The Trump Agenda

Such a pathetic transparent troll weenie.

For a real definition of 'pathetic', read your own posts, Andy.

can't wait for trump to take up truffles invitation to come here, I along with 10s of thousands will give the fucktard a good ole Aussie get the fuck out of here welcome aka LBJ style.

http://tribappstest.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/1966/10/21/page/1...

GuySmiley, would you have given Obama the same reception?

No

Is it because, despite being a total warmonger, he presents so well in public?

Hang on, it's because he's from the "progressive" side of politics, right?

Andy,

No on both counts. I have been highly suspicious of American foreign policy and their presidents since Vietnam, a war that touched my family and friends greatly. The trouble with American foreign policy is they mostly get it wrong especially when it comes to the wars they engage in and Australia as the subservient junior alliance partner gets suckered into wars that are none of our business.

IMO leaders whatever the field need to unite people not divide. Trump more than any US president or modern political leader will divide America because of his policies and his obnoxious personality and at the end of his presidency Americans will be more divided and angrier than ever - at themselves and the world.

Never fear, comrades, Trumble's here!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/05/08/prime-minister-trumble-speak...

Guy I agree with your second paragraph but surely the first paragraph is an argument strongly in favour of protesting against Obama?

No, Obama for all his shortfalls, was a bridge builder. A class act and in another time* would have been amongst the greatest presidents.

*when politicians on both sides of the divide worked towards consensus and the good of the nation.

A bridge builder domestically but not internationally?

Andy, correctly me if I'm wrong but didn't Obama inherit the wars, a basket case economy and a Republican Party that said no to practically everything he wanted to do to improve the lot of the average Joe?

The Republicans and their behaviour towards Obama and inaction on the ultra ultra right in their own party have much to answer for in the election of Trump.

just need to listen to the history of what has come out of the twits mouth. at the very least he will be a class act at fucking up relations with other countries. at worst, maybe something else. half of what he says is indecipherable.

the bloke appears mentally unstable. would you leave him in charge with your kids, your finances, your wife....a nuclear missile perhaps? but somehow "being president" is ok and we just accept the idiocracy that the likes of trump and abbott present.

Guy, it's all smoke and mirrors, it doesn't matter.

Globally, whether it's the Bushes, Clintons, Obama or Trump, it's irrelevant because the corporations already exist, the loose agenda is in place and has been for decades, if not much longer, and the president is merely the figurehead.

Look at the lineage of the Bush family to get an idea of the types of people that are allowed to rise to the position of U.S. president.

In my opinion, Trump is an A-grade cretin and Obama is an incredibly smooth and charismatic front man.

Also as far as I'm concerned, Trump is a distraction or an anomaly out of left field and apart from appearing to ruffle a few feathers, will have virtually no bearing on global politics.

And as an aside, Australian politics is little better - we are absolutely a vassal state of the U.S.

Our prime ministers are rubber stamped by the U.S./CIA and if you want to get too cocky, well, just ask Gough Whitlam.

And if you think that occurrences like the Nugan Hand Bank scandal are a one-off then I'd say think again - this is how the highest levels of government, corporations and power work, whether in the U.S or in Australia, the U.K or Russia or wherever.

And if your country doesn't want to play this game, your democratically-elected government will be overthrown, or sanctions will be applied against you, or rebels will be armed.

I like your posts happyas and floyd, but I have to ask, do you really believe things would be much better/different if clinton won?

She is a hollow shell of a candiddate that only cared about one thing, her own personal goals. She was a selected stooge candidate representing a party that stands for nothing anymore, except the liberal globalist (broken) agenda, that is so far past it's use by date it relies on corruption, intimidation, nepotism, propogada and outright lies just to sustain iitself (the democrats have become the republicans).

The party represents nothing anymore - except identity politics - which was cynically harnnessed to outnumber republican voters. However it has actually had negative effects, splintering their traditional base, and dividing society generally right across the political spectrum.

It backfired bigtime...both politically, and even socially, which, if one takes a naive positive view, is the reverse of their supposed well meaning intentions.

Karma?

...sure looks that way to a trying to be objective observer

Yep a shock, no doubt...hard to accept...yes...but get on with it...and move on, the left is losing ground big time, and its only getting worse as they continue to blame everyone but themselves six months on.

Her campaign offered nothing, from a nothing candidate, from a party with nothing. They have basically ran out of ideas, and comnensurately, relevance.

Even worse they have become the 'born to rule' types the left once despised

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-on-the-new-book-tha...

The third way bullshit has undermined everything, crebibility, trust, and especially supposed potential positive outcomes for people and the planet.

What they've been doing for the last 30 years hasn't worked. In many people's eyes it has just made things worse. Until the left manages some self reflection and comes up with some new ideas that work for the majority they are doomed.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/third-way-environment-third-stage-env...

