++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Is this Ocasio-Cortez the new voice of The Democrat Party?
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Moshe Arens interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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Galganov unloads. (See 1 below.)
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Yesterday Georgia installed a new governor. Kemp made a good speech designed to inform all Georgians he is their governor.
The outgoing Governor was smeared in vicious character assassination attacks when he ran for the office and yet, proved to be an excellent governor. So much for Democrat efforts to ruin another adversary.
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Debt discussion. (See 2 below.)
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Trump has a Middle East strategy but it is shaped by the fact Obama gave away the store. (See 3 below.)
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1) This War Is Far Bigger Than The Dems Versus Trump
By Howard Galganov
I must have been Asleep or Drugged over the Past 10-Years, while Obama was the President of the United States of America, because, as hard as I try to know what’s happening around the World . . . I Never Once Heard Of An FBI Investigation Into Barack Hussein Obama.
How Did I Miss It . . . when Obama wasn’t Investigated by the FBI for his NON-SECRETIVE ASSOCIATIONS with Radical American Socialists (Communists), Pro-Palestinian Anti-American/Anti-Jewish Black Liberationists & Known Felons?
I Also Missed The FBI Investigation . . . of President Obama Welcoming the Jew-Hating, America-Hating, Freedom-Hating Moslem Brotherhood, which was Repeatedly Invited into Obama’s White House, just as the Brotherhood was Doing all that it Could to Destroy any Vestige of Secular Governance throughout the Arab/Moslem Middle East.
I Don't Know What I Was On - Maybe I Was Drugged . . .
What did the FBI Investigation find out about President Obama . . . as President Barack Hussein Obama, made the Detestable Nuclear Deal With the Iranians, giving them 150-Billion Dollars & Billions More In Cash, to Continue to Surreptitiously Develop their Nuclear Arsenal & Long Range Missile Program, as the Iranians Financed Military Terror Groups - Hamas & Hezbollah . . . To Name Just Two?
I DON'T GET IT . . . HOW THE HELL DID I MISS THIS FBI INVESTIGATION?
Please Help Me Out & Explain Why This Wasn’t Collusion?
WHAT ABOUT THE TIME . . . When President Obama in a Furtive Manner, Leaned-Over to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, where a “Hot Mic” Picked-Up the President (Obama), Speaking Covertly to Medvedev, “That As Soon As The 2012 Election Was Over, I (Barack Obama) Will Have More Flexibility To Negotiate With Putin”?
AND NOW PRESIDENT TRUMP IS BEING INVESTIGATED FOR . . .
1 – His Previous Business Dealings That Made The President A Billionaire.
2 – President Trump's Primary Campaign To Lead The Republican Party.
3 – President Trump's Alleged Collusion With The Russians.
4 – President Trump's Supporters & Inner Circle To Flip On The President.
5 – President Trump's Sex Affairs With A Porno-Slut & Others.
And Now The Latest . . . President Trump Being On The Russian Payroll.
MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT THIS – IT’S NOT ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP:
THIS IS A VAST WORLDWIDE CONSPIRACY . . . for the LEFT to Realize their Global Dream of a One World Socialist (Communist) Government, Divided Neatly between the Europeans, Asians, Africans & the Americas.
And President Donald J Trump Is The Stick In Their Spokes.
What Do You Think The EU Is All About? And why do you think the British Parliament is Prepared to Risk a British Revolution (Civil War) . . . NOT TO HONOR the Will of the People, who VOTED TO EXIT THE EU, even after a Relentless & Dishonest Billion Dollar Attack by the So-Called “Stayers”?
Why Do You Think The EU & Others Hate Today’s Israel . . . When in the days when Israel was a Socialist Tool, “Everyone” Loved Israel, or at Least Pretended to. But, since the 6-Day War, and the Aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, when Conservative Jews took Control of Israel, Opposed to the One World Socialist Government – Everything Changed.
And As For Israel’s Coming Election . . . How Far To The Right Will Israel Go?
