Trump's Motivation for Releasing the CIA Files on JFK

draft

One of the interesting things about the newly released CIA files on the JFK assassination is why Trump released them when no other president would.

Does this make Trump the advocate of freedom and transparency in government? No, of course not. His administration will go down in history as one of criminality and lies, the worst this country has ever seen in its entire history.

So what other motivation does Trump have?

He has two motivations and they are both very clear. First, Trump hates America and wants to destroy its institutions. By releasing the papers, he lowers the CIA's credibility as the CIA clearly executed a cover up of their failure to prevent the JFK assassination. Second, Trump hates the CIA because the CIA has said that the Russians spoofed the election and possibly threw the election to the least qualified candidate in an effort to destroy America.

So this is not about honesty and transparency. This is about Trump getting back at the CIA and his work to destroy America, hand in hand, I have to say, with his friends and financiers, the Russians.

[Note: Larry Weinberg on Facebook pointed out that Congress set the deadline for this release. Thats true, but what Congress really did was set a proposed date, the President had the power to postpone the release indefinitely. So it was really Trump's decision to release, and he had complete power to postpone. Any other president could have requested the release at any time]

What the Newly Released CIA Files Reveal

draft

Now the JFK assassination files are being released. I have wondered for years what could possibly be in them that was worth suppressing all these years. Here is one person's guide to what may be in these papers by Phillip Shenoni for Politico.  You can read his guide here.

Shenoni has a theory for what it is that was being protected in those files and why they were not released, and I think his theory is oddly compelling.  Here is the theory in my own words.

There was a CIA cover up but it was not about who killed JFK. It was about how much the CIA knew about Lee Harvey Oswald before he came back to this country from Mexico. It was about his activities in Mexico City that *should* have tipped the CIA off that Oswald was planning to kill JFK. Hindsight is 20 20 of course, but apparently the evidence suggests that the warning signs for Oswald were really high and that the CIA was grossly at fault for not doing anything about this.

In other words, the concern was that the CIA was going to get itself reamed a new asshole for its failure, and so they conspired to hide the truth from the Warren Commission, not about who killed Kennedy, but how badly the CIA had screwed up. A classic, cover-my-ass, bureaucratic fuckup and protection maneuver of galactic proportions.

No space aliens on the grassy knoll. No mafia paid for, Castro financed, commie-plot to kill Kennedy. No CIA rogue operation gone wrong. No Oliver Stone revealed truth. Just the CIA covering up its gross failure to do its job and protect America.

And lets not forget that LBJ and every president since then has known this truth and decided not to tell the American people. And every single bipartisan heads of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees knew or could have known and did not tell the American people.

Just like today, when the President and Congress fails to tell us that the Russians threw the election to Trump.

Whats my point? My point is, if you lie and you lie and then you lie again, why should we ever believe you?

The Trans Pacific Partnership and National Security

draft

The NY Times has published an editorial describing how rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was self-destructive and will allow China to take over the world and destroy America. <insert link here>

They may very well be right. But whoever wrote this is in the dark about some fundamental issues that seem to have escaped them. So allow me to help my brilliant, elite editorial writer learn about some basic reality in American in 2016.

First, although we hear how Globalization and NeoLiberalism has been good for the world economy and especially the American economy, most of us have not seen it. We have seen the rich get richer, the middle class get destroyed by taxes, reduced wages, reduced pensions and the destruction of jobs but we have not seen how this new economy helps us. We have seen the government lie about unemployment and do absolutely nothing about helping the middle and working classes except perhaps to suggest that we could learn to type and become a secretary, or maybe work at Jack in the Box for minimum wage.

And furthermore, this has been going on for 30 years. But no response from Washington, no acknowledgement of the problem. No attempts to fix it that are not laughable. But we do see bankers and fund managers destroy the economy, not get prosecuted and given their multi-million bonuses nevertheless. We see Wells Fargo commit fraud for a decade, fire 5,000 little people, but no one goes to jail and the CEO retires with 100 million dollars after some insider trading which of course is not investigated. We see middle class people get assets seized by the police without being accused of a crime and the DOJ say that it is OK.

