Trump: right on the TPP

All of that makes a ton of sense, PA. Especially the part about “team first.”

I think he’s “right” on TPP as well, and it’s okay to say that. I just wish he didn’t feel the need to claim he killed it — cuz it was already dead, at least in its current form. He and some media talk as if it were already in effect, and that Trump took us out of an existing arrangement. It wasn’t a done deal at all, and was being held up in Congress prior to Trump’s entering the White House.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32498715
(Links to the full treaty on the BBC site)

But you make excellent points, regardless.

PA Ram wrote:

Yes–actually I give Bernie most of the credit for killing it. He made Clinton back off that in the primary. Obama gave up on it. You’re right–it was dead in the water.

Yes I agree, it;s not at all clear the TPP was going to stand no matter who was elected.

Yes Trump did the right thing but to me that’s not worth the cost of him being president, since no candidate was going to keep it anyway.

This minor disagreement with you has nothing to do with whether or not you have a right to make the argument you do. Of course you do. I don’t know where you’re getting that kind of resistance, but chock it up to volatile times.

I face similar stuff all the time. Among Trumpees I argue that their over the top Hillary demonizing does not stand up to rational scrutiny. (The point being to always defend rational scrutiny.) That causes war. Among Hillaryites I argue that she was a standard-issue neoliberal with the usual bad foreign policy ideas and her advantage was just being better than Trump on a long series of important domestic issues. This causes war. Among Bernie and Stein people who try to suggest Trump won’t be that bad compared to Hillary I argue that, absolutely, yes he will and if anything will he will be even worse than we anticipate. This doesn’t cause war so much as just tension.

We can’t be sensitive or defensive about stirring up volatility. It’s just going to happen no matter what. Better I think to smile at it and shrug. Sign of the times.

..

nittany ram wrote:

zn wrote:

Among Bernie and Stein people who try to suggest Trump won’t be that bad compared to Hillary I argue that, absolutely, yes he will and if anything will he will be even worse than we anticipate.

Yeah, I never understood how leftists could think Trump would be better than Clinton. Granted, how good a president is perceived to be is a matter of personal perspective but since Trump was elected the republicans have moved to defund women’s healthcare and take away their reproductive rights. The groundwork has been laid to sell off protected federal lands (including National Park Service lands) and the Endangered Species Act is in jeopardy because the ESA also serves to preserve land upon which endangered organisms rely. None of these things would have happened under Clinton, and they’re just getting started. Trump has been in office less than a week.

nittany ram wrote:

<
Yeah, I never understood how leftists could think Trump would be better than Clinton….

============
MOST of the non-american leftists i have talked to think as bad as Trump is,
he’s better than Hillary. Almost all their reasoning is centered on ‘war with russia’. Its a HUGE issue outside of America. And the thinking of a lot of international leftists was that Hillary was gonna cause a war with Russia.
Rightly or wrongly that is what many of them think. (I dont think Hillary was gonna cause a war with russia, myself. Though i do think she would continue with the mass-murder thing using drones and the CIA etc)

w
v

The fear of a war with Russia always puzzled me. That’s something you don’t even see (pushed) among the Republican side of the neocon continuum. They may be crazy, but they’re not that crazy. Mutually Assured Destruction has penetrated their otherwise surreally hawkish minds, etc, etc.

Trump, however, has talked about war with Iran, using nukes against “Islamic terrorists,” “eradicating Islamic terrorism,” etc. etc. And every Muslim I know, many of whom were originally from Iran, Palestine or Kuwait, was petrified by the idea of a Trump victory. Not only because of his call to ban all Muslims from entering the country, registering those still here, and shutting down all mosques . . . but because they feared he would go to war with Iran and start WWIII. They also saw him as far too cozy with Netanyahu and Likud.

It just never made any sense to me that any leftist anywhere would prefer Trump on balance. Just Trump’s seriously close connection to the Alt-Right was enough all by itself. Throw in the Nazi-like call to ban all Muslims, his warmongering regarding Iran, his shady business dealings, his seven bankruptcies, his endless lies, including the one that said Climate Change was a Chinese hoax . . . Oh, yeah, and his bragging about sexual assault.

It still baffles me to no end.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by Billy_T.

nittany ram wrote:

Trump just froze all EPA grants and their contract budget. Scientists there and at the Dept of Agriculture are also prohibited from communicating with the public (whose tax dollars fund their research) and the media. Trump thinks there’s an inherent bias in the results of the research. He views science as a leftist conspiracy.

