Trump: 'You Do Have a Military-Industrial Complex. They Do Like War.'

The threat of an official end to Iran sounds to me like a threat to use nukes

President Trump, speaking about hostile foreign powers, Iran especially, told Fox News that if he can solve tensions economically, he prefers that to a military solution.

But he said he's up against a military-industrial complex in Washington that wants to keep the wars going:

Well, I'm the one that talks about these wars that are 19 years (long), and people are just there. And don't kid yourself, you do have a military industrial complex. They do like war.

You know, In Syria with the caliphate, so I wipe out 100% of the caliphate that doesn't mean you're not going to have these crazy people going around, blowing up stores and blowing up things, these are seriously ill people...But I wiped out 100 percent of the caliphate.

I said, I want to bring our troops back home -- the place went crazy. They want to keep-- you have people here in Washington, they never want to leave. I said, you know what I'll do, I'll leave a couple hundred soldiers behind, but if it was up to them they'd bring thousands of soldiers in.

Someday people will explain it, but you do have a group, and they call it the military-industrial complex.

They never want to leave, they always want to fight. No. I don't want to fight, but you do have situations like Iran. You can't let them have nuclear weapons. You just can't let that happen.

President Trump made the remarks last week in an interview with Fox News's Steve Hilton. The interview aired on Sunday night.

On Sunday evening, following reports that an Iranian-backed militia may have fired the rocket that landed near the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, Trump tweeted: "If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!"

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CheOC, Omar and Tlaib, Oh My!

It is almost as if the Democrats want to lose the 2020 presidential election.

Most of their front-runners and all who currently serve as federal election officials eagerly signed onto Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ — hereafter “CheOC” — Green New Deal legislation and embraced her warning that the world only has twelve years left before the ravages of global warming become unstoppable.

Now, the thoughtful and serious CheOC tweeted on Mother’s Day, “This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it. Like the ‘world ending in 12 years’ thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal. But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows.”

To be fair, nobody thought she meant the world would vanish after 12 years but her hard deadline, again, was to act before climate change became irreversible. That was the impetus for the radical change contained in the Green New Deal and embraced by its supporters.

Of course, the radical solutions proposed in her released and rapidly pulled back fact sheet around her proposal which included murdering all the cows in America and ending domestic airline travel along with the internal combustion engine were justified by the short time frame for action. The Ocasio-Cortez recanting of the hard deadline effectively saws the limb off on those eager to embrace the hot new thing in D.C. and actually gives aid and comfort to former Vice President Joe Biden who favors the slower approach that CheOC still eschews.

And in case you missed it, the duo of Representatives Ilyan Omar and Rashida Tlaib seem to thrive on rolling rhetorical hand grenades under the DNC building.

Rep. Omar, who has come under constant scrutiny for her outrageous comments about Israel, compounded her verbal dismantling of Democrat legitimacy when an October 2017 tweet of hers was uncovered where she tweeted, “In his selective memory, he forgets to also mention the thousands of Somalis killed by the American forces that day! #NotTodaySatan.

The revelation of the tweet by then Minnesota state Representative Omar, a Somali refugee who fled with her family from the very warlords and violence that the U.S. troops were seeking to overcome as they tried to deliver food supplies to a starving population, was stunning as it brought into stark reality that those very refugees who Americans generously welcomed to our country, actually are being taught to hate us within their ethnic enclaves.

And Representative Tlaib of Michigan refusing to be outdone, spoke of the German Nazi Holocaust that murdered six million Jewish people,

“There’s always kind of a calming feeling, I tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people’s passports.”

Tlaib continued, “And, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And, I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways, but they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it was forced on them.”

So in a period of two weeks, CheOC (besides discovering what a garbage disposal is in a shock video) walked away from the 12 year timeline of doom that is the predicate for her legislative prescription that would destroy the U.S. economic system, Rep. Omar is discovered to have dismissed the sacrifices of American fighting men immortalized in the movie Blackhawk Down, and Rep. Tlaib revealed that thinking of the Holocaust calms her.

It is no wonder that their fellow freshmen Democrats who represent districts that have historically leaned Republican or which President Trump won in 2016 have begun to scramble to distinguish themselves from the terrible trio.

