#i just being crushed by capitalisms manufactured poverty

[800-dick-pics]

i hate when ppl give financial advice without knowing who the PERSON is, like there is not hustle and saving my way out of poverty my brain cannot work like that!!!

I know THREEE autistic people who have jobs that arent sex work, FUCKIN THREE!!! And i know that 1. all of them are burnt tf out and self medicate to cope with the dumbass social dance! 2. if they didnt work them, their partner(s), dogs/cats WILL STARVE AND BE HOMELESS, and 3. ALL OF THEM ARE STILL POOR! MY FRIENDS AND GIRLFRIEND WHO WORK ARE UNDER EMPLOYED, UNDERVALUED, UNDER PAID!!!!

my girlfriend works a very dangerous job with heavy machinery, and gets paid shit for it! I cant work bc of the mental and physical disability combo! and EVERYONE i love and know is autistic and literally are BARELY HOLDING TF ON!!!!

there is no type of financial advice that is going to dig me/autistic people out of fucking poverty!!!! SOME PEOPLE SHOULD JUST NOT HAVE TO WORK AND THAT SHOULD BE OK!!!!

If you reblog youre an asshole!

[tinyshe]

I wanted to snip this because I believe the incoming administration will try to erase and change facts/history to suit them so here is a hot link and one in the title. I hope the copy traveled well because it was so large!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/trump-administration-accomplishments/

As of January 2021

Trump Administration Accomplishments

Unprecedented Economic Boom

Before the China Virus invaded our shores, we built the world’s most prosperous economy.

America gained 7 million new jobs – more than three times government experts’ projections.

Middle-Class family income increased nearly $6,000 – more than five times the gains during the entire previous administration.

The unemployment rate reached 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century.

Achieved 40 months in a row with more job openings than job-hirings.

More Americans reported being employed than ever before – nearly 160 million.

Jobless claims hit a nearly 50-year low.

The number of people claiming unemployment insurance as a share of the population hit its lowest on record.

Incomes rose in every single metro area in the United States for the first time in nearly 3 decades.

Delivered a future of greater promise and opportunity for citizens of all backgrounds.

Unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, veterans, individuals with disabilities, and those without a high school diploma all reached record lows.

Unemployment for women hit its lowest rate in nearly 70 years.

Lifted nearly 7 million people off of food stamps.

Poverty rates for African Americans and Hispanic Americans reached record lows.

Income inequality fell for two straight years, and by the largest amount in over a decade.

The bottom 50 percent of American households saw a 40 percent increase in net worth.

Wages rose fastest for low-income and blue collar workers – a 16 percent pay increase.

African American homeownership increased from 41.7 percent to 46.4 percent.

Brought jobs, factories, and industries back to the USA.

Created more than 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs.

Put in place policies to bring back supply chains from overseas.

Small business optimism broke a 35-year old record in 2018.

Hit record stock market numbers and record 401ks.

The DOW closed above 20,000 for the first time in 2017 and topped 30,000 in 2020.

The S&P 500 and NASDAQ have repeatedly notched record highs.

Rebuilding and investing in rural America.

Signed an Executive Order on Modernizing the Regulatory Framework for Agricultural Biotechnology Products, which is bringing innovative new technologies to market in American farming and agriculture.

Strengthened America’s rural economy by investing over $1.3 billion through the Agriculture Department’s ReConnect Program to bring high-speed broadband infrastructure to rural America.

Achieved a record-setting economic comeback by rejecting blanket lockdowns.

An October 2020 Gallup survey found 56 percent of Americans said they were better off during a pandemic than four years prior.

During the third quarter of 2020, the economy grew at a rate of 33.1 percent – the most rapid GDP growth ever recorded.

Since coronavirus lockdowns ended, the economy has added back over 12 million jobs, more than half the jobs lost.

Jobs have been recovered 23 times faster than the previous administration’s recovery.

Unemployment fell to 6.7 percent in December, from a pandemic peak of 14.7 percent in April – beating expectations of well over 10 percent unemployment through the end of 2020.

Under the previous administration, it took 49 months for the unemployment rate to fall from 10 percent to under 7 percent compared to just 3 months for the Trump Administration.

Since April, the Hispanic unemployment rate has fallen by 9.6 percent, Asian-American unemployment by 8.6 percent, and Black American unemployment by 6.8 percent.

80 percent of small businesses are now open, up from just 53 percent in April.

