If you take your information from the mainstream media, then you could have thought that, under Obama/Clinton/John Kerry, Syria and East Ukraine were being rescued from dastardly governments by a benevolent US-NATO, which is standing up to Grizzly-bear Russia. If you read the articles on Syria and Ukraine on this site, which takes its information from a wide range of sources, you would be aware of how scary the prospect of Hillary Clinton winning the US 2017 elections really was. Already guilty of tens of thousands of deaths in Libya and Syria as Obama's foreign secretary, she seemed to be enthusiastically marching straight into WW3 with the approval of George Soros, Obama, Merkel, Hollande, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Australia, Israel .... The mainstream press was encouraging everyone to get right in there behind her. Hillary's very shallow brand of globalism, dressed up as 'progressive' attitudes to the oppressed, seemed to fool a lot of people who presumably didn't read much outside the MSN or took their information from corrupt NGOs and ersatz socialist alliances that actually work as a front for the establishment. So how is Trump doing now?
Why does the corrupt establishment hate Trump?
When it became obvious that the establishment elite and the establishment press that support the growth lobby and which supported Hillary Clinton were dead against Trump, I became interested in what Trump had to say, despite the fact that he is an obscenely wealthy property developer. If so many powerful and destructive organisations and people hated him, astonishingly he might not be all bad. [2] As a member of the alternative press, I was naturally interested in any major politician who was able to go round and over the MSN. This interest sent me straight to the videos of Trump's rallies, where I could check what the MSN alleged and what actually went down.
When the mainstream media were predicting that Hillary would win, I was thinking they obviously were not listening to Trump's speeches, they had not seen the size of his audiences or his connection with them. For some reason they totally underestimated the importance for most ordinary people of the subjects Trump commented on. When the press called him stupid, but he overcame all the major obstacles in his way, including the mainstream press, I thought, this guy is a genius. You would have to be stupid to think otherwise.
Exceptional
Actually listening to Trump's rallies showed the man to be an exceptional communicator. In fact, he is obviously exceptional in very many ways: exceptional stamina, exceptional ability to think independently and to hold his own against would-be peer pressure. Maybe, I hoped against hope, he would also be an exceptional property developer with an exceptional sense of proportion who would use what he knew about the workings of the international development and growth lobby to bring their juggernaut to a halt. Because the juggernaut, composed of organised networks of corporations and investment is so huge that it has integrated actual governments and political parties. Watching as these networks vastly increased with the establishment of the internet, I have often felt that 'resistance is hopeless', continuing to resist nonetheless. Maybe, I thought, James Sinnamon, who built candobetter.net website, is correct after all that exceptional leaders can still exist and somehow pull people together despite the corporations and the corrupting influence of the super-charged monetary economy, the deep state and the military-industrial-mass-media complex. Trump's use of twitter seemed to illustrate this possibility.
Not your typical developer-speak: Trump's economic and moral philosophy
Granted Trump was talking about bulding a trillion dollars worth of new infrastructure, which is typical developer speak, but he wasn't talking up population, which is developer speech, and he was localising this project to the United States, which he correctly identified as greatly in need of new infrastructure. The former administrations were typical growth lobby servants, creating opportunities through war and globalisation, for privateers to profit from disaster management, sending in the bulldozers to clear the bodies and the rubble, cranes to stack the concrete blocks and financiers to organise the foreign debts.
In contrast to Hillary Clinton's war drums, globalism and dog-whistles to disaster capitalists,Trump talked about reducing foreign intervention and getting along with Russia and Syria. He wanted to halt illegal immigration, in part because it was taking local jobs. This is is well-established, particularly in regard to black jobs being replaced by illegal and legal hispanic workers.[3] He has noted the associated growing poverty of black communities and the infrastructure decay in former manufacturing cities with large populations of black Americans.
He is not in favour of increasing the minimum wage. My understanding is that he believes the US could not compete with international labour prices if wages were increased there, but he seems to believe he will create a more propitious local/national situation by reducing imported slave-labour, decreasing taxes to attract investment in manufacturing, and increasing taxes on manufactures from corporations that have left the country in search of cheaper labour. In the event that Trump succeeds in this economic shoring-up program, using local labour, this would create a much better bargaining environment for local labour. It would also improve opportunities for small to medium businesses which have difficulty competing with international corporations that can cherry-pick labour, taxes, environment and other laws and country.
This is not your classical dirigiste economy, which workers traditionally fight for, with government influencing wages and living costs, but the above manner of improving work opportunity and security is a way of make wage increases possible. If immigration (legal and illegal) is also noticeably reduced and population growth falls back, inflationary pressure on fuel, water and housing would be reduced, thus cutting the cost of living and the need for higher wages. Concommitant security of work and housing tenure would be expected to increase democratic activity by freeing large quantities of people from energy and confidence-absorbing precarity. I have suggested and so have others that globalism with its open-borders policy on labour is a way of keeping people too precarious to engage politically.
Trump has been lambasted by 'liberals', MSN, Soros, et al for trying to stop the entry of terrorists via large streams of refugees from seven countries deemed by the previous administration to be a terrorist risk. Yet those previous administrations promoted and legitimated mass fear of terrorism when they engaged in very dubious wars to 'defeat terrorism' (thereby vastly increasing terrorist takfiri warriors) and implemented a swathe of new laws that have vastly reduced legal civil rights in the United States and other countries, in order to 'prevent terrorism'.
Astoundingly, super-businessman Trump wanted to get rid of the Trans Pacific Partnership, which threatened sovereign rights to control laws and conditions for environment, employment, labour movement and legal process.