Now before you read any further, you should reread the above two paragraphs. You should reread them again. You should keep rereading them until you understand them. Until you understand that they are true. Then when or if you finally get it through your head that we have a corrupt and unacceptable economy for millions of Americans, then we can move on. The point is that your trade deals and Globalization is not a favorite concept among millions and millions of Americans. Ok, got that?

Second, the TPP was negotiated in secret and sprung on the American people about a year ago. When it was released to the public with the statement that we must ratify this treaty at once, and no discussion permitted, people demurred. Since a ratified treaty becomes law, it makes sense that there be some discussion of what is essentially a proposed law(s). We cant have that, the Government says, we must ratify this at once!

But what we discovered when we looked at the TPP was some very egregious and unlikeable provisions. Well, unlikeable unless you are a large, corrupt corporation of course. In fact, there is a lot to dislike about this “partnership”, when it was finally presented to the American people.

Third, you now tell us that the TPP had nothing to do with trade. In fact, it had to do with national security as manifested by trade blocks that will form a bulwark against China and Russia (if anyone cared about Russia as an economic power, which they do not, apparently).

Well, that is interesting and it may even be true. But your efforts to slide that past the American people without discussing your real motives or the slightest effort to protect the American people against the egregious and manifest crimes of international corporations doomed this effort.

As you say, it has nothing to do with trade. It may or may not have something to do with national security. But it certainly has a lot to do with the trust that the American people have in their government, and that is where you lost.

But there is a way forward. All you have to do is be honest with the American people about what your real motives are, fix the problems with the treaty to protect the American people and their laws, and convince them that your trade policies actually help Americans instead of just stridently assert that they do against all the evidence of people's experience of the last 30 years.

If you do that, I have no doubt that a treaty can be ratified.

Good luck.

Lies, Unemployment and the Bureau of Labor Statistics

        They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful with those who lie.

                 -- Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now (1979)

People demand different things from their government, but generally speaking our government is supposed to keep our nation out of a war when possible, to fight a war successfully when it is necessary, and to assure that their citizens are prosperous and free with valid elections, an honest judicial system, freedom of religion and a free press.

But when we have a failure of one of these criteria, such as prosperity, what should we expect from our government? Should we expect it to lie about the situation? Perhaps. Governments regularly lie about bad news. But should we want it to lie about the situation? Probably not. Probably when things are bad it is best for people to know about it so they can make reasonable plans and change the government if necessary. Obviously, governments do not in general want that, so they lie.

Its one thing to spin public opinion, its another thing to lie about something that is life and death. Its another thing to lie such that people do not have the information to make rational decisions, or to hide the failure of government, over and over again, to stay in power.  

I have a personal favorite in the lying sweepstakes, because it is so stupid, so self-serving, and so obviously indicates that our government is corrupt and without integrity, at least in this area. (1)

My favorite lie is the lie of the “unemployment rate” that is regularly announced by the US Government. For example, recently we heard that that unemployment rate has dropped to 6% and in some sense that is true. In other words, you can design a metric and then measure it and report it, but that does not mean anything about unemployment particularly. In this case, the metric is designed to not only misrepresent the situation but to do so in a way that is particularly deceptive.

Now those of us who have had the pleasure of studying aggregate economic indicators such as GNP understand that these things are far from perfect.   They are necessarily compromises that may have some value when properly interpreted.  Too much reliance on any one indicator is almost certainly a mistake.  However, when an indicator is deliberately designed to obscure what it is nominally supposed to reveal, then we cross a line from an imperfect tool to deliberate deception.  And that is what we find with the unemployment rate.

Because if you examine the details of what the unemployment rate measures, you discover that it only measures the unemployment of those who were recently employed. In other words, they had a job, they lost it, and then they got another job rather soon thereafter. But if for any reason they did not get a job again within 18 months, then they are no longer measured. They no longer exist on any statistic of unemployed as measured by our government so far as I know. (4)

These statistics come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics whose web site is www.bls.gov. If you have the time, you are invited to visit this web site and see if you can figure out what the unemployment rate means and how it is calculated. It will take a while but the information is there. And I have slightly oversimplified matters, but I am not wrong about the broad thrust. The unemployment rate deliberately understates unemployment, and in particular it deliberately understates those who are the most miserable and the most affected by unemployment.

