It's a rainy, muggy day in Leesburg, Va. Although the town is 30 or so miles from the interminable partisan wrangling in Washington, D.C., it's infected with some of the same bitter polarization -- as is so much of the country. On this morning in July, I'm walking into a Veterans of Foreign Wars post that looks as if it hasn't been refurbished since the Vietnam era, or maybe World War II. Noisy window air conditioners wheeze and struggle to keep two spartan meeting rooms at a tolerable temperature. But the atmosphere inside is electric.
Sixteen local people have gathered for a Better Angels workshop. Eight are Donald Trump supporters and Republican voters; eight supported Hillary Clinton and vote Democratic. One is a progressive transgender man still in his late teens; another is a conservative, middle-aged academic. They don’t agree on much, but they're here to see if they can talk to each other, instead of at or about or against each other.
America has always been a partisan country, but not always as sharply as today. After liberals all sorted themselves into the Democratic Party and conservatives sorted themselves into the Republican Party, cross-party dialogue withered -- in the U.S. Congress and in our country’s streets. Worse, disagreement about issues has morphed into something psychologists and political analysts call “affective polarization,” which means partisans don't merely disagree with one another, they dislike and distrust each other. They think the other side is dishonest and dangerous. In a system designed by its founders to depend on compromise, that kind of angry tribalism is toxic to America's capacity for self-governance.
Maybe most discouraging is the feeling that, as polarization grows, there's nothing we can do about it, either as individuals or the country. We're stuck in an escalating spiral of partisan animosity, or so it seems. It's a frightful future, but what can we do?
Both sides present their lists to the whole group. Participants are asked to talk about what they've learned about how the other side sees itself. A woman in the blue group acknowledges she has held many of those anti-red stereotypes, adding that she's sad that this is the case. Next comes a “fishbowl” exercise. One group discusses and critiques its own values while the other listens; then the roles reverse. Only after this exercise in listening, more than halfway into the workshop, do the participants finally begin to interact directly across party lines. By now, however, all feel safe to do so. All feel that they are being heard.
Better Angels sessions are not about changing anyone's mind. Instead, they're about building little platoons (to use the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke's term) of people who will do the hard work of listening to one another. Modern psychology says that a good way to build solidarity among diverse people is to give them a project to do together, hands-on and face-to-face. For Better Angels, learning to talk to -- instead of past -- each other is just such a project.
I am a Better Angels board member and contributor, so I'm an interested party. I'll admit, though, that I initially had doubts that the workshop model could bring about significant change. In a huge country drenched in hyper-partisan social media and split into contending epistemic bubbles, can a handful of people in a VFW hall really matter? Workshops take hours at a minimum, and up to a couple of days. They need volunteer organizers and recruiters. Could such a labor-intensive program be scaled?
As it turns out, the program is scaling itself. Participants often find the experience of making contact with the “other” inspiring and transformative. Hundreds have raised their hands to bring the model to their own communities. The Better Angels organization is training people to be moderators -- and training those moderators to train other moderators. Its goal of seeding a national grassroots movement still seems ambitious, but far from impossible.
Something else about Better Angels also scales: its message. It changes the story we tell ourselves about our agency as Americans. It shows we need not passively accept the decline of civic life into constant, grinding, low-grade partisan warfare. Polarization isn't inevitable or automatic, after all; we can push back. I've seen the emotional relief and happiness people feel when they connect candidly and compassionately across party lines. I've seen the mental lightbulb turn on when they realize they’re not helpless.
Of course, nothing changes overnight. Our political differences are substantive and consequential, and no one pretends otherwise. No guarantees. But in America, hands-on activism like what I saw in Leesburg last summer, activism by little platoons, is how civic renewal happens, and it always starts out against long odds.
Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor of National Journal and The Atlantic, is the author of several books and many articles on public policy, culture, and economics.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2)How Obama manipulated sensitive secret intelligence for political gain
For years, a clandestine U.S. intelligence team had tracked a man they knew was high in the leadership of
al Qaeda — an operative some believed had a hand in plotting the gruesome 2009 suicide attack in
Afghanistan that killed seven
CIA officers.
Their pursuit was personal, and by early 2014, according to a source directly involved in the operation, the agency had the target under tight drone surveillance. “We literally had a bead on this guy’s head and just needed authorization from Washington to pull the trigger,” said the source.Then something unexpected happened. While agents waited for the green light, the
al Qaeda operative’s name, as well as information about the
CIA’s classified surveillance and plan to kill him in Pakistan, suddenly appeared in the U.S. press.