The World Doesn't Say Squat About Nicolás Maduro . . . The Communist/Fascist Leader of Venezuela, who is Basically Obliterating his Should-Be & Once-Upon-A-Time Was . . . a Very Wealthy Country – But Doesn't have much Good to Say about Jair Bolsonaro . . . The (New) Hard Core Conservative President Of Brazil.
And Even Amongst Eastern European Countries Like Hungary, Poland & Others . . . There is no real Love-Lost between them and Socialist Western Europe.
IF PRESIDENT DONALD J TRUMP IS NOT DESTROYED THE LEFT WILL FALL:
So Please Don't Think For A Second . . . That this is all about President Trump, how he Speaks, about his Tone, his Business Dealings, his Wealth or his Sexual Adventures . . . Because It’s Not.
President Trump . . . Whether He Likes It Or Not – Whether He Intended It Or Not, Which I Am Positive He Didn't Intend . . . has Become the Defacto Defender Of Worldwide Civil Liberties & Rights . . . as have been Prescribed & Promoted for almost 250-Years through the United States Declaration of Independence & US Constitution.
This Is Far More Than Just The Democrats Wanting To Gain Power.
To What We Are Bearing Witness . . . Is a full Fledged Assault on our Global Freedoms, from Socialist Elitists, Who we were Warned about by Writers like Ayn Rand & George Orwell . . .
And The Unlikely Donald Trump . . . Has Become The Key To Victory Or Defeat.
Please don’t Think about the Relentless Attacks on President Donald Trump and all of those About Him as being American/Political . . . BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT – IT’S THEM VERSUS US!
And Whether We’re Americans Or Not . . . We All Have Skin In This Game!
Best Regards . . . Howard Galganov
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2)
Debt Denial Is a Threat to America
‘Modern monetary theory’ rests on dangerous, false premises. The U.S. won’t grow its way out of the red.
By
Do deficits matter? Between Republican tax cuts and Democratic spending proposals, U.S. lawmakers act as if the answer is no. Lately, academic economists have echoed the sentiment, advocating large, unfunded infrastructure spending programs—the main thrust of former International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard’s recent presidential address to the American Economic Association. “Put bluntly,” Mr. Blanchard said, “public debt may have no fiscal cost.”
This view, known as modern monetary theory, rests on false premises. One is that the U.S. government will likely be able to borrow at low rates indefinitely. Another is that so long as the U.S. nominal growth rate is greater than the rate at which its government borrows, America can always grow its way out of debt problems.
Never mind that amid full employment and low interest rates, according to the IMF the U.S. has a general budget deficit of more than 5% of gross domestic product, and the general government debt level exceeds 100% of GDP. Even if the government borrowing rate were to stay low, the public-debt-to-GDP ratio would still increase indefinitely. Growth is no panacea.
Say we accept that nominal U.S. growth continues to exceed government borrowing costs by 1 percentage point. Starting from America’s high debt level, the budget deficit excluding interest payments would need to be less than 1% of GDP to stabilize the public debt ratio. At the peak of the business cycle, the U.S. general government deficit excluding interest payments is already around 3.5% of GDP. Even under ideal conditions—full employment and low interest rates forever—the public debt ratio would increase indefinitely.
If the U.S. experiences a recession at any point, the budget deficit would swell as tax revenues decline. Unfunded increases in infrastructure spending—as proposed by Mr. Blanchard and other leading academics—or an expansion in social spending under a future Democratic president, or even increased military spending in a war, would also boost the deficit. Those eventualities would put the public-debt ratio on an even steeper upward curve.
The premise that government borrowing costs will stay low indefinitely, even if the budget deficit remains high, is questionable, especially now that the Federal Reserve is shrinking demand for Treasurys by reducing the size of its holdings—while a ballooning budget deficit is increasing the supply.
It’s more likely that investors, particularly from overseas, will demand higher government bond yields to compensate for the elevated inflation or default risk they see from an ever-increasing public debt ratio. This would be made worse if larger budget deficits put downward pressure on the dollar by increasing the size of the U.S. trade deficit.
One must hope that the drift in the U.S. economic-policy debate toward fiscal laxity is a passing phase. If not, we are well on the path to fiscal ruin.
Mr. Lachman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has been a deputy director in the IMF’s Policy Development and Review Department.
