americans battered by globalization—are our natural constituents. We need to win them back. If Democrats are going to return to power, we need a strong pro-prosperity platform that includes pragmatic and economically inclusive policies that drive growth.
Let’s look at regulation. The attitude that regulation is fundamentally good—and any attempt to reduce it bad—is far too prevalent among Democrats. In 2012 and again in 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that landowners could sue to challenge Environmental Protection Agency decisions to protect wetlands. No one at the EPA seems to have asked if its regulations were actually the best way to preserve wetlands. Regulation of the wrong sort hurts economic growth and diminishes U.S. competitiveness.
The new tax bill is also instructive. Let me state something that is heresy with some Democrats: Cutting the corporate tax rate was good for the economy. It levels the playing field with other countries, keeps thousands of jobs at home, and makes billions of dollars available for reinvestment, especially in smaller companies with limited access to capital markets.
A recent Morgan Stanley survey showed that companies expect to reinvest the bulk of the tax savings in higher wages, increased capital expenditures and research and development. The companies surveyed anticipated passing only a quarter to shareholders in dividends and buybacks. That squares with the plans of the companies our firm has invested in, and is corroborated by the significant jump in capital expenditures—24%—by S&P 500 companies last quarter.
Many think corporate tax reform was not the appropriate national priority. It certainly didn’t do enough to help struggling Americans, and the personal tax cuts were insufficiently progressive. But heated rhetoric from Democrats often dismisses tax reform altogether. From the results, it appears that these policies have given the economy a significant boost. As Democrats, what blinded us? Did our overriding disdain of all things Trump mean we failed to recognize that some of his policies make economic sense?
It is time we built a closer partnership with business, and prioritize ideas over criticisms. One example is infrastructure. Investment in infrastructure would provide fiscal stimulus, create high-paying jobs, improve safety, and increase productivity. Over the longer term, fixing aging infrastructure can add 0.5% to annual economic growth.
Another driver of economic expansion is growth in our labor force. That means we need immigrants—skilled and unskilled. Tech businesses struggle with the deficit of workers trained in science, technology, engineering and math. Agriculture suffers from a lack of seasonal workers. A more accommodating immigration policy would be embraced by business, unleashing further economic growth and expanding the tax rolls.
Addressing trade inequities would also help U.S. producers protect jobs at home. The U.S. has effective tariffs of 9%; China, 27%. Beyond tariffs, China also appears to have benefited disproportionately from current trading rules and has not taken sufficient steps to open its own economy. The result for the U.S. is a trade deficit of $375 billion a year.
Contrary to the prevailing views of most corporate executives, economic evidence shows that a higher minimum wage would benefit business because the added demand more than offsets the added cost. It doesn’t help anyone to have consumers at the poverty line. By engaging constructively with business leaders, Democrats should be able to build consensus on this issue.
There are other areas where Democrats’ priorities and business goals should align: What business executive wouldn’t favor more-efficient health care for everyone, an effective retirement system, better education for more talented employees, and federal support for technological innovation?
Embracing business doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to its flaws. Sensible regulation is vital to a vibrant market economy. More fundamentally, Americans have to feel that the economic system is fair and can work for everyone.
But if we want voters to hand us back the reins of government, we must be able to help the economy grow. That means establishing a constructive partnership with private business. As Democrats, we have already conceded faith, family and freedom to the Republican Party. We need to be the party of inclusive prosperity. Let’s not also concede that to the Republicans.
Mr. James is executive vice chairman of Blackstone and author of “Rescuing Retirement.”
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