Abdullah al-Shami, it turned out, was an American citizen, and President Obama and his national security advisers were torn over whether the benefits of killing him would outweigh the political and civil liberties backlash that was sure to follow.
In interviews with several current and former officials, the al
-Shami case was cited as an example of what critics say was the Obama
White House’s troublesome tendency to mishandle some of the nation’s most delicate intelligence — especially regarding the Middle East — by leaking classified information in an attempt to sway public opinion on sensitive matters.
2a)
Look in a mirror.
The members of Barack Obama’s administration in exile have become conspicuously noisy of late—even more so than usual. Former CIA Director John Brennan accused Donald Trump and his administration of engaging in “outrageous,” “narcissistic” behavior typical of “vengeful autocrats” by threatening proportionate retaliation against countries that voted to condemn the United States in the United Nations, as though that were unprecedented. It is not. James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, all but alleged that the president is a Russian “asset.” Perhaps the most acerbic and incendiary series of accusations from the former Democratic president’s foreign-policy professionals were placed in the New York Times by Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice. In her estimation, America has abdicated its role as a “force for good.”
It’s no coincidence that these overheated condemnations accompany abundant evidence that the Trump administration is finding its legs. As the last administration’s undeserved reputation as sober-minded foreign policy rationalists is dismantled one retrospective report at a time, its jilted members are lashing out.
Rice’s attacks on the Republican administration deserve the most attention, if only because they are the most apoplectic.
Donald Trump’s recently released national-security review paints a “dark,” “almost dystopian” vision of the world, Rice contended. His world is full of “hostile states and lurking threats.” Rice claimed that there is “no common good” in Trump’s worldview. What’s more, there is no “international community” and no “universal values.” There are just “American values.”
Rice takes a theatrically dim view of what is essentially a restatement of the bedrock principle of almost all international-relations theory: The international environment is anarchic. There is no “international community,” because there is no enforceable “international law.” To the extent that such a thing exists, it is dependent upon the willingness of nation states to subordinate their sovereignty to international institutions. There’s no mechanism to make them do this, save for the threat of force. The recognition that nation states exist in a state of perpetual competition is not some grim surrender to the darkest of human impulses. It is reality, the acknowledgment of which only conveys to other nations firm parameters in which they can operate without accidentally triggering a conflict with another sovereign power.
Rice acknowledges that Moscow is a threat to regional stability and peace, “Western values,” and U.S. sovereignty. She implies that Trump is a menace because he declines to recognize that. In fact, it was Obama much more so than Trump who has failed to see the obvious.
Barack Obama was inarguably the least Atlanticist president since the end of World War II. Within a year of Russia’s brazen invasion and dismemberment of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, Obama
scrapped George W. Bush-era agreements to move radar and missile interceptor installations to Central Europe. In 2013, the last of America’s
armored combat units left Europe, ending a 69-year footprint on the Continent. By 2014, there were just two U.S. Army brigades
stationed in Europe. The folly of this demobilization became abundantly clear when Vladimir Putin became the first Russian leader since Stalin to invade and annex territory in neighboring Ukraine.
A year later, Putin intervened militarily in Syria, where U.S. forces were already operating, resulting in the most
dangerous escalation of tensions between the two nuclear powers since the end of the Cold War. Putin’s move in Syria should not have come as a surprise; Barack Obama outsourced the resolution of the Syrian conflict to Moscow in 2013, if only to avoid making good on his self-set “red line” for intervention in that conflict despite the norm-shattering use of WMDs on civilians. Even Rice’s chief complaint about Trump, his failure to condemn Putin’s brazen intervention in the 2016 election, didn’t elicit a reaction from Barack Obama until the
final month of his presidency.
By contrast, and to the surprise of just about everyone, the Trump administration has been tough on Russia. Trump has ordered harsh
sanctions on Moscow’s Iranian allies for violating United Nations resolutions—a course the Obama administration declined to take even if it allowed
Hezbollah terrorists with direct links to Putin to operate with impunity. He ordered long overdue airstrikes on Putin’s vassal regime in Syria,
halting any further use of chemical weapons in the process. Trump not only declined to lift Obama-era sanctions on Moscow, as many feared he would, but
expanded them. This administration
closed Russian consulates and annexes in the United States. It has
targeted Putin allies like Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov under the Magnitsky Act—the same act that Kremlin cutout Natalia Veselnitskaya
lobbied the Trump campaign to scuttle. Trump has even gone so far as to open
U.S. arms sales to Ukraine, representing a significant blow to Putin’s ambitions in Europe. It is without a doubt that Trump now has a stronger record on Russia than Barack Obama ever did. No wonder Susan Rice is so angry.
