Saturday, October 28, 2017

The Drums Of War, Con't

While the Trump regime is in now full panic mode over the coming Mueller indictments, the counter-operation that will make all this go away is in full swing, half a world away. Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis is priming the pump for war, and right now it's a race to see which will happen first, an indictment that leads to Trump's downfall, or the bombs dropping on Pyongyang.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Saturday the threat of nuclear missile attack by North Korea is accelerating. 
In remarks in Seoul with South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo at his side, Mattis accused the North of illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear programs — and vowed to defeat any attack. 
Mattis said North Korea engages in “outlaw” behavior and that the U.S. will never accept a nuclear North. 
He added that regardless of what the North might try, it is overmatched by the firepower and cohesiveness of the decades-old U.S.-South Korean alliance. 
“North Korea has accelerated the threat that it poses to its neighbors and the world through its illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear weapons programs,” he said, adding that U.S.-South Korean military and diplomatic collaboration thus has taken on “a new urgency.” 
I cannot imagine a condition under which the United States would accept North Korea as a nuclear power,” he said. 
As he emphasized throughout his weeklong Asia trip, which included stops in Thailand and the Philippines, Mattis said diplomacy remains the preferred way to deal with the North. 
With that said,” he added, “make no mistake — any attack on the United States or our allies will be defeated, and any use of nuclear weapons by the North will be met with a massive military response that is effective and overwhelming.”

And it won't be long before the case will be made that America must attack to stop North Korea, and the closer Mueller comes to Trump, the closer we come to a war that will kill millions.

Trump Cards, Con't

Red state faithful in Ohio are only realizing now how truly screwed they are by handing the country over to Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell, and will have to warm themselves at night with thought that at least it'll be worse for those people or something.

Doug Corcoran is in the trenches every day in the fight against the opioid crisis in the rural Ohio county he helps oversee.

So President Donald Trump’s failure this week to formally declare the overdose epidemic a “national emergency” - words that would have freed up more federal funds to tackle the crisis - was disappointing for him. 
“I have been hopeful for the last several years that the federal government would step up and help us with this crisis, and they haven’t. They’ve really dropped the ball on this and it’s sad,” said Corcoran, a county commissioner in Ross County, home to 77,000 people an hour south of Columbus, Ohio.

The county’s child services budget nearly doubled in the past five years to almost $2.4 million from $1.3 million, because of the number of children needing care due to addicted parents. For a county with a general fund of $23 million, that is a stress on the finances. 
Corcoran struggles constantly to make funds available from the county budget for the likes of drug treatment centers, the county jail and anti-drug education programs.
The disappointment about Trump’s announcement is more bitter in Ross County given that more than 60 percent of the county voted for the Republican at last year’s presidential election against Democrat Hillary Clinton. 

Oh well.  Hillary had a plan to help you, and I'm 99.99999% sure Doug Corcoran told his buddies at the church cookout that he would never vote for "that stupid Clinton bitch" and that Trump was going to MAGA the hell out of Ohio.

Now you get the Republican plan.  We all do, but it's going to cause the most suffering in Ohio's farm counties too, but as long as FOX News is filled with stories about those people suffering too, I'm pretty sure Doug will vote GOP straight ticket again and again.

They're Richie Rich Rich

The global wealth inequality phenomenon over the last ten years is hardly limited to the US, as the world's thousand-plus billionaires are now worth $6 trillion and counting.

The world’s super-rich hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the US Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century, when families like the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts controlled vast fortunes.

Billionaires increased their combined global wealth by almost a fifth last year to a record $6tn (£4.5tn) – more than twice the GDP of the UK. There are now 1,542 dollar billionaires across the world, after 145 multi-millionaires saw their wealth tick over into nine-zero fortunes last year, according to the UBS / PwC Billionaires report
Josef Stadler, the lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients were concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?” 
Stadler added: “We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age.” 
He said the “$1bn question” was how society would react to the concentration of so much money in the hands of so few.

Anger at so-called robber barron families who built up vast fortunes from monopolies in US rail, oil, steel and banking in the late 19th century, an era of rapid industrialisation and growing inequality in America that became known as the Gilded Age, led to President Roosevelt breaking up companies and trusts and increasing taxes on the wealthy in the early 1900s. 
“Will there be similarities in the way society reacts to this gilded age?,” Stadler asked. “Will the second age end or will it proceed?”

Considering Republicans in Congress are working to cut $6.5 trillion in taxes, 90% of which will go to the wealthiest, I'm betting the world's billionaires will see their total net worth grow by trillions more in the Trump era., at the direct expense of the rest of us poor slobs.

And yeah, as they say, something's gotta give. 
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