[Peace-discuss] Maureen, the Sycophantic Mouthpiece

[Robert Naiman]

Give the devil her due. She praises Steve Bannon for wanting to tax the
rich and cut the taxes of working people, and urges Trump to take Bannon's
advice.

[...]
Steve Bannon has not been partying in the Hamptons with Jared, Ivanka and
Kellyanne. He has instead been lurking in his lair, scheming about a plan
to raise taxes on the richest people in America and give tax cuts to the
people who need them.

As Jonathan Swan wrote when he broke the story in Axios, “It’s classic
Bannon — pushing a maximalist position that’s reviled by the Republican
establishment.”

Conservative craniums are exploding all over town. Mitch McConnell had
already been worried that Donald Trump might revert to the pragmatist who
gave Chuck Schumer and Hillary donations and triangulate with Democrats.
[...]

[...]
As Grover Norquist, the anti-tax evangelist, howled, “It’s a particularly
cruel thing for Bannon to do.”

In his role as Keeper of the Essence, the one who tends the flame between
Trump and his base, Bannon has been guilty of plenty of cruel things, from
the botched travel ban to “American carnage” to the fixation with the wall
to the offensive tripe in Breitbart when he ran it.

As the rumpled hero to white nationalists likes to say, “Darkness is good.”
[...]

[...]
Bannon is right to challenge his colleagues’ claim that the rich pour money
from tax cuts back into the economy.

If you give a tax cut to people who make a million a year or more, they
save the money. But if you give a tax cut to working-class and poor people,
they spend the money. So the multiplier effect for the economy is much
higher with tax cuts for people who don’t have a lot of money.

Bannon understands that if President Trump gave a raspberry to plutocrats,
including all the ones in his own administration, he would grow more
popular. (It would be hard to grow less popular.)

For all Trump’s insanity, he is in a unique place to do some interesting
things because he’s not beholden to the usual suspects. He’s barely even a
Republican, so it would be a smart strategy to work with Democrats on the
things he agrees with, that Democrats can’t say no to.

Why doesn’t Trump indulge his predilection for acting against expectations
in a way that could be a boon to his base, or “my people,” as he calls
them? Why squander all that combativeness and impulsiveness on Twitter
insults? Why settle into an angry standoff with a majority of the country?
It’s an exhausting dynamic that breeds a siege mentality — a mind-set that
was succinctly described by Kellyanne Conway at a recent Washington dinner
as “they hate us and we hate them.”

Why doesn’t Trump channel all that bile against the establishment and show
us his purported negotiating skills by sitting down and working out an
actual deal that could benefit a lot of the people in Trump country who
need health care rather than backing the “mean” House and Senate plans that
are going to hit rural America particularly hard?
[...]



Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1

Amend NDAA to End U.S. Aid to Saudi War in Yemen
https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/to-stop-cholera-famine?r_by=1135580





On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 12:32 PM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss <
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/opinion/sunday/putin-
> trump-bannon-taxes.html?_r=0
>
> The US political establishment, with the NYT as one of its multiple
> loudspeakers, continues their hysterical campaign against Trump, for fear
> he might actually mean some of his 'economic nationalist' criticisms of the
> neolib and neocon policies ('corporate globalization') that characterized
> the Bush and Obama administrations.
>
> The propaganda cover of the establishment's campaign is the desperate and
> fantastical 'Russiagate'; their principal weapon for winning the support of
> the US populace is their control of the US media.
>
> The leading critic within the administration of the more war (neocon) and
> more inequality (neolib) policies of the establishment is Steve Bannon,
> whom MSM must make a villain (along with Putin), as in the outrageous
> nonsense above.
>
> —CGE
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20170709/c4012d70/attachment-0001.html>