Video of trump’s speech to the troops!

GZERO World with Ian Bremmer

Video of trump’s speech to the troops! Sets the record straight on WWII and Vietnam.

"I'd have done the Christmas bombing by Thanksgiving."

EXCLUSIVE video of Trump's speech to the troops. Sets the record straight on WW2 and Vietnam.

Posted by GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on Thursday, December 27, 2018

America needs a universal health care system!

Senator Bernie Sanders

December 27, 2018

It was true in 1993 and it’s true now: the time is long long overdue for the United States to join the rest of the industrial world and have a universal health care system.

Bernie in 1993: The United States Needs Universal Health Care

It was true in 1993 and it is true now: the time is long, long overdue for the United States to join the rest of the industrialized world and have a universal health care system.

Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Thursday, December 27, 2018

The Next Stock Market Crash!

Robert Reich

December 27, 2018

As the stock market careens like a roller coaster, it’s time to worry about the next crash. The same imbalances that brought about the financial collapse that caused the Great Recession are back.

The Next Crash

As the stock market careens like a roller coaster, it's time to worry about the next crash. The same imbalances that brought about the financial collapse that caused the Great Recession are back.

Posted by Robert Reich on Thursday, December 27, 2018

America is better than a border policy that allows children to die

The Chicago Sun – Times

Editorial: America is better than a border policy that allows children to die

The Sun – Times Editorial Board     December 27, 2018 

Claudia Maquin, 27, shows a photo of her daughter, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin in Raxruha, Guatemala, on Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018. The 7-year-old girl died in a Texas hospital, two days after being taken into custody by border patrol agents in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. | AP Photo/Oliver de Ros

Claudia Maquin, 27, shows a photo of her daughter, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin in Raxruha, Guatemala, on Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018. The 7-year-old girl died in a Texas hospital, two days after being taken into custody by border patrol agents in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. | AP Photo/Oliver de Ros

There is no defending a border security policy that allows children to die.

We don’t yet know why an 8-year-old boy from Guatemala, Felipe Gomez Alonzo, died on Christmas Eve while in the custody of the U.S. border police. But we know he was moved among at least four detention centers in his last six days where the level of care was nothing we would wish for our own children, healthy or ill.

Processing centers on the United States border with Mexico are known as “hieleras,” Spanish for “iceboxes,” because they are cold inside and the lights are always on and the only covers are Mylar sheets.

We also don’t yet know why a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin, died in detention two weeks earlier. But we know Jakelin was held first at a facility that did not even have running water. And we know her father was asked to sign a form, stating that Jakelin was in good health, that was in English — and he may not have understood what it said.

Jakelin was being taken by bus to another detention center when her temperature spiked to 105.7 degrees. She died in an El Paso, Texas, hospital the next day.

What is going on here?

If you ask Kirstjen M. Nielsen, the Trump administration’s secretary for homeland security, the blame lies with the refugees seeking entry into the United States, and with Americans who want “open borders.”

“Our system has been pushed to a breaking point by those who seek open borders,” Nielsen said Wednesday.

But if you ask us, that’s classic Trumpian misdirection. Most Americans do not favor open borders. They just wish the Trump administration would stop being stupid and cruel about border security, understanding that it’s not a matter of pulling up a drawbridge. They wish the administration would stop treating refugees, who are fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries, like diseased-ridden criminals and gold diggers.

Maybe then Felipe and Jakelin would have been treated more like children and less like burdens.

The problem is growing only worse. Last month, border agents detained 5,283 children unaccompanied by a parent and 25,172 “family units” — parents and children together. Both figures were highs for the year. Children who arrive unaccompanied are supposed to go to longer-term facilities operated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But, the Associated Press reports, most of those facilities are maxed out, each holding more than 100 kids.

Now the border police — U.S. Customs and Border Protection — won’t even say how many children are being held, or reveal the results of health checks done on those children in the wake of the deaths of Felipe and Jakelin.

Trump’s response to all foreign policy challenges is to hunker down in our American castle. Walls are good and alliances are for suckers. He’s holding the federal budget hostage to that wall.

Last week, Trump announced that about half of the U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan soon will be withdrawn, ignoring the sage advice of experts who say that keeping a lid on terrorists over there sure beats waiting for them to come over here.

In the same way, Trump’s response to the problem of refugees clamoring for entry at the southern border has been to ignore root causes and potential diplomatic solutions.

Nielsen says the best American response to the border crisis is to let parents “who bring their children on a dangerous illegal journey” face the “consequences for their actions.” But a more effective long-term approach, more in keeping with our nation’s humanitarian values, would be to reach out with a helping hand to the three Latin American countries from which the refugees are fleeing — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

As the columnist Georgie Ann Geyer wrote in the Sun-Times last month, the heart of the refugee problem is political injustice in those three countries, making life for the masses unstable and miserable. But “creative American policies” that support economic development and land reform, such as President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, could bring about political reform.

“These are tiny countries where Washington has long had great influence, which it has too often used against, instead of for, political reform,” Geyer wrote.

In the meantime, the Trump administration’s handling of refugees has only added to their suffering. The administration has begun a process called “metering,” in which only a small and limited number of refugees are processed at legal ports of entry each day. This has led to interminably long lines, not surprisingly, and people — many with children — drifting off to sneak into the country elsewhere, often in remote and dangerous areas.

