LyrArc Article Gist
Trump turns to early supporters of his campaign in his appointments to key positions. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama is the new Attorney General. Mike Pompeo, three time Congressman from Kansas, as CIA Director, and Mike Flynn, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency under president Obama for 2 years, as the National Security Advisor. Among people Trump is meeting to broaden the new administration team are- Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, and Michelle Rhee, a Democrat who was chancellor of schools in the District of Columbia.

LyrArc Article Gist
The former president Donald Trump and Rachel Scott of ABC Q&A session turned into controversial remarks about Kamala Harris. About not knowing she was black "until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black." And now she wants to be known as Black."

Former Maryland Governor and candidate for senator from Maryland Larry Hogan says “It’s unacceptable and abhorrent to attack Vice President Harris or anyone’s racial identity. The American people deserve better."

LyrArc Article Gist
A open conversation with the NYT's Baker, Schmidt and Haberman by president Trump in mid July 2017. This conversation of the president with the NYT is remarkable for its frankness about people close to the president during the election campaign, particularly Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Sessions was the only leading Senator in Congress who supported Mr. Trump from the beginning. Southern states came out heavily for Mr. Trump as part of the traditional Republican base. Trump says of Sessions that had he known Sessions was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation he would not have appointed Sessions as the new Attorney General. About Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein Trump says he should never have appointed Mueller as Special Counsel. The president also says Mueller should stay only with information related to Russia and not stray from that to delve into Trump's finances. During the election efforts were made to get Mr. Trump to disclose more about his finances as a real estate businessman- most of these efforts failed and not much is known about president Trump's finances. The president says he never said he would order the Justice Department to fire Mr. Mueller, yet he left open this possiblility, according to the NYT, as the president feels it has affected the first 6 months of the Trump presidency. This interview with president Trump was published on July 20, 2017, the day after an editorial in the WSJ by the Editorial Board of the Journal on July 19, 2017, calling for transparency from president Trump on the Russia investigation. This was an exceptional and powerful editorial by its editorial board telling president Trump that he must tell everything he knows now or face the risk of losing public confidence, and risk his presidency. It said that president Trump was wrong to think that his larger than life personality and social media role could insulate him from the effects of this lack of transparency. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Stephen Miller, as both intellectual and organizer, is shaping policy on immigration at the White House as adviser to Kristi Noem, head of Homeland Security. He is a dedicated follower of DJT and White House deputy chief of staff. He also brought Prof. Navarro to the attention of DJT on trade policies.  He was a key figure in the first DJT administration at the age of 31 having served as communications secretary for Senator Jeff Sessions and developed his ideas during the period with Sessions. As director of speech writing and senior adviser to DJT,  he wrote some of president DJT's policy speeches in the first term, the speech to the Republican National Convention 2016 , and the Inaugural Address of 2017,  including the speech on Jan. 6th 2020 following the storming of the Capitol building.  Who is Stephen Miller? He comes from a Jewish family that immigrated in his grandfather's generation in 1903 to Ellis Island from Belarus, during a period of discrimination in Russian regions. During the period on campus at Duke University where he graduated in Political Science, Miller was a follower of a prolific author, David Horowitz. Horowitz was part of the Jewish leftist intellectual movement in New York in the post war period, but after the 1980's joined the Reagan movement and questioned the ideas he had believed in, questioned what he saw as the antisemitism on US campuses. At Santa Monica public school in California in 2000-2003 Stephen Miller questioned the multiculturalism that replaced the America of the founding fathers, that he saw at the school. It is this perspective that also underlies Stephen Miller's ideas about universities, about immigration, about the economy and China under Bush, Obama and Biden. Miller is also an organizer as he set up the America First Legal in 2020 with funding from donors on the right which has filed many lawsuits during Biden's term in office.  ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Donald Trump's economic advisory team includes in addition to Harold Hamm, shale energy billionaire, Steven Mnuchin, CEO of hedge fund Dune Capital Management, hedge fund billionaire John Paulson, Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor, bankers Stephen Calk, and Andy Beal, tax expert Stephen Moore, and David Malpass, a columnist for the WSJ. The team is headed by Stephen Miller, an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama. The Washington Post points out that the selection of the team with many hedge fund businessmen including John Paulson, who bet against faulty mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis, is at odds with his criticism of Hillary Clinton for her contacts with Wall Street and his message of not having any connections with Wall Street so that he could better represent the interests of ordinary Americans- people hurt by the 2008 financial crisis with the high jobless rate for older white men. In the 2008 election both candidates John McCain and Barrack Obama were shown in media articles to have connections to lobbyists for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In the 2012 election Mitt Romney as a private equity executive at Bain, was a part of the financial industry. This time in 2016- after all the noise and tumult about who represents Main Street- is no different for Trump and Clinton's connections to the financial industry. Only Clinton has to respond to the movement within her party from Bernie Sanders for providing a genuine example, and breaking with the past. The team of economic advisors put together by Jeb Bush led by Glenn Hubbard may be little different in substance than the one put together by Trump in its connections to the financial and real estate industry. The only person who took on the financial industry to fight for homeowners interests shown in Lyrarc since 2008 is Sheila Bair of the FDIC, a Kansas Republican. She could truly represent the interests of working class and ordinary Americans simply from a notion of fairness that  is so much a part of the American experience. Yet she has said running for office and fund raising in the way it is practiced today makes the thought too difficult to accept. Recent developments do not offer encouragement. Yet ordinary Americans ought not to forget, and ought not to let anger affect a discerning view of things. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
This WSJ report says Chris Christie's role has been reduced in the transition. Mike Spence, the Vice President, is at the top of the organization, Vince Preibus, who led the Republican National Committee, will be chief of staff at the White House, and Steve Bannon will be the strategist. Trump is the only person to be elected president without holding a government or military position. This makes it imperative for Republicans to put in key people with experience into the adminsitration. Others who are playing a critical role are Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who supported Trump from the early days of his candidacy. Bannon is seen as strategist for his focus on midwestern industrial states and the working class, traditionally Democratic constituencies, which gave Trump the small margin of 110,000 votes to win in 2016. 