And the fact that House Democrats have failed to rein in CheOC, Omar and Tlaib serves as proof to swing voters in America of the party’s far leftward lurch.

A white flag decision which makes one wonder whether Democrats are conceding a second term for Donald Trump, and an inevitable GOP House takeover in 2021.

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No, AOC is not the new normal and young people are not socialists

The Atlantic article last week on young voters painted a gloomy picture for conservatives, claiming that a majority of Generation Z — young people born after the mid-nineties — hold far-left views in alignment with those of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The authors rely on the 2019 Harvard Youth Poll to make the claim that Generation Z surpasses the Millennial generation in their appetite for socialism, and that young people are driving the American policy agenda to the left.

The data, which the Institute of Politics at Harvard generously provided to the public, blatantly contradicts these claims. Instead, the data shows an increasing share of young Americans identify as moderates, liberal identity has been declining steadily for over ten years, and young people largely reject Ocasio-Cortez’s key proposals, including her ‘Green New Deal’ and 70 percent income tax plan. In reality, a majority of Generation Zers are political moderates who support America First policies on issues like illegal immigration and foreign wars, and are critical of big-government policies that they fear could negatively impact economic growth. What’s more, the share of young people today who identify as liberals has declined by a staggering 41 percent since 2008, while the share of young moderates has more than doubled over the past 11 years, according to publicly available Harvard IOP polls.

Let’s start with the one of the far-left’s most prized proposals: radically overhauling transportation systems and buildings to address climate change. This is a no-brainer, given everything we’ve seen in the media lately, we all know young people are the champions of combating climate change through draconian government intervention without a second thought, right? Wrong. Despite the pollsters going so far as to label the proposals plucked directly from Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal as ‘the bold action we need’, less than a third of young people agreed with them (31 percent). A full 33 percent said the ideas might be good but were worried about the economic impact, 21 percent didn’t know, and 12 percent stated the ideas were too radical to even consider. A combined 66 percent of young people either didn’t support the proposals, had reservations, or weren’t sure how they felt about them, as shown below. That’s a pretty resounding rejection of the Green New Deal from a constituency that the mainstream media would have us believe is enthusiastically driving the agenda.

What about income inequality, another policy area where socialist champions like Ocasio-Cortez allegedly lead the nation’s youth in demanding wealth redistribution and government intervention? Surely, young people can at least embrace the socialist ideal of levying a 70 percent income tax on the highest earners, and enacting a $15 minimum wage. Not by a long shot. The Harvard poll gave young people every opportunity to enthusiastically embrace these proposals, once again labeling them as ‘bold action’, but less than a quarter of young people agreed. Just 24 percent embraced the proposals, while 31 percent expressed concerns about, shocker, the economic impact. Meanwhile 21 percent outright rejected a 70 percent income tax and $15 minimum wage, and an equal share admitted they weren’t sure what to think. A net 73 percent of young people either had reservations, outright rejected, or weren’t sure about these two core elements of leftist economic solutions.

All rright, so maybe Ocasio-Cortez’s “bold” proposals are a little ahead of her time even for the vast majority of 18 to 29-year-old Americans, but can we at least admit that over time, young voters are shifting to left? Again, no. While Millennials — those born between 1981 and 1996 — were arguably the most progressive generation, these voters are now in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. As the Millennial population has aged, their views have remained relatively liberal compared to older generations, but the views of Generation Z are stalling, if not outright reversing, the liberal youth cycle.

Look no further than the Harvard Youth Poll from 2008 which showed a full 46 percent of young people considered themselves liberal or liberal-leaning, while 19 percent considered themselves moderate, and 35 percent considered themselves conservative or conservative-leaning. Keep in mind a majority of those respondents are now in their thirties, and compare those numbers to the latest Harvard Youth Poll.

Just 27 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds now consider themselves liberal — a 41 percent decline in liberal affiliation since 2008. Meanwhile, the share of young people who now consider themselves moderate has more than doubled, from 19 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2019. That is an increase of 58 percent. Read that again: the share of young people who say they are moderate has more than doubled since 2008, and the share of young people who say they are liberal has declined by well over a third over the same time period. The share of young people who say they are conservative has declined modestly, from 35 percent in 2008 to 26 percent in 2019.