This is an obvious attempt to bully the researchers and ultimately weaken those agencies. I think the EPA is going to be gutted and perhaps eliminated and the environmental regulations it overseas will be rolled back. He can’t eliminate it with an executive order due to the 1977 Reorganization Act. However, he can do it with cooperation from congress which he could get it due to the Republican majority.

Enjoy the clean air and water while you can, folks.

——————
Well that kind of thing might very well limit him to four
years. I dunno though.

wv

nittany ram wrote:

wv wrote:

——————
Well that kind of thing might very well limit him to four
years. I dunno though.

wv

He can do a lot of irreversible damage in four years. Hell, who knows if he even wants a second term?

This could burn him out west though. A lot of the EPA grant budget funds cleanup efforts and jobs out there.

Link: http://content.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2017/01/how-trump-s-freeze-new-epa-grants-and-contracts-will-hurt-western-states

But, again, I doubt that he would even care if it hurt him politically.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by nittany ram.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by nittany ram.

I feel you PA. Have some of the same issues.

Trump got a call right. Even a broken clock is right twice a day…

But let’s be honest.

Whether we use “better or worse”…pick your poison…

Trump was always going to be worse domestically and Clinton was always going to be worse on foreign policy and international trade (thus, internationally).

And when the Obama Admin wasn’t too concerned with killing innocent people with the Drone Program (75-90% of all people killed in the drone program were innocents based on various estimates), it’s pretty easy to understand why people aboard might not be too excited about a warmongering regime changer who almost certainly would have expanded that irresponsible imperialistic program over a nationalistic sociopathic egomaniac who decried foreign intervention.

The choices were shit sandwiches.

And it’s clear some of us disagree. I categorically reject the notion that one of the shit sandwiches was “better” than the other. Different, yes.

Better? I’m just not there.

But yeah. I’m all about the issues…and Trump’s gotten everything catastrophically wrong..except TPP.

So far. I mean…it’s early.

There’s still time to defund public education before the polar ice caps melt in a couple of years…

Mackeyser wrote:

Trump was always going to be worse domestically and Clinton was always going to be worse on foreign policy and international trade (thus, internationally).

And when the Obama Admin wasn’t too concerned with killing innocent people with the Drone Program (75-90% of all people killed in the drone program were innocents based on various estimates), it’s pretty easy to understand why people aboard might not be too excited about a warmongering regime changer who almost certainly would have expanded that irresponsible imperialistic program over a nationalistic sociopathic egomaniac who decried foreign intervention.

G’morning, Mac,

And apologies for following ZN here with this. Don’t mean to pile on.

It’s pretty obvious that Trump provokes sometimes wildly different responses. My own take is that he was never going to be anywhere close to “dovish” as some contended. I never saw that in his rhetoric, or his history. Quite the opposite in fact. He was constantly rattling his saber at Iran, China and the entire Islamic world, and frequently talked about how Obama and the Dems supposedly had gutted the military. He frequently called for massive expansion there, including a ginormous increase in our Navy and our nuclear weapons programs. He also said bring on a nuclear arms race. He was in favor of that, publicly. And he said he wouldn’t take nukes off the table when it came to fighting ISIS.

To me, if we actually accept his words, he was far more hawkish than the hawkish Clinton. And when you elect a Republican, you elect a party, as happens when you elect a Dem, of course. The neocon wing of the Republicans is more hawkish than the neocon wing of the Dems . . .

Well, yeah, we disagree.

And the upside is that the piece of shit corporate Dems have very little sway right now.

The progressive movement actually has a chance to be part of a real resistance that can penetrate for the first time in 40 years.

It’s unfortunate as hell, that requires someone as destructive as Trump.

But we could have Shitnado hit and then mobilize to clean up after the disaster or we could continue the slow, immoral decline (Obama’s drone program, neoliberalism, mass incarceration, etc) while most of the citizenry and most of the press slept.

It’s arguable that 8 years of Clinton’s climate acceptance would be more damaging than four years of Trump’s climate denial followed by hopefully someone like Tulsi Gabbard who would focus on innovating on green/renewable energy.

Lastly, Trump’s ego is so dammed unstable that he succumbs to public pressure. He already has on numerous issues. When was the last time Clinton gave a shit about anything anyone said???

Not defending Trump, just pointing out that his weaknesses can be used against him.