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One day, President Donald Trump is at a prayer meeting talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger being lousy on TV, and on another, he is naming the brilliant Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his national security adviser. I will hereby be an unsolicited national hope adviser. Do the second kind of thing much more and wholly eradicate the first kind of thing, Mr. President, and save us from a grave public enemy.

That would be the kind of socialistically inspired future represented by Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. She wanted more freebies but less freedom, more spending, more regulations, a marketplace coerced into failures, identity-group divisiveness, contemptuous elitist supremacy and judicial power usurping democracy along with constitutionalism.

President Barack Obama was also a champ at all of this, and while the public mostly liked him, many did not like what he was doing. Thus, after his eight years in office, Democrats had lost a net of 62 seats in the House, nine seats in the Senate, 12 governorships, more than 900 state legislature seats and the presidency, according to a Fox News report. Republicans took charge, and there is now an extraordinary opportunity to reverse a big-government trend threatening to encapsulate us for eons.

The thing is, we may be cheated out of that chance if Trump does not give up on his stupidities and instead provides his enemies the wherewithal to stymie the best in him and turn the country back over to their contrary dreams. If he loves America, therefore, he should please, please quit obnoxious tweeting for starters. It is absurd and makes him look like a misbehaving child with a misused toy.

Then he should quit holding zany press conferences in which he overstates everything, insults everyone and further institutes enmity. He should in fact avoid adlibbing as much as possible. He is a non-linear, now-you-see-it, now-you-dont speaker who treats us to unconnected, unexplained phrases that can mean just about anything and are advantageously interpreted by critics as saying he favors hell over heaven.

Still more advice. He should quit substituting glances at a TV set for actual study. He should quit having reckless phone calls with heads of state. He should quit putting together policy plots with minimal trustworthy advice. He should quit the small-mindedness that puts claims of crowd size above real issues.

Yes, it is absolutely the case that his critics are often far worse than he is. Sen. Elizabeth Warren? Sen. Chuck Schumer? There is nothing polite to say. The reputable press is not so reputable when its commentators, for instance, issue baseless growls about anti-Semitism.

It is also despicable that protestors carry signs referring to Trump as anti-gay when there is absolutely nothing to back them up. It is simple-minded and worse for anyone to insist Trumps criticism of someone who is black is ipso facto racism, and yet we have seen it. In terms of evidence at this point, the Russian collusion theory is right up there with the birther theory. Vandalizing college students should be required to clean up after themselves before packing their bags and going home, and the leakers in the intelligence community should be worried about criminal prosecution.

There is lots of good in Trump, as seen in his executive orders on pipelines and absolutely smothering regulations, his choice for the Supreme Court, most of his Cabinet picks and, as mentioned earlier, his choice of McMaster as a top advisor.

He may very well do something about a crime rise the left uncaringly dismisses as nothing much. Watch for an improved world order. Some of his tax ideas are excellent, if not the one on imports, and we should replace Obamacare with something better, although prudence is needed. The wonders already happening in the economy are signs of how he actually could do splendid things.

But if Trump does not cut out the bad, there are those waiting in the bushes with a ruinous future in mind.

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Jay Ambrose: How Trump could lead us to socialism - Winona Daily News

Posted by Laura Handly on February 23, 2017 Leave a Comment

(Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)

At 18 years old, I moved to Norway and fell in love with the Norwegian way of life. While others spoke of the American Dream, I learned that equality and justice were relegated to the cold climes of Scandinavia. Ideologically, socialism is the best solution to the problem of human governance. It is a system that advocates for government regulation and promises a relatively high quality of life to everyone. In practice, that means that people pay higher taxes but things like healthcare and education are free and virtually no one is homeless.

Socialism works in Norway. With its relatively small and homogenous population and its massive oil wealth, the Norwegian government has the ability and the incentive to provide extensive social benefits to the people. The country is surrounded by similarly governed countries and separated from conflict due to the ocean and the arctic. It offers free higher education and even provides low-interest loans to support students living expenses.Political participation is widespread and encouraged from a young age, with each major party supplemented by a youth branch. One friend explained Norwegian political discourse as many voices advocating different paths to the same goals.

Donald Trump ran his political campaign on a populist fiction. He promised to return power to the people and to drain the swamp of elites in Washington. Like Bernie Sanders, Trump challenged the concentration of government elites and appealed to voters who felt excluded or ignored by the current system. Using rhetoric inspired by socialism, Trump spoke of redistributing power, creating new jobs and, infamously, making America great again.People responded to these promises. The populism of this Presidential Election reshaped the political landscape. In the end, the division between establishment and outsider proved just as important as party affiliation for the candidates.