Conclusion? No, Generation Zers are not more liberal than Millennials were. In fact, today’s 18 to 29-year-olds are significantly more likely to identify as moderates than in the past, and Ocasio-Cortez’s most radical proposals on income inequality and the Green New Deal earn abysmal support from young Americans. The overwhelming majority of Generation Zers reject radicalism, and express economic concerns when presented with socialist policies, despite pollsters using terms like “bold” to goad them into agreement.

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The Labor Department’s Harwood Grant Program Should Be Eliminated

Every year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) at the U.S. Department of Labor awards grants to unions and union-affiliated organizations through the Susan Harwood Training Grant Program. Although the Harwood grant program is supposed to train and educate “workers and employers on workplace safety and health hazards, responsibilities and rights,” it is little more than a union giveaway program. Due to the chronically low number of trainees, the dubious training quality, the unwillingness of wealthy grantees to assist with funding their own training programs, the ample availability of safety training, and amount of federal resources needed to manage the program, Congress should honor the Trump Administration’s request and eliminate the Harwood grant program.

In spite of all of the advantages that many Harwood grantees have, including years of experience dealing with safety hazards, training, and government grants, they regularly fail to meet their own goals. Some grantees boast in their applications about the number of union members they have, the number of employees at friendly companies or institutions who “need” training, or the extent of their shop steward network; yet, time after time, they request a contract extension to allow more time to meet their goals. What makes this situation even more perplexing is that trainees are sometimes even paid by their employers to attend training and that goals are often modest, such as training a few hundred people over the course of a year.

Training provided by the Harwood grant program seems unremarkable. Many of the training sessions are short, lasting just 30 to 60 minutes, and much of the training is also provided by trainees who may only have a small amount of formal training on a topic. Additionally, the information taught at these training sessions is largely from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), OSHA, or other OSHA grantees; sometimes grantees even apply for another grant to train on a topic they have previously covered.

Harwood grants are often awarded to connected, multi-million dollar organizations, yet these grantees typically contribute little or no money to fund their own training programs. Furthermore, there does not appear to be any effort to seek funding from state or local governments or charitable foundations to help cover the cost of these training programs. Nonetheless, grantees tend to receive grant, after grant, after grant. While grantees contribute little or nothing to funding these training programs, grantees or affiliated organizations often spend large sums of money on political expenditures and lobbying.

Instead of committing to help fund their own training programs, grantees routinely request funding for employees’ health insurance and pensions; some even seek money for rent and utilities. In addition, as the grant applications show, some grantees are requesting taxpayer funds to subsidize the six-figure salaries and benefits of their executives.

Safety training is, and should be, easily accessible. There are many sources of training, such as colleges, trade associations, state governments, and the U.S. Department of Labor. A large amount of safety training programs are available online. Furthermore, businesses should take responsibility for training their own employees. With recent tax and regulatory cuts, businesses should be better able to afford to pay for training that meets the exact needs of their employees. Additionally, unions should be knowledgeable about the safety hazards facing their industries or professions and should gladly offer safety training to their members or to potential members.

Managing the Harwood grant program requires a lot of government resources. For example, OSHA holds orientation meetings for grantees, conducts on-site financial reviews, and conducts field observation of training classes. In one case, an OSHA employee, who had scheduled a training observation meeting, emailed the grantee to ask, “Are you sure about the two hour Susan Harwood Grant Training on Machinery and Machine Guarding for workers at Eii Inc?” [1] The OSHA employee also included text from the Eii Inc. website which stated that the company had received the OSHA Star Voluntary Protection Programs Award, which recognizes “excellence in occupational safety and health protection.”

For all these reasons, Congress should eliminate the Harwood grant program. Failing that, Congress should further restrict the grants, including requiring matching non-federal investment in these training programs. If the training these grantees provide is truly needed, then they should either be able to provide significant funding themselves or find a foundation or a wealthy donor willing to contribute.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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