Sanders ought to be president right now .... what a different america/world it would be

the president is indeed the figurehead. and the figurehead can for example "accept climate change" and build on obama's policies, or do what hes doing and reverse everything. setting the US back 10 years with everyone else looking on saying, oh well ill just stroll at the US pace too. he is already having an impact on global politics.

Happy, when Obama took office, he was facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. His priorities were saving major American industries, restoring faith in the economy and dealing with unemployment. The Recovery Act, the bailout of the auto industry and the Wall Street reform act, Dodd-Frank, were at the top of the agenda Obama's team pushed for, followed by health care reform.

Had the White House pushed for a comprehensive national climate plan early, it could have given Obama's climate agenda legislative backing, making it much harder for his successor to undo.

Unfortunately regardless of Obama's personal feelings, he was not surprisingly forced to toe the neoliberal line.

Should we have protested against Obama's lack of intestinal fortitude as we should protest against, well, most things about Trump?

why would I protest the guy that made some effort but not "quite" to the standard required to stop his successor unravelling his work? that would be like protesting gillard because the carbon tax wasn't cemented in our constitution. positive changes exists within the scope of the neoliberalism nonetheless. 2008-2013 labor proved that. a govt can do more than just one thing at a time. if we are so cynical about politics on account of neoliberalism then we throw away any ability to make any positive change at all. small steps as always. decades of free market deregulation wont be unravelled overnight.

Why would you protest against Obama?

Because notwithstanding Obamacare (and possibly his domestic "bridge building") he was/is a neo-liberal shill who spent every single day of his tenure at war.

Under Obama, the U.S. dropped over 26 000 bombs in 2016 alone and more generally, authorised 10 times more drone strikes than Bush.

This doesn't sound like positive change, this sounds like regression.

And you'd protest against Trump but not Obama? Sure, protest against Trump for so many things, including his recent sacking of the FBI chief, but Obama was no saint.

Having said that, I still believe that broadly speaking, it doesn't matter who is the POTUS.

Andy, I was thinking about your recent comments about Obama, as far as I can tell factually correct as they are. I was thinking about Obama in the context of the nature of change; incremental and wholesale. Further, I wondered how that change process linked to social media and the angst people generally feel about politics at the moment.

A lot of thinking so my my head really hurt after a few minutes, anyway here goes ....

I would think Obama, the man as president( or any well intentional person in that role for that matter) would have been fighting against the "machine" pretty much everyday he was president. The irony is that while he had this daily fight he headed it all up from the public's point of view. So to what extent was his desired course as president hamstrung and to what extent was his destiny preordained?

So I think its reasonable to assume any changes Obama made "for the good" were incremental and not wholesale. The wars and economy he inherited was his lot for president regardless of what he would have wanted to do. His frustrations with inaction on gun reform were clearly there for all to see for example. Social media users don't want incremental change they want revolution so its water and oil and regardless of the most outrageous lies fucktards like Trump get elected. Trump and Brexit are examples of angry people in their personalised social media bubble wanting revolution when the machine and the political hero of the day will only ever give them the increments.

Of course in the greater scheme of things this all plays out very well for conservatives and big capital because an electorate divided or hateful of fearful is easy manipulated and its distracts from reasoned political debate.

Obama in the context of the nature of change - jeez, so many angles and sub-plots here with this one!

From an optimistic point of view, an urbane, apparently progressive black man as the POTUS has to be a good thing symbolically.
I do expect that his heart is in the right place but when you ask, was he hamstrung, and also was his destiny pre-ordained, my response to that is 100% yes it was.

It's a pretty freaky thought to imagine the extent to which the president's position would be created, manufactured, curated and manipulated, building the myth and selling the message as delivered by a team of hundreds or maybe thousands of the best and brightest with limitless resources.
And this goes on relentlessly, hour by hour, year after year.
Fucking hell.

Surely Obama knew where he was heading and just as surely, he wouldn't have been let through if he was going to rock the boat.
He suited the narrative of the times, which very much involves our obsession with identity politics.

As for social media, well, I would agree that users are impatient with the current rate of change, and rightly so considering that the evidence on pretty much everything is in and is being met with inaction.

But then you get suckers voting for Trump and people voting for Brexit/Le Pen/Hanson for various reasons, many of which do not involve racism blah blah blah.

I would make a comment though that many people voting for the above lot are far from being in a social media bubble.
I'd say it's a fact that millions of "salt of the earth" people in regional areas who don't care about emojis or Twitter are voting this way because they have seen their industries disappear and their wealth evaporate in real terms while the rich continue to disproportionately continue to increase their wealth.