Desperate people become only more desperate.

The Shutdown Could End Tomorrow But Dealing With Trump Is Like Negotiating With a Criminal

The Root

Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root      December 27, 2018

A candid look at hunger in America

Frontline
December 26, 2018

Kaylie’s family can’t afford a refrigerator. Johnny dreams of eating meals somewhere other than a shelter. A candid look at hunger in America, explained kids: http://bit.ly/2u1AgLd

Child Hunger in America

Kaylie’s family can’t afford a refrigerator. Johnny dreams of eating meals somewhere other than a shelter. A candid look at hunger in America, explained kids: http://bit.ly/2u1AgLd

Posted by FRONTLINE on Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Rise-Up Vs. Trickle-Down Economics

Robert Reich
December 26, 2018

As we’ve seen with Trump’s tax cuts, handouts for the wealthy and corporations don’t lead to more investments and jobs or better wages. The real way to build the American economy is to invest in workers — in their education, job training, and health care. Your thoughts?

Rise-Up Vs. Trickle-Down Economics

As we've seen with Trump's tax cuts, handouts for the wealthy and corporations don't lead to more investments and jobs or better wages. The real way to build the American economy is to invest in workers — in their education, job training, and health care. Your thoughts?

Posted by Robert Reich on Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Trump is incompetent, impulsive and amoral. Heaven help us all.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Trump is incompetent, impulsive and amoral. Heaven help us all.

By Eugene Robinson, Columnist    December 24, 2018


President Trump at the White House on Dec. 21 in Washington. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post).
The chaos all around us is what happens when the nation elects an incompetent, narcissistic, impulsive and amoral man as president. This Christmas, heaven help us all.
Much of the government is shut down over symbolic funding for an insignificant portion of a useless border wall that President Trump said Mexico would pay for. The financial markets are having a nervous breakdown that Trump and his aides are making worse. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, widely seen as having kept Trump from plunging national security off some vertiginous cliff, resigned in protest over the president’s latest whim and is being shoved out the door two months early. The world’s leading military and economic power is being yanked to and fro as if by a bratty adolescent with anger management issues.

It has become a cliche to quote William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” written almost 100 years ago in the aftermath of World War I. But no one has said it better:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

We should acknowledge such apocalyptic thoughts so that we may conquer them. For many millennia, this has been the season of hope and renewal — the time of year when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the daylight hours begin to grow longer and the promise of spring, still months away, is assured. While Christians celebrate the birth of their savior, others mark the turning of a page and the coming of a brighter tomorrow.

So we must be realistic but never hopeless. Much has gone wrong. But it is in our power to put things right.

It is difficult, at the moment, to fully assess the damage Trump is wreaking. We have never had a president like him, so history is a poor guide. For his racism, we can perhaps look back to Woodrow Wilson; his general unfitness to hold the nation’s highest office recalls the hapless Andrew Johnson. Maybe Andrew Jackson was as impetuous, maybe Richard M. Nixon as venal.

The past week has seen Trump manifest all those characteristics and more.

After a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump suddenly announced the withdrawal of the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops who are fighting in Syria. The Islamic State is basically defeated, Trump claimed — another of his myriad lies.

It is debatable whether the United States should have sent forces to Syria in the first place, but there was widespread agreement among military and foreign policy experts that abruptly pulling them out now is unthinkable. It will leave the Syrian Kurds — loyal U.S. allies — at the mercy of Erdogan and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. It gladdens the hearts of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the mullahs in Iran. And, like so many of Trump’s decisions, it stems not from analysis but from caprice.

Mattis had gone along with Trump’s ridiculous pre-election deployment of troops to the U.S. border with Mexico — a transparent ploy to stoke fervor among his base. But the Syria move was a bridge too far, and Mattis resigned with a blistering letter outlining U.S. values and interests as he sees them and making clear that Trump has very different views. Angry about being called out, Trump advanced Mattis’s departure date from Feb. 28 to Jan. 1.

Also last week, Trump reneged on a deal that would have kept the government funded through Feb. 8, demanding $5 billion for his imaginary border wall instead of the $1.3 billion that Congress was willing to provide. The president was evidently responding to right-wing commentators who warned that his base would not forgive him if he surrendered. So now we’re in a partial shutdown, with no end in sight.

The financial market indexes have plummeted. On vacation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had the bright idea to call the leaders of major banks Sunday, quiz them about their liquidity and assure them everything would be all right — which helped send markets into another dive on Monday.

As multiple investigations close in, including the one led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump will surely lash out. I believe things will get worse before they get better.

However, Psalm 30:5 tells us that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” All of us, believers and nonbelievers, must somehow summon faith that we will survive this trial. Please start by having a very merry Christmas.

trump Christmas Special

GZERO World with Ian Bremmer

December 25, 2018

Forget North Korea, China, and Iran — this holiday season, Trump takes on the great Northern threat to US security and jobs.

Christmas Special: Trump vs the Butcher of the Arctic

Forget North Korea, China, and Iran — this holiday season, Trump takes on the great Northern threat to US security and jobs.

Posted by GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on Tuesday, December 25, 2018