Trump's Forthcoming "Call to Arms," Kristof on Meanness, "Our Kids" and a Very Frightening Article

There's a lot of very important material on this posting, information which many people may not be aware of. Please pass this on to your friends, relatives and neighbors.

What's Behind the Trump Team's "Shake-Up"

What is “Dangerous” Donald Trump up to now?  By now you know he again shook up his campaign staff.  In a polite way, he has already said to “apprentices” Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort, “You’re fired!”  So where does he go now?

He has put Stephen Bannon of Breitbart News in a joint top campaign leadership role!  Wow!  This is a perfect example of “preaching to the choir,” designed to further strengthen the bond between “Dangerous” Donald and those who enabled him to win the G.O.P.’s Presidential nomination: the vocal far right-wing minority of the Republican Party, those whose lives have been changed by technology and world trade, and those who wish to turn back the nation’s socio-economic clock and tax rates half a century.  It will do nothing whatsoever to improve his standing with the rest of the G.O.P. and even less with Democrats and independent voters.

Bannon

Trump is not stupid, although in the eyes of many, he might appear to be.  His appointment of Bannon means that he has given up on any hope of winning the Presidency in 2016, regardless of what he might say.  Rather, his aim is to strengthen and expand his ego-based movement far beyond the borders of the Republican Party and cultivate and expand the anti-establishment, anti-immigration, covertly racist coalition which got him the G.O.P. nomination.  Right now, embittered by the lukewarm support he is receiving from the rest of the Republican Party, “Dangerous” Donald considers them an impediment to his being elected and wants to be rid of them.  Bannon’s conservatism includes a deep distrust of both Democratic and Republican leadership, and this seems to suit Trump’s purposes just fine.

“Dangerous” Donald’s eyes are already set beyond the impending election of Hillary Clinton.  I suspect that he is planning a four- year campaign of attacks on her on all levels commencing with his concession speech which will figuratively be a "call to arms" directed to all those who oppose Hillary Clinton.  His aim is unite all of the disgruntled in this country, Democrats, Republicans and independents, and recruit them in his campaign to “Make America Great Again.”

 

Whether he will do this within the framework of our existing party structure,or form his own party, intent on running in 2020, is still uncertain.  By then the G.O.P., minus its Trump supporters, will be impotent.  He may choose to ignore it entirely, starting his own party, or decide to build upon its skeleton. Having been their 2016 nominee is the equivalent of his securing an "option" to do that if he so chooses to. 

"Dangerous" Donald Trump is very, very good at this sort of thing; he has been buying properties for years and deciding whether to demolish them and totally rebuild, or make do with what he acquired.   He will paint whatever the Clinton administration will have accomplished as evil, dishonest, un-American and even traitorous.  For four years, on a nationwide basis, he will use the tactics which won him the 2016 nomination: insults and vague half-truths, designed to appeal to the gullible. Stephen Bannon is just the man to do this and it will start right now, continuing until Election Day in 2020.  (For those who are unfamiliar with Breitbart News, I personally consider it somewhere to the right of Rush Limbaugh. Trump has now moved "beyond the fringe" and is now venturing into unknown, uncharted and dangerous waters.)

That’s the way it looks to me, unless “Dangerous” Donald Trump is actually stupid, which I find it very, very hard to believe.  To think that he is would be a huuugh, huuugh mistake!
Jack Lippman
                               

Homework Assignment: For Extra Credit - Read this Article

In October of 2015, long before the Republican primaries, caucuses and Convention,  BloombergBusinessweek published an article with the following headline and lead-in:  "This Man is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America - Steve Bannon runs the vast right-wing conspiracy - and he wants to take down both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush."  It was their cover story.



It is imperative that all of you, and that means YOU, take the time to read this frightening article.  Breitbart News, referred to in the article as a haven for those who think Fox News is too restrained and polite, is at the core of Conservative media, and its head, Stephen Bannon, probably has more brains singlehandedly than Trump, Pence, Cllinton and Kaine put together times two!  That's why Businessweek referred to him as "Dangerous." CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE.   
JL

                     

A Column by Kristof

About a week ago, the New York Times (and subsequently other papers nationwide) carried a column by Nicholas Kristof about the meanness Donald Trump is bringing to the American political scene.  It is very moving and well worth a minute or so of your time.  Click here to read it.  You may want to pass it on to others.
JL

                                                       

"Our Kids"

The following article appeared on this blog about a year ago.  It is reprinted because this afternoon, I happened to hear Dr. Putnam on NPR discussing his book.  It is worth reading.  
JL

I recently read a book that I must draw to your attention.  It is probably one of the most important books to come out this year.  I am referring to “Our Kids, The American Dream in Crisis” by Robert D. Putnam.  Get a hold of a copy, read it and I hope, recognize the importance of the issues with which it deals.  Oh, yes.  He does offer solutions … but please read the book.

What is the American Dream?  It may be summed up in one word: Opportunity.  That is what brought waves of immigrants to our shores and sent Americans across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  It’s what created businesses, families and communities.  Robert D. Putnam, Harvard political scientist, in his book “Our Kids, The American Dream in Crisis,” focuses in on how over the past two or three decades, our society has been increasingly divided into two classes, defined by the interrelated criteria of educational level and income, and how that has closed off that “opportunity” to massive numbers of American children.

The “tracks” that these classes are in effect locked into include where members of each class live, where they go to school, what kind of families they have, when they have children, the nature of the communities in which they live and the way they earn, or fail to earn, their livings.  Mobility between the two classes is next to impossible, and results in the absence of growth opportunities for children in the “lower” class, whose status they inherit from their parents.

It always wasn’t that way.  As recently as the 1960s, rich and poor attended the same high schools, lived in neighborhoods that were not that far from one another, shopped in the same stores, and were considered part of the same community.  People were still able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  But that world where mobility opened the door to opportunity has disappeared.

Putnam documents that this class division is not a racially determined; it is found equally among Blacks, Latinos and Whites.  We see the result of this class system in our decaying cities, in teenage pregnancy statistics, school dropout rates, drug usage, crime, family disintegration and unemployment.  These problems affect members of the poorer class far more than those who are more affluent and better educated.  And the ones who suffer the most are the “kids,” who in earlier generations had the opportunity for climb a ladder out of their class.  But that opportunity no longer exists.

The book includes detailed case histories of these “kids” which are enough to break one’s heart.  Bottom line:  Economic hardship translated as the inability of a “breadwinner” to get a good job contributes to family disintegration and turns life into a scenario where the struggle to simply survive so saps the energy of the lower classes that the nexus of the American Dream, opportunity, is in danger of permanently fading for them.

If you read one book this year, this should be it.

JL

                                    

                                                 

                                           

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