Will Trump Deliver or Become the Next Obama?

Trump won the second debate, although Clinton did her best; will it be enough for him to win though?

Oh, the comedy! A supposedly populist townhall, in which Anderson Cooper, a trust fund baby of the super rich Vanderbilt family, who makes 11 million a year from CNN, clumsily questioned Trump, a billionaire, and Clinton, owner of a billionaire foundation, about their plans to respond to the economic worries of the average Joe and Jane. Do they really remember them?  

Trump did win the second debate in a do or die night. It was a surprising come back after a week from hell with the recording of his sexual bravado, (while newly married with gorgeous Melania in 2005) that gave everyone pause. He was composed, sober, lethally on point, no longer mangled his sentences, displayed some humor, and he even looked presidential: His hair had a new sheen of distinguished silver. Will it be enough for him to win? With all the media piled up against him it, like wild beasts cornering a gladiator, and his own words coming back to bite him, it would be nothing short of a miracle.

Hillary Clinton was very good, at her best, but there is something about the way she talks that prevents one from being engaged: Is it her lawyerly avoidance of straight, binding words? Her competent sounding platitudes and generic promises conveying exactly nothing? Because of all of this, it is hard to remember most of the things she says.

The Townhall was supposed to be a “what can you do for us, brother” job interview for each candidate. This is what voters want to find out. We don’t care if you are a womanizer with a potty mouth and an equal opportunity basher, or a cold woman with many secrets and conflicts of interest in your bleached private servers, lost laptops, or hammered iPhones, we don't even care if both of you have used the same loophole to write off your real or imaginary loses from taxes, we don't care if, at least, you can get us something we need. How can you make healthcare and education cheaper, what special interests are you going to cut exactly, how are you going to create jobs, how are you going to make saving profitable again? And finally do you want us to continue financing various regime change coups and wars in the Middle East against all non compliant presidents, and use our federal taxes to silently and covertly continue of American Project for the 21^st Century? If yes, what's in it for us, or for who?

Instead, courtesy of the moderators Copper and Raddatz, the townhall turned into yet another combined effort to magnify Trump’s sins, and gloss over Clinton’s; in other words, another effort to magnify non substantive issues and gloss over real problems that affect our quality of life. For instance, I believe the tactics of how to wage the war/conflict in Syria should be left to generals and kept secret. What should be discussed/asked instead is the general direction: Do you both (Trump/Clinton) want to continue the post War War II politics of arming rebels and changing regimes to expand the power of American empire abroad? Or do you want to focus those resources on building up the inland to catch up with the progress in Europe and Asia? Or are you going to cut the obscene, artificial profits in healthcare or are you going to continue to subsidize its excesses with tax payer money? If yes, how exactly? 

Oh, the comedy! When they entered the race last year, Trump said that he was for the Public Option because it worked well in Canada; Clinton was against the Public Option, hotly wanted by Sanders. At the second debate, Trump borrowed his moronic party talking points that Public Option is bad because Canadians come to the US for all the special surgeries, and Clinton borrowed Sander’s humanitarian position on the public option. Neither was genuine. So now we have a closeted Democrat, Trump, who tries to appeal to his Republican base, and a closeted Republican, Hillary, who is trying to lure the progressives, just to get their votes, and then what?

If I had any certainty that Hillary will push for a Public Option, I would vote for her on this alone, but I don’t. Experience has shown that greedy Hillary is always pushing for the biggest donor and then she will dress up the favor as something good for all of us. (As a New York, Senator Hillary brought Tata Industries, the biggest outsourcer in India, at the time a client of McKinsey Consulting, which employed Chelsea; the move was presented as somehow good for creating jobs (for who, for Indians?), while Upstate New York became a no-jobs- no-factories-ghost-land.)    

If I had any certainty that Trump will push a public option and relieve people of a mandatory and predatory private insurance, I would vote for him on this position alone, but again, I don’t, because he needs his party support, and his party is against it.   

Actually both parties are against the Public Option and the elimination of a morally and financially bankrupt for-profit model in medicine. Any real reform in healthcare means that certain actors will make less money, the stocks will drop, and with everyone owing these stocks, the healthcare "mafia" is too big to fail; just another Ponzi scheme, like Wall Street, and almost everything else at this point. More than that, the “medical and drug complex” are the biggest advertiser for the media, and a top donor in all the Congressional races.