I also think it's worth mentioning Sypkan's post above, which for me was totally on the money - you've got a two party system where the old "left" has found common ideological ground with the "right" and now, can't define itself and so stands for nothing.

Obama can possibly be seen as a progressive individual but in the framework he was in, this was almost entirely irrelevant.

A thoughtful response, thanks. On change, while people might want a revolution they aren't going to get, not with Brexit not with Trump. Too many vested interests and too many fingers in the pie. Anyway, where have any of us experienced wholesale change in our work place or life? Change is a slow incremental beast and I think that mostly that is a good thing. The best change is universally supported so people have to be brought along with it. If people expect massive changes under Brexit or Trump or Hanson or Brian (he's not the Messiah) they will be disappointed and only get angrier.

Social media or salt of the earth doesn't matter people are generally unhappy or angry. I think in some small part this comes back to the poor quality of political leadership and discourse we have had in the last 10-15 years, the politics of exclusion, of hatred and of envy. Are we really that "aspirational". How many genuine happy people do we all know? people that make the room brighter? its a struggle to name any and its a struggle to be happy without actively blocking out the daily tripe.

Nice one Guy.

All politics aside, I think your last paragraph is really important.

We've been sold the aspirational dream but at what cost?

I know nostalgia is not what it used to be but my memories of the 70s and 80s are of a time of lower material standards of living but greater happiness, especially societal happiness. It bothers the hell out of me to talk to all these people today who, for example, feel they can't be happy living in a humble house etc.

It seems like perspective, priorities and a healthy definition of wealth have been badly distorted.

Also, I hope it's fashion or something, but a lot (as in, the majority) of younger people that I cross paths with seem really flat - a suppressed sense of humour, lacking a bit of spark.
Is it cool to be indifferent at the moment or are the young'uns really weighed down by the way things are?
Modern information overload really can't help.

I am happy guy. In fact I am a really smiley guy. Life in three d planet earth appears to be a drama and sometimes a classic tragedy. But it can also be a comedy. Switch channels and switch off the set. Gosh it was just a show. It was all made up. It was a pretend virtual reality. Acceptance of this brings peace and then gratitude with happiness. You and me and the are spirits playing a game of forgetfulness and disunity. So please re member the unification of all and of course this then creates genuine happiness.

Andy. Obama inherited ISIS. you can call it "regression" or rather just how the cards were dealt. using that against him is disingenuous. TBH i wasn't going to bother but since you've brought it up twice now. and similarly Trump inherits war too. but im not holding that against him....just CC inaction. just to be clear .

nice work dave, i'm trying believe me. a smile is a wonderful thing.

Another damming assessment of the democrats

Pointing out that trump should be the oppositional party's political gift that just keeps on giving...

"...But all signs suggest that the DNC is poised to blow this unique moment and potentially guarantee the GOP increasing success over the next four years. This is so because the DNC has become immensely tone-deaf to its own internal problems.

Much has been made, for instance, of Trump’s historically low approval ratings, but less attention has been drawn to the fact that support for the DNC is even worse.

Trump currently has a 45.1 percent favorability rating, one of the lowest for any president in the history of polling. But Democrats fare worse. The DNC has only a 38.8 percent favorability rating.

....What’s amazing about this list is that there is no reference of any kind to the failures of the DNC itself. Clinton, like all party stalwarts, seems completely incapable of articulating any sort of reasonable assessment of the disasters of the last election.

...The elephant in the room for the DNC isn’t Trump or the GOP or Bernie bros or Russian hackers; it is its own elitist, corporatist, cronyist, corrupt system that consistently refuses to listen to the will of the people it hopes to represent. Thus far, though, DNC leadership has refused to take these issues seriously. It’s a strategy that smacks of arrogance and hubris. And it’s a politics that looks a lot more like the GOP than a party invested in helping the little guy."

While the NYT, CNN, WP, and the like continue with the hysterics, it is most interesting to finally get some balanced reporting from certain sources. Even if it's taken a post post election epoch to get there!

http://www.salon.com/2017/05/13/the-dncs-elephant-in-the-room-dems-have-...

Happy, I don't think that I am being disingenuous about Obama being a wartime president.

Yes, under Obama the U.S. has substantially scaled back the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan compared to Bush.

But Obama also approved strikes against Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, for a total of seven countries; Obama intentionally bombed more countries than any other U.S. president since World War II.

Even before taking office, Obama stacked his administration with pro-war people: He kept George W. Bush’s head of the Pentagon, Robert Gates; for Secretary of State he nominated Hillary Clinton; he surrounded himself with other prominent Iraq War backers including Vice President Joe Biden and senior foreign policy advisers Susan Rice and Richard Holbrooke.

He surrounded himself with a pack of liars and hawks.

Obama the figurehead, the frontman, was always going to be installed to look charming out the front of a U.S. that was never not going to broaden its military influence.