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3)
Trump’s Mideast Strategy
Like Obama, he wants the U.S. to step back. Unlike Obama, he wants to contain Iran.
By
As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo concludes his swing through the Middle East, the Trump administration’s regional strategy is coming into view. Like President Obama, President Trump wants to reduce American commitments while promoting stability. But their strategies differ. Mr. Obama thought the best hope for a reduced U.S. footprint was conciliating Iran. Mr. Trump, by contrast, seeks to build a coalition of U.S. regional allies—even if those allies fall well short of perfection—that can provide a stable security architecture and offset Iranian strength as the U.S. steps back.
In seeking a reduced Middle East presence and retreating from expansive human-rights goals, both Team Obama and Team Trump have reacted to significant changes in American politics. Public support for U.S. military action and democracy promotion in the Middle East has all but collapsed, for two reasons. First, decades of engagement in the region have brought neither stability nor democracy. Second, as America’s dependence on Middle East energy recedes, many voters see less reason to prioritize the region. Pundits can argue that these reactions are shortsighted, but politicians must take them into account.
The Trump administration hopes that with limited American support, Israel, Turkey and the Sunni Arab countries can together contain Iran. If so, Mr. Trump can claim credit for improved Israeli-Arab ties and a more stable region even as he cuts back on American troop and aid levels. This is a sounder strategy in the abstract than the Obama team’s gamble on Iranian restraint. U.S. relations with the Sunni Arab powers, Israel and Turkey are sometimes difficult, but a policy based on continued cooperation with them is more feasible than subordinating their interests to chase after an improved relationship with the deeply hostile regime in Tehran.
Yet the Trump plan also has significant drawbacks. The first is that, as the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran points out, it unites the president’s domestic critics. Many of Mr. Trump’s staunchest critics in the conservative foreign-policy establishment continue to support the George W. Bush strategy of muscular engagement and democracy promotion. They are appalled by both Mr. Trump’s desire to retreat from the region and his willingness to work with autocrats like Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Team Obama, meanwhile, may be out of power but remains influential among opinion makers and pundits. And it knows a Saudi alliance is America’s only alternative to the Iran outreach of the Obama era. The Obama lobby has therefore joined the neoconservatives in the hopes of using public horror at the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, revulsion at the humanitarian cost of war in Yemen and unease about the deplorable state of human rights in Mr. Sisi’s Egypt to disrupt the Trump administration’s Middle East strategy.
A second difficulty with the Trump approach is that relying on such disparate U.S. allies as the Gulf sheikhdoms, Israel and Turkey forces Washington into the Middle East cat-herding business. Over the weekend, Mr. Pompeo found himself embroiled in the Saudi-Qatar rivalry. Meanwhile, national security adviser John Bolton was trying—and failing—to reassure the Kurds while calming the Turks over the conditions of U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria.
Getting Turkey and Israel to work together is also a hard sell; last month Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an “anti-Semitic dictator” whose army “massacres women and children” in Kurdish villages. Fortunately for Mr. Trump, the Sunni Arab powers and the Israelis are working together more effectively than ever before because the threat from Iran is so great; unfortunately, the Saudis and Israelis hate and fear Mr. Erdogan almost as much as they do Tehran’s ayatollahs.
Even if Washington succeeds in controlling its herd of allies, it must still orchestrate an effective strategy for rolling back Iran’s influence. That is hard; in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, Iranian influence is deeply entrenched. Without sustained American engagement, Mr. Trump’s hoped-for grand alliance will fall short.
Yet sustained American engagement is exactly what Mr. Trump hopes the grand alliance will help him avoid. Meanwhile, it is a safe bet that Russia, Iran and to some extent China will be looking for ways to make it as difficult as possible for Mr. Trump to achieve his objectives in the Middle East. At home, so will the neoconservatives and the Obama lobby.
Mr. Trump’s approach to the Middle East, for all its difficulties, may well be America’s least bad option. To pull it off, however, will require extraordinary diplomatic skill, self-control and not a little luck. As Mr. Pompeo harnesses his caravan of cats for their trek across the desert, he should brace for some interesting times.
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