Since coming to office, Trump has demonstrated he has no plans to remove the Washington establishment from positions of power. Trumps cabinet isthe most affluentin United States history, with members regulating agencies they would prefer did not exist. He has abused his executive power to undermine the system of checks and balances and to push through a hateful and unconstitutional immigration ban. He has announced that he will cut funding to arts programs, which will savejust 0.0625 percent of the projected federal budget, while moving forward with his plans to elect aborder wall with Mexico for $21.6 billion. His regular weekend trips to Mar-a-Lago cost taxpayers an estimated$3 million each, while security to protectTrump Tower drains the budget of $500,000every day.

This election has given us all a lot to consider. It has taught us that truth can be subjective, and that those in power may seek to redefine reality to serve their own interests. It has shown that our democracy is fragile at best and that elected politicians can threaten our freedoms of religion and speech. I have learned that we cannot overly depend on our government or the structures that value the interests of elites above the rest. Socialism works when people have faith in their institutions and their leaders. The Trump administration has done little to abate the fears of many Americans.

Trumps abuse of power demonstrates that the American people must guard their rights vigilantly. When a president explicitlylies to their people, foreign powersintervene in our elections andscientific truth is disregardedfor a more profitable fabrication, we must seriously reconsider the powers we grant to our government.

Laura Handly is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at lhandly@umass.edu.

Filed under Archives, Columns, Headlines, Opinion, Scrolling Headlines Tagged with Border Wall, Capitalism, Donald Trump, Mexico, norway, President Trump, Socialsim, Trump, Trump Tower, Trump's Cabinet

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Trump's election and the end of a socialist dream - The Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Vox

Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - Venezuela Discovers The Perfect Weight Loss Diet Forbes Is there nothing that that Bolivarian socialism cannot achieve? That anti-economic brainchild of the Chavistas which is so enriching the people of Venezuela has, at various times, managed to make the country run out of beer, Coca Cola and Big Macs--one ... Venezuela's economic crisis is so dire that most people have lost an average of 19 poundsVox all 2 news articles »

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Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - Venezuela Discovers The Perfect Weight Loss Diet - Forbes

When the former administration expressed its desire for greater accessibility to health care, it was condemned as socialism. When it proposed regulations to rein in profiteering in financial institutions, again, these were railed against as socialism. There are many other examples. Yet no one admits that any and all corporate protections are a form of socialism--an intervention by a government designed to aid proponents of free enterprise.

So it really isn't free enterprise. Without corporate socialism, energy companies would ultimately have to contend with competition. Without corporate socialism, only extremely large farms would be able to withstand the ebb and flow of markets and the environment. Without corporate socialism, certain industries would not be propped up while others are left to flounder and fail.

It isn't really the evils of socialism that is at issue, is it? It's who a legislative body chooses to enrich. Protecting jobs is important. Protecting contributors to an economy is important.

But when a legislature opts to intervene on behalf of a company or an industry, with no guarantee of any quantity of jobs, or contributions to the common good, or agreements to the preservation of a natural environment, we are left to believe that the primary function is simply to enrich those who derive the greatest profit from these enterprises, and everyone else be damned.

The average citizen of this state gains little security from these interventions. The companies are still free to reduce payrolls, damage the environment, and behave in every manner contrary to the public good. And to ignore the validity of other perspectives, especially for long-term effect, is fundamentally dishonest.

Unrue lives in Fargo.

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Letter: Proposed moratorium on wind development is a form of socialism - INFORUM

Donald Trump once said that we would no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism. Globalism, free trade, internationalismthey are nothing and everything, shapeshifting boogeymen that have helped us in many ways and ruined us in so many others. For the time being, they are a lost cause. We liberals must reject the false song of globalism. Our path is simple: adopt economic populism.

Starting symbolically with NAFTA in the 1990s, governments began signing massive trade deals at an astonishing rate. These deals promised to raise up every American and person on earth; we wrapped the narrative of free trade in luxurious promises of growth and progress. But then the factories closed. Never mind that it was technology and automation, the new boogeymen, that were truly the cause. Small towns that once supported themselves were now stagnant. Their economic livelihood was pulled out from beneath them like tablecloth under silverware. When the first signs of cracksin the armor appeared, our leaders ignored them. We melded into the world, becoming ever more interdependent and globalized.

Instead of slamming the brakes on this false song, governments pushed the globalist agenda even harder. NAFTA, TPP, KORUS, all backed with false promises. China joined the WTO with our prodding and promptly took advantage of us. We relinquished our status as a manufacturing Mecca to be the gluttonous, debt-ridden consumers of today. Forget the fact that these deals meant cheaper products; does anyone care how cheap their goods are when they have no jobs? When their towns, once buzzing, now were empty blocks of small businesses with For Sale signs on them? Is it so wrong for middle America to be resentful of the fact that they no longer produce? Their lives have shifted (seemingly) overnight, and their work now is a phantasm that lives, if not in another country with someone making 1/10th of their salary, then in the moving gears of a machine.