If I had any certainty that Hillary will indeed push for the end of Citizen’s United, I will vote for her, but so far she has benefited from Super Pac money more than Trump. Once elected she’ll need those funds to get re-elected, because in her case only money can buy  love.  

With forces so great against real change, we are all led to vote based on fear, not hope.

#4 Default rates on U.S. corporate debt are the highest that they have been since the last financial crisis.

#5 Corporate profits have fallen for five quarters in a row, and it is being projected that it will be six in a row once the final numbers for the third quarter come in.

#6 During the month of August, commercial bankruptcy filings were up 29 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

#7 The rate of new business formation in the United States dropped dramatically during the last recession and has hovered at that new lower level ever since.

#8 The Wall Street Journal says that this is the weakest “economic recovery” since 1949.

#9 Barack Obama is on track to be the only president in all of U.S. historyto never have a single year when the U.S. economy grew by at least 3 percent.

#10 In August, the Cass Freight Index dipped to the lowest level that we have seen for that month since 2010.  What this means is that the total amount of stuff being shipped around the country by air, by rail and by truck is really dropping, and this is a clear sign that real economic activity is slowing down in a major way.

#11 Capital expenditure growth has turned negative, and history has shown that this is almost always followed by a new recession.

#12 The percentage of Americans with a full-time job has been sitting at about 48 percent since 2010.  You have to go back to 1983 to find a time when full-time employment in this country was so low.

#13 The labor force participation rate peaked back in 1997 and has been steadily falling ever since.

#14 The “inactivity rate” for men in their prime working years is actually higher today than it was during the last recession.

#15 The United States has lost more than five million manufacturing jobs since the year 2000 even though our population has become much larger over that time frame.

#16 If you can believe it, the total number of government employees now outnumbers the total number of manufacturing employees in the United States by almost 10 million.

#17 One study found that median incomes have fallen in more than 80 percent of the major metropolitan areas in this country since the year 2000.

#18 According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

#19 The rate of homeownership in the U.S. has fallen every single year while Barack Obama has been in the White House.

#20 Approximately one out of every five young adults are currently living with their parents.

#21 The auto loan debt bubble recently surpassed the one trillion dollar mark for the first time ever.

#22 Auto loan delinquencies are at the highest level that we have seensince the last recession.

#23 In 1971, 61 percent of all Americans were considered to be “middle class”, but now middle class Americans have actually become a minority in this nation.

#24 One recent survey discovered that 62 percent of all Americans have less than $1,000 in savings.

#25 According to the Federal Reserve, 47 percent of all Americans could not even pay an unexpected $400 emergency room bill without borrowing the money from somewhere or selling something.

#26 The number of New Yorkers sleeping in homeless shelters just set a brand new record high, and the number of families permanently living in homeless shelters is up a whopping 60 percent over the past five years.

Despite all of the facts that you just read, the truth is that there is one particular group of people that have been doing quite well during the Obama years.  I really like how Charles Hugh Smith made this point in one of his recent articles…

The top 5% of households that dominate government, Corporate America, finance, the Deep State and the media have been doing extraordinarily well during the past eight years of stock market bubble (oops, I mean boom) and “recovery,” and so they report that the economy is doing splendidly because they’ve done splendidly.

By recklessly creating money out of thin air and pumping it into the financial markets, the Federal Reserve has greatly enriched the elite, but they have also dramatically increased the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us.  Since he has been in the White House during this time, Barack Obama has gotten the credit for this temporary stock market bubble, and most of the elite love Obama anyway.

But in the process the stage has been set for the greatest economic and financial implosion in U.S. history, and the pain that is coming is going to affect every man, woman and child in this country.

During the debate, Trump and Clinton will talk a lot about tinkering with tax rates and regulations, but those measures are essentially going to be meaningless when compared to the massive economic tsunami that is coming.  The next president is going to inherit the biggest economic problems that this nation has ever faced, and it is going to take a miracle of Biblical proportions to turn the U.S. economy in the right direction.