LyrArc Article Gist
This report in the WSJ points to president Biden's speech to a joint session of the US Congress that providing two years of free community college would "change the dynamic" for education in America taking the first step to correct a dangerous drop in college enrollment for young men in America and ensuring working class families have access to college education. The last thirty years of skewed wealth distribution, loss of manufacturing in America, have created alarming distortions in  the access to college education for working class families. Mrs. Biden is a fervent advocate for community college access in today's America, as a community college teacher for 30 years. Biden's $45.5 billion 5 year plan would waive tution for 2 years of public community college. States would have to opt-in to participate, and federal government would provide 100% funding in the first year, decreasing contribution by 5% each subsequent year, with states picking up rest of the cost. It is quite shocking that this is being dropped from the Biden $3.6 trillion Families and Workers Plan that is now being whittled down to $2 trillion. Not because it is not badly needed for American economic competitiveness, and helping workers and families. But because following narrow parochial interests the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities opposes it. And because the US Congress is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans 50-50 in the Senate. The Association of Independent Colleges sees a shift to community colleges and a sharp drop in its enrollment. Community colleges saw a dangerous drop in enrollment of 12% to 4.5 million students in 2020 from the spring of 2019, according to National Student Research Center. Never was a program more badly needed, as American men are alarmingly falling behind in enrollment. Here are some responses to the failure to take even the first steps to broaden college access so that America can return to economic competitiveness. "What kind of world do we want to live in?" Martha Kanter, College Promise. "That's kind of a devil's choice, isn't it? The whole system has to work from infant care all the way through." Senator Tina Smith, Democrat of Minnesota. This is because child care and children's education will be funded yet a struggling generation of college students will be left out. US Chamber of Commerce opposes a $45 billion program that is critical to American competitiveness with China and other countries. US Congress drops a program that at $45 billion is only about 2% of the $2 trillion package and which is critical to economic competitiveness. Former Republican Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee supports community college access as a pillar of economic development and it passed the supermajority in 2014. Mike Krause, Republican former director of the state higher education commission says- "I have been surprised by the lack of enthusiasm for what is really a massive workforce development concept that also provides a path to the middle class. You'd think that would hold some appeal for Republicans and Democrats." The lack of clarity and concentration, lack of unity of purpose to get all vaccinated,  is visible in America's vaccination drive. That same lack of clarity and concentration, lack of unity of purpose, is visible in America's faltering efforts at correcting serious and alarming problems for access to college and American competitiveness in the world. Julie Bykowicz and Douglas Belkins wrote this article in the WSJ.   ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The two men, the couple one a Professor and the other a hard charging investment banker who kind of fit in together, their background, personalities, and preparation for this crisis. Throughout this crisis both had little sleep paulson some 4 hour and Bernanke leaving at midnight to catch some sleep and how the crisis kept going on and on, with one fire put out another remaining to be put out and finally after day after day on Diet coke or diet Dr. Pepper and little sleep Paulson agreed with Bernanke's opinion that "we've got to go to Congress." In fact based on his studies and research on the Great Depression and of the crisis in Japan in the nineties in the banking system there, Bernanke had given his conclusion early on about a year earlier that if there were significant decline in housing prices the government would have to step in with a large intervention. But in the end it happened all so suddenly with Paulson agreeing and both Paulson and Bernanke going upto the President and the President saying lets do it. So the meeting with Congressmen was arranged a few hours later after the inital meeting in Speaker Pelosi's office. Any reluctance to meet Congressmen who had considered any steps in this session unlikely having disappeared, and the stark nature of the crisis in the words of Senator Dodd, Chairman of the Banking Committee, became clear in the opening remarks of Paulson and Bernanke. Dodd told a news reporter that for a long time there was complete silence in the room and he does not recall a moment like this in 25 years in Congress and it being a scary story. By now it had become overwhelmingly obvious that something needed to be done in hours and days....