Rice further alleged that Trump recklessly accused China of being an “avowed opponent” of the U.S. rather than just a competitor, and then insisted that China has not “illegally occupied its neighbors.” Tell that to Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, or Taiwan, each of which
lay claim to strategic territory in the South China Sea that the People’s Republic seized and turned into forward air and naval bases. Rice suggested that Trump’s “realists” decided to “lump” Beijing in with Moscow, not because it is a rising military and economic power, but because they wanted to “placate” American nationalists. Though this White House declined to defibrillate the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement back to life when it inherited its corpse, it has done a far more comprehensive job of working with Beijing to isolate Pyongyang than Obama did. As the North Korean nuclear crisis intensifies, China has
backed fresh sanctions on North Korean
financial institutions, cut off all
access to Chinese iron, lead, and coal, and may even scale back petroleum deliveries to the Stalinist state by as much as 90 percent. And all in the space of one year.
Rice bemoaned the fact that Trump’s national security document contained no nods to America’s core ideological principles, such as democracy promotion and human rights. Except it does. The strategy review did declare perfunctory fealty to the idea that America cannot “impose its values” on others, but it criticized nations like China and Russia for making their economies “less free and less fair” and for censoring information “to repress their societies.” It professed America’s intention to oppose “rival actors” who “use propaganda and other matters to discredit democracy.” The document added that this administration intends to “support the dignity of individuals” who “live under oppressive regimes and who seek freedom” and “rule of law.” The U.S. will use “every tool” to “isolate states and leaders who threaten our interests and whose actions run contrary to our values,” including “repressive regimes and human rights abusers.” After all, Dr. Rice, America values are universal values.
Rice contended that the document failed to itemize the discrete identities on whose behalf the U.S. should labor: LGBT people, people in poverty, people with AIDS, people under 30, et cetera. Rather, the document insists that all mankind, regardless of conditions or accidents of birth, are objects of U.S. interest. Rice complained that climate change is no longer viewed as a threat to national security. Good. Climate change is not itself a threat to American national security but a
threat multiplier, as the weather has always been. Save for some valid concerns about the prospect of an overly restrictive immigration policy and the precariousness of U.S. free-trade obligations, Rice painted a picture not of a radical administration but one that is returning to a familiar status quo ante. In nearly all respects, it was Obama’s White House, not Trump’s, that adopted an ideological foreign policy and rendered the U.S. and the world less safe as a result.
Even as early as March of 2017, it was clear that the Obama administration’s foreign-policy professionals were
quite insecure about how posterity would remember their stewardship of American interests abroad. They had every reason to be. For now, at least, the Trump administration has declined to govern as Trump campaigned; not as a populist firebrand but a conventional Republican. Susan Rice and her former White House colleagues have every reason to worry, but not for the United States. Their reputations, however, are another matter entirely.
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3)
Now that the tax bill is about to be law, corporations will be revising their forecasts and earnings guidance. When earnings are released in Q1 2018, guidance will be increased by many companies to account for a combination of the tax reduction and GDP growing next year at 3-3.5%. It is very possible that Q4 GDP is growing at 3.5% to 4%. There will also be dividend increases as well as new investments. Taken together, there will be a nice boost to the stock market in Q1. More companies will be announcing bonuses and minimum wage increases, as well as new capital expenditure. I don’t know, but it would not surprise me to learn that CEO’s of many large and mid-sized companies have all spoken and agreed that they need to do these things to convince voters the tax reform was really beneficial to middle and lower class workers, and the benefits do flow to labor. I suspect they know the Dems and the press will continue to claim the tax reform is all for big corporations and the wealthy, so they need to prove otherwise, or risk the Dems getting control of Congress in November. If a lot of companies do pay bonuses or otherwise increase wages, the Dems lose in November. There will also be more announcements of new facilities being developed in the US instead of offshore. While dividends will be increased, that flows to the 45% of workers with a 401K who are already happy with the performance of the stock market. CEO’s are not stupid. They know there is a PR war going on to prove the tax bill really benefits workers, and they will do things to make it so. One of the unintended benefits of Trump and the stock market rally is that grossly underfunded pension funds, mainly those for government workers, are now earning way above their target rate of return and this will help fill the gaping deficits. There is still a pension crisis coming, but it is going to be less than it would have been and a little further down the road.