We never heeded their warnings or reacted to their concerns. We focused on foreign wars, education reform, and bank bailouts, while our inability to see the domestic, micro effects of economic interdependence became our undoing. We never once considered the fallout, economic and political, of progress. Labor unions, once our only chance to slow down the disastrous effects of such economic interdependence, are in ruin; our side of the aisle did nothing. We gutted our safety nets just when we would need them mostit was, after all, a certain Democratic president in the 1990s that said the era of big government is over.

Now, with smug looks, all I hear are academics and the elites saying This was going to happen anyway, or You cant stop globalization and technological progress. It is all structural, a necessity of economic progress. Are we so blind and elitist that we delude ourselves to the political consequences of these policies? Do we really think that telling millions of families in flyover country that their jobs were going to disappear no matter what is an adequate response? That is one of the fundamental splits in todays America: a discord between our elites and the mass public. The former stands to gain immensely from globalization, and the latter gains only in that what they buy is cheaper. Cheaper goods are not economic livelihood. They are not all that mattersjobs do. Economic security matters. A decent life, not subject to the ebb and flow of a global economy, matters.

The failure of the American Left in 2016 was not due to the American people rejecting liberal policiesit wasthe consequence of continuing to preach the false song of globalism. We went full speed into an interdependent world without policies to help those who would feel the unequal effects of globalization. People began to resent globalism, slowly and gradually. It is too late now. We cannot carry the flag of globalism anymore. The idea is toxicit is combined with feelings of lost sovereignty, political correctness, and economic stagnation. The longer we rally around that damned idea, the longer we lose.

The fight in todays world is not between right-wing and left-wing policies. It is between populism and elitist globalism. The former benefits the many at the expense of the few; the latter, the few at the expense of the many. Brexit, Donald Trump, and Marine Le Pen are the first things people name when thinking of the rise of populism. This could easily make one think that populism is a right-wing phenomenon, but one can also think of examples on the left. Syriza in Greece and Podemos and Ciudadanos in Spain are center-left/far left populist parties. They have seized millions of votes because they are responding to the new reality of our world.

Bernie Sanders and his insurgent campaign nearly rid our Democratic Party of the globalist agenda that stains it, inspiring millions of young people and Americans all over the country to join the political revolution. Populism on both sides of the aisle has returned.When we, the left, adopt ithope, American pride, and economic populismwe will win again. The left and Democrats can do it without the disgrace of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia so commonplace in right-wing populism. We must shed our corporatist, globalist skin and emerge a leaner, grassroots-oriented party. Do not fear populismadopt it.

Adopting economic populism means slamming the brakes on globalization for now, until we have quelled the anger that surges through our citizenry. We must bite the bullet and do things that hurt temporarily, because it is the only way you show your peoplenow suspicious of your every move, concerned, rightfully, with their well-beingthat you are on their side. The transition to an interdependent world is chaotic and painful, and we have done nothing to minimize it. Why else did Donald Trump win? Wasnt he the only Republican that saw the growing anger? Meanwhile, on our side a corrupt, globalist, corporatist party leadership shut down our best chance to win the last election. Democratic leaders conspired against our chance to champion populism and once again picked up the flags that would lead to our ruin. We now know the result of thata rotting carcass of a party without control of almost any governorships, almost any state legislatures, and the White House or Congress. If we win in 2018 and 2020, it is because Donald Trump was an incompetent champion of populismnot because people rejected populism. It is here to stay.

Once we have joined the populist movement and shown the people that we are truly on their side, we can begin again with a reformed view of globalization, scaled back, better marketed and better equipped to deal with the inevitable disruptions it will cause to the way of life of millions of people. Until that can happen, however, I urge us to embrace populism. We must reject massive trade deals and listen to concerns about our loss of sovereignty to massive governmental organizations. We should become a party that is for the peopleall people.

There is nothing wrong with saying that your country comes first. Say it with me: America First. America the diverse, America the tolerant, America the free, America the compassionatebut America First. America must produce and America must provide for its own. Thats how we will win again as a new, populist left.

Podemos in Spain is an insurgent populist party. Podemos in Spanish means we can. But there is one word that better describes the choice of winning with populism or losing with globalism. I warn us all, if we want to win again, with debemossimply, we should.

Figure 1 source: http://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp147/

Featured image courtesy of Getty Images.

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Neither Fascism, nor Liberalism, nor Socialism. Populism! - The Daily Gazette