And this is deliberate. Because you see, who is employed and who is not has very little to do with merit, but it has everything to do with fashion, with appearances, and with choosing a field that turns out to be less affected by globalization, or with foreign government subsidies, and so forth. And in the corporate view of things, which our government unanimously supports, only those who have been working recently are or should be eligible to be employed. If, for any reason, you have not been employed recently, then you fall out of fashion and become a much harder case to deal with.

And they don't want to deal with it. They don't want to know about it. They don't want you to know about it. They wish those people would go away and die, and in a sense they will. Because they are poor, and our government only responds to the rich, the unemployed are powerless to do anything about it. And so they become impoverished, a burden on their family, and their lives are ruined.

Because my career involves technology and media, particularly the use of computing in motion picture production, computer animation and visual effects,  I happen to know a number of people in the category of chronically unemployed. Of the dozen or so people that I know who are in this category and whose situation I have followed for a while, all but one of them are still unemployed three years later.  In some cases they have been unemployed for longer in spite of vigorous efforts to change that.   Several of them have had small projects during this period, which helps but does not solve the problem. A few of them have had jobs / projects that lasted a year and then finished.   All of my friends are interesting, educated, experienced and capable people with a good track record by the standards of the industry that they are a part of.  All but one of them failed to get a trust fund.  The problem does not lie with them, the problem lies with the structure of our economy. (2)

Of these people, three of them are essentially homeless, and one of them is literally homeless. (3) A fourth person is becoming homeless over the next few months.

And none of these people except the one who did indeed get a real job show up in the government's statistics on unemployment. And these people are trying and these people are miserable. But they are officially invisible.

The economy is not improving at least not for these dozen people I know. Furthermore, even if they were all employed tomorrow, or became a successful entrepreneur (which many of them have certainly been trying to do) nothing short of a making a whole lot of money will help. Why? Because they have accumulated debts, or lived on their retirement fund, and because they have not been able to add to their savings during these lost years of employment.

So even if they were employed starting tomorrow, they would in most cases still be fucked.

Which is why our government does not want to measure them, does not want to know about them, does not want to acknowledge they exist. To do so would be to admit that they, the government, has failed and lied all the while.

Now, the US Government, having lied about such an important issue, and having done so year after year, knowingly and deliberately, why should I or anyone ever believe them again?

___________________________________________________

Notes

1. In contrast, there may be areas where the government does have integrity.  For example, I have noticed and believe that when the US Government issues a terrorist warning, which is generally a vague statement that some sort of attack may happen in some area (e.g. W. Africa) that they only do that when they have genuine information that something might happen, but not enough to be able to stop it, or to be specific. In other words, I am accusing the US Government of integrity in this area. Other people believe that the government does this to manipulate public opinion or the results of elections, but I don't think so. Anything in the area of intelligence can be confusing to the general citizen outside that community, but I have to admit that trusting them in this area, but not trusting them in others may not be totally logical, or it may acknowledge an important fact: our government is diverse and one part is not like the other.  The FBI is not the NSA, and so forth.

2. In one case, the problem does lie with the individual who is so eccentric and difficult, if brilliant, that it is not to be believed. The fact that he ever held a job would be miraculous if you did not realize that the job he held was a complete anomaly and not at all a normal job in the least.

3. I call someone homeless if they are living on a friends couch or in a spare room but could not afford rent if this couch were not made available.  Then I call someone literally homeless if they do not have that couch, but are living on the street.

4. It may be that an indicator that may include such long term unemployed is the Social Security disability system.   If so, this is a very imperfect indicator, although I know that some people have found it a useful metric for this.

_____________________________________________________

Links

Bureau of Labor Statistics
www.bls.gov

Apocalypse Now (1979) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/