The Dow is up around 25% and the S&P 500 is up 20%. It has been a great and near record year to be in stocks. 2018 should be more ups. Bitcoin is now beginning to show how easy it is to get killed investing in it. Stay away from all the crypto currencies. It is all lunacy. Don’t confuse blockchain with Bitcoin. Blockchain is just the underlying technology that makes Bitcoin work, and is completely separate, and it is legitimate. Blockchain will be a major software system used by banks and many other fully legitimate institutions in the future, and it has nothing at all to do with Bitcoin. It is only about record keeping for transactions.
The return of cash held offshore is likely to begin early in the year and that will also be a plus for stocks and the US economy. The taxes collected for that will potentially help fund infrastructure investment. Not only does that help the economy, but it helps productivity by improving roads, airports, and other similar things. The loser in this is Ireland which will no longer see the major influx of US companies and the tax income they enjoyed from that. Despite all the crap you hear in the media and from Nancy and Chuck, the tax bill really will make a major good difference to the US economy, which is why those two have ramped up the attacks to a level of absurdity. It is going to be very hard for the Dems to campaign against the tax bill in November when workers see more money and higher wages. GDP growth and historically low unemployment will be hard for them to counter. What are they going to say- elect us and we will raise your taxes? The Republicans are right, once the money starts to show up in paychecks and wages are increased, the bad polls will turn good.
Given the political issues in Europe, Brexit, and high energy costs, this will likely cause companies to find the US much more attractive as a place to do business with dramatically less regulation and low taxes, and much lower energy costs, to be the place to have their companies. The US is getting rid of regulation while Europe is ramping up tough regulation out of Brussels and Macron wants far more control by Brussels. Europe is doing things that make energy more expensive, and the overall cost of doing business higher.
It is pretty clear now there is no case for collusion by Trump nor is there any case for obstruction. Even Adam Schiff has stopped making up fake news stories. It is equally clear that there was a major collusion by Clinton, Wasserman and aided by Lynch and top level FBI officials. It is a fact that Clinton paid for the “dossier”. It is fact that top FBI officials colluded among themselves to try to keep Trump out of office and help Hillary by rewriting the Comey press event to extremely careless from Gross negligence. Those are established facts now. It is also clear that Obama made sure the DEA and CIA could not pursue the case against Hezbollah in order to curry favor with Iran who specifically asked that the US back off. It is also a fact that Susan Powers requested unmasking on over 200 names for no reason to do with her job. It is a fact supported by Donna Brazille that Clinton likely broke campaign finance law by laundering contributions through state party groups and back to her campaign. It is yet unclear what the real story is on uranium, but supposedly there is an informant who has proof of bribes. On it goes. Come early next year, Mueller will find there was no collusion, Trump will be vindicated and Republicans will have ramped up the investigations of all the Clinton and Obama misdeeds. Each day just makes it more likely that my prediction that the Dems will be sorry they ever started this will come true. By spring there will likely be a full scale scandal revealed about what Clinton, the FBI officials and Obama did, and the whole Dossier story. This is going to be ugly and the Dems will no longer be able to try to sell the fable that the Republicans are just trying to hide the Trump collusion. None of this is stuff I made up. It is all out there publicly and with evidence to back it up. As I have said from day one- ignore Trump the person and his tweets and watch what his cabinet makes happen. The policies are beginning to take effect and the results are being shown by market investors and corporations putting their money behind the policies. That is what matters. When people and companies put their own money behind something, that is real, as opposed to all the noise in the media and from Nancy and Chuck.
The tax bill passing is going to be shown to be the turning point politically. It got done and the Dems get no credit. The Mueller investigation is going to clear Trump. The government did not shut down. GDP is growing faster than any time in 10 years. And now the focus is shifted to Hillary, Obama and the scandals they created. Instead of all the focus being on collusion by Trump and Republican failures, it is shifting to the scandals of the Dems, and the economy is humming.
Merry Christmas and have a great holiday. 2018 is going to be another great year to make money if you are all in stocks
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