LyrArc Article Gist
Attorney General Sessions says the driver of the car who drove into protesters could be prosecuted in a number of ways including for a hate crime. The protest was against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. A car driven by 20 year old James Alex Fields drove into protesters injuring 19 and killing one woman. The local charges being made are for hit and run, malicious wounding, and the Justice Department is conducting its own probe. The comments by Sessions contrasted with the statement blaming both sides by president Trump, which led to strong criticism in the media and by the business community.

LyrArc Article Gist
U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Yellen launches a sweeping review of practices for supervision of large banks in Nov. 2014. The review is designed to check "whether there are adequate methods for decisionmakers to obtain all necessary information to make supervisory assessments and determinations," and whether channels exist for decision makers to take into account divergent views when important issues arise. This is in response to questions about how the culture at the New York Federal Reserve may have stifled differing opinions on how banks should be supervised and what is proper information sharing between regulators and banks.

LyrArc Article Gist
Michael Getler describes the missed opportunity under President Obama for using one of America's most talented diplomats to engineer a peace agreement between the warring factions in Afghanistan- the U.S., the Pakistan army, the ISI and its support in the army, the Taliban, and the other parties such as the Haqqani faction and the Afghan government of Karzai. Holbrooke had used his experience for another President, with the same force of his larger than life personality, when he helped bring about the Dayton Accords in a similiar area of stubborn ethnic strife. Could Obama have tapped Holbrooke's skills and set aside the distractions of his personality as coming from an American with unique gifts, talent and achievement, is the question Getler asks. And is this a comment on the nature of the Obama Presidency and America's poorly invested hopes.