Dude. Sweet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

Is there anyone that still doubts the effects of a vote for Trump on the calibration of politicians worldwide ?

Trump may be a stooge / plant , but the desire of the incumbent populations of western democracies for cultural stability has revealed the whites of the globalist's eyes.

We all know what to do when we see the whites of their eyes...

I reckon the worldwide phenomenon of nationalist governments will keep on rolling because if one government does and then negotiates a better deal, then shit why wouldn't the rest? As much as I dislike the LNP they are in fact the only ones making any effort to slow it down in Aus. KRudd dropped the foreign investment laws down to his ankles and we're still feeling the damage now.

Rampant globalization can't go on forever. It all sounds good until the ordinary people in the richer countries catch on that in order to lower the draw bridges to poorer countries with trade and jobs it means the resulting equilibrium of living standards will inevitability be lower for the majority of richer countries. True, there will be a few rich business owners but the working class will be left with less due to the transfer of trade to poorer nations.

DTrump knows this and recognizes the people being let down in the process so he played them like a fiddle.

Yes, Trump may have played them but the problem is bigger than that. There is clear evidence that the top four companies are controlling over 50% of the market. We can see this with Apple, Facebook and others. Basically there are less firms. Trumps dreams maybe just dreams. We are better placed here in Aus but the problem is still there.

Think there is problems with monopolistic corporate domination now ?

Wait till AI ascertains that an esoteric entity such as itself that exists within cyberspace is beyond corporeal punishment and does....whatever the fuck it wants to do in regards to achieving its goals of dominance.

Which obviously extends far beyond the mere accumulation of wealth that the corporations currently pursue.

https://m.

Boooooom......full retard !

But also sort of serious.

yes, we know about the many notable world thinkers on AI but I am more thinking about the current time and the domination of large corporations. Its all around us and we know we need to do something but somehow its becoming all too hard.

It's actually already too late to stop the corporations they're currently achieving economies of scale so huge that they can already buy entire nations with their annual profits. The big banks make something like $10 bil profit a year EACH. They claim to return 80% in dividends, but if they changed their minds even for one year they could happily buy out our whole country. These are the just the ones we know about that play by the rules & report their consolidated profits in Australia, and they would be chicken feed compared to what goes on in the bigger countries. Old money corporations are already out of reach.

To be frank tb i don't even think they're Trumps dreams I reckon he just says what people want to hear. The trump corporation is still ticking over in the background and I'm curious about what he does as soon as he's out of the oval office.

One thing that struck me in the last few years as I delt with a couple of very large US corporations/ companies of monolithic proportions was the fact that their needs are the real dictators of US political and military action.

At first I thought it was a case of the tail wagging the dog till I realised that the American voting public is almost INCIDENTAL to the machinations of the USA as a world force.

The example of United Fruit in Nicaragua is one example , but an example that it's easy to dismiss as mired in the recent past and unrepresentative as Nicaragua wasn't a respected ally of the US.

But if you truly think about why large energy companies are permitted to rape Australia of its resources , then you'll realise that it goes far beyond the obvious corruption of individuals.

It goes beyond the scope that you'd call mere corruption by a large, large measure.

More a question related to sovereignty and what a nation can claim as its own in the face of an avaricious capatilistic power that travels under the guise of a nation state.

Still, give me the cultural courtesy of being dominated by our American cousins than the grasping aliens promoting a One belt , one road path to subjugation.

North Australian economic forum as we speak ...yaaaaay !

Burp!

Exactly that.

It's almost too big to be considered corrupt as it's written into our society now. In Aus we're dominated by the corporations, the unions and the church. I've said this before but the churches and the unions exist outside accountability because they own the game. The unions talk big but the ALP is just as guilty (if not more so) than the Libs of selling out everything our nation has to offer to the big corps. The greens come across as terrorists because they point it out but they have to pick a side in the end. The US system isn't that different.

Spot on, Gazzy!

Parp!

As found in the previously unreleased edition : Tin Tin gets off chops.

Yew!

I'm mostly a Trump free zone these days, god its hard to avoid the daily (black) comedy, but is he totally barking mad?

Could Monty Python write a better script for the presidency of this total imbecile?

Surely this will be the straw that breaks the camels back. I wish they'd hurry up and impeach him just so we can get him out of the news. Who does the US of A get instead if Trump gets the sack?

http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/16/tips-for-reading-washington-post-sto...

Pretty sure that they are going to reanimate Reagan if Trump falters.

Should be a spectacle.

The author of that has got a great writer's surname at least. And she's written for (wait for it) the Washington Post...apparently.

Anyway, Mike Pence has got to be the old radical Christian supremacist militant's wet dream. God AND big business as usual. Praise the Lord, and pass the buck/ammunition.