Even more encouraging, after Trump was elected, he has immediately attempted to carry out his policy promises, starting with stopping America's involvement in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yet the MSN hardly paused to report this and the "Left" simply ignored this gob-smacking promise-keeping and democratic event. The reason seems obvious: those in control of the MSN and the 'voice' of the "Left" are globalists and they were not really against the TPP.
Trump, who had a brother who died of alcoholism, is a non-drinker, who seems to understand rather than judge addiction. His political philosophy could largely be summed up as, "Look for the similarities, not the differences," which is core Alcoholics Anonymous. Identity politics is the opposite of this as in, 'Look for the differences, not the similarities'.
From many previous comments and interviews, it was obvious that Trump was not your typical Republican or puritan. I think he is highly sexed and ribald, but he seems to value the women in his life, showing great respect for his daughters. It was tragic for those who would be adversely affected that Trump had to agree to anti-abortion demands, but that was necessary to obtain Mike Pence's support which was crucial for any chance at winning the presidency. I can remember the absolute terror of the threat of pregnancy in a country and a time when abortion and contraception were both very difficult and expensive to obtain. The reversal of Roe vs Wade is not all that it is cracked up to be, but the right-wing Christian attitude to abortion, indeed towards sex, is daunting.
Military spending increase
One of those policies that Trump announced in advance was to beef up the military, at the same time as he said he was against foreign interventions. Whilst I can understand Trump's reduction of funding and staffing of the US Environmental protection agency and other places where his enemies are numerous - and he said that he would - what is most concerning about Donald Trump is his plan - announced only a day ago - to so vastly increase military spending. He says that it is for 'public safety and national security'. Does that mean that it will not be used to 'intervene' in the Middle East and elsewhere, but more for defense? He plans to upgrade outdated military technology. It is true that the United State's military technology is quite out of date. Russia, which spends far less than the United States already spends on its military, nonetheless has superior technology and is said to be able to defend itself against any US missile attack. However Russia has not attacked any country for years, unless you count the voluntary annexation of Crimea and backing separatists in Georgia in a move that ended up with the creation of South Ossetia as a separate state. These moves were understandable defensive responses to political incursion from EU/NATO which threatened Russian access to important trade-routes for oil and gas transport. We should ask the question: Which countries, if any, threaten the United States with war? Another consideration that might underlie Trump's boosting of the national military might be to take it back from private outsourcing. Or it might not. For several presidencies - in fact, since the invasion of Iraq - the military has been outsourced as a for profit to corporations like Haliburton. (See Video & transcript: Prof Sean McFate on rising danger of mercenary armies forming corporate military states or running amuck) These corporate entitities have replaced government paid soldiers with mercenaries. There have been fears that corporations and mercenaries are more likely than national armies to support perpetual war. The corporate entities have not been answerable to the United States public or their courts and are suspected of pillaging countries and reconstructing governments to their own advantage. (See Naomi Klein on 'disaster capitalism', for example: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/disaster-capitalism-in-action/tags/iraq.) However Trump's most recent pronouncements about putting boots on the ground in the Middle East have sounded as if he has fallen into the grip of the perpetual war military. Unless he carries through with remarks about cooperating with the Syrian and Russian governments to eradicate Daesh. (See https://sputniknews.com/military/201702271051092603-us-military-strategy-troops-syria/.) Will Trump surprise us with his exceptionality again here?
TRUMP: "We've pursued this rebuilding in the hopes that we will never have to use this military. And, I will tell you that is my - I would be so happy if we never had to use this - but our country will never have had a military like the military we're about to build and rebuild." Reassuring remarks made by Trump as he gave his speech to joint session of Congress, February 28, 2017
Environment
With regard to climate change and carbon gases, war is probably the biggest contributor, but it is never officially counted. The Obama regime increased wars whilst increasing talk of C02 reduction. (See http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/12/fight-climate-change-not-wars.) For all its environmental agencies and rhetoric, it increased fracking and local fossil-fuel operations as well. It was open-borders oriented, which meant perpetual increase in population and demand for energy in the United States. What Trump's military policy had on the side of the environment was his stated willingness to get on with the rest of the world and refrain from war and his willingness to reduce immigration, which is the major contributor to population growth in the United States.
NOTES
[1] For an in-depth analysis of some important craven activities of the Clinton Foundation and other NGOs in Haiti after that big earthquake, read Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Then you have the White Helmets, Doctors without Borders, Human Rights Watch, various "Greens", GetUp, Change.org, MoveOn.org, all marketed by the mainstream, funded by the establishment, justifying foreign interventions and often promoting open borders. It is amazing how few people look beyond nice labels. In fact, this is probably a skill acquired in later adulthood, from life experience.
[2] Murdoch Press has been a bit of an exception to this rule. Murdoch could be looking to buy up cheap some of the 'fake news' media that Trump has 'trumped' and he probably also sees Trump's enemy, Soros, as a competitor for press influence.
[3] http://newamericamedia.org/2016/06/growing-temp-industry-shuts-out-black-workers-exploits-latinos.php http://www.fairus.org/issue/immigration-and-job-displacement Here too is a general breakdown in employment trends for various 'races': https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/the-workforce-is-even-more-divided-by-race-than-you-think/281175/ And here is a history of black/white employment trends published in the 1970s which shows that there was a period when black and white employment rates were similar due to protection from one undercutting the other, but then that employers started to relocate overseas or to import foreign labour in order to undercut black and white. Edna Bonacich, "Advanced Capitalism and Black/White Race Relations in the United States: A Split Labor Market Interpretation," American Sociological Review, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Feb., 1976), pp. 34-51 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2094371
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