Small business confidence hit a new high.

Homebuilder confidence reached an all-time high, and home sales hit their highest reading since December 2006.

Manufacturing optimism nearly doubled.

Household net worth rose $7.4 trillion in Q2 2020 to $112 trillion, an all-time high.

Home prices hit an all-time record high.

The United States rejected crippling lockdowns that crush the economy and inflict countless public health harms and instead safely reopened its economy.

Business confidence is higher in America than in any other G7 or European Union country.

Stabilized America’s financial markets with the establishment of a number of Treasury Department supported facilities at the Federal Reserve.

Tax Relief for the Middle Class

Passed $3.2 trillion in historic tax relief and reformed the tax code.

Signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act – the largest tax reform package in history.

More than 6 million American workers received wage increases, bonuses, and increased benefits thanks to the tax cuts.

A typical family of four earning $75,000 received an income tax cut of more than $2,000 – slashing their tax bill in half.

Doubled the standard deduction – making the first $24,000 earned by a married couple completely tax-free.

Doubled the child tax credit.

Virtually eliminated the unfair Estate Tax, or Death Tax.

Cut the business tax rate from 35 percent – the highest in the developed world – all the way down to 21 percent.

Small businesses can now deduct 20 percent of their business income.

Businesses can now deduct 100 percent of the cost of their capital investments in the year the investment is made.

Since the passage of tax cuts, the share of total wealth held by the bottom half of households has increased, while the share held by the top 1 percent has decreased.

Over 400 companies have announced bonuses, wage increases, new hires, or new investments in the United States.

Over $1.5 trillion was repatriated into the United States from overseas.

Lower investment cost and higher capital returns led to faster growth in the middle class, real wages, and international competitiveness.

Jobs and investments are pouring into Opportunity Zones.

Created nearly 9,000 Opportunity Zones where capital gains on long-term investments are taxed at zero.

Opportunity Zone designations have increased property values within them by 1.1 percent, creating an estimated $11 billion in wealth for the nearly half of Opportunity Zone residents who own their own home.

Opportunity Zones have attracted $75 billion in funds and driven $52 billion of new investment in economically distressed communities, creating at least 500,000 new jobs.

Approximately 1 million Americans will be lifted from poverty as a result of these new investments.

Private equity investments into businesses in Opportunity Zones were nearly 30 percent higher than investments into businesses in similar areas that were not designated Opportunity Zones.

Massive Deregulation

Ended the regulatory assault on American Businesses and Workers.

Instead of 2-for-1, we eliminated 8 old regulations for every 1 new regulation adopted.

Provided the average American household an extra $3,100 every year.

Reduced the direct cost of regulatory compliance by $50 billion, and will reduce costs by an additional $50 billion in FY 2020 alone.

Removed nearly 25,000 pages from the Federal Register – more than any other president. The previous administration added over 16,000 pages.

Established the Governors’ Initiative on Regulatory Innovation to reduce outdated regulations at the state, local, and tribal levels.

Signed an executive order to make it easier for businesses to offer retirement plans.

Signed two executive orders to increase transparency in Federal agencies and protect Americans and their small businesses from administrative abuse.

Modernized the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for the first time in over 40 years.

Reduced approval times for major infrastructure projects from 10 or more years down to 2 years or less.

Helped community banks by signing legislation that rolled back costly provisions of Dodd-Frank.

Established the White House Council on Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing to bring down housing costs.

Removed regulations that threatened the development of a strong and stable internet.

Eased and simplified restrictions on rocket launches, helping to spur commercial investment in space projects.

Published a whole-of-government strategy focused on ensuring American leadership in automated vehicle technology.

Streamlined energy efficiency regulations for American families and businesses, including preserving affordable lightbulbs, enhancing the utility of showerheads, and enabling greater time savings with dishwashers.

Removed unnecessary regulations that restrict the seafood industry and impede job creation.

Modernized the Department of Agriculture’s biotechnology regulations to put America in the lead to develop new technologies.

Took action to suspend regulations that would have slowed our response to COVID-19, including lifting restrictions on manufacturers to more quickly produce ventilators.

Successfully rolled back burdensome regulatory overreach.

Rescinded the previous administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which would have abolished zoning for single-family housing to build low-income, federally subsidized apartments.

Issued a final rule on the Fair Housing Act’s disparate impact standard.

Eliminated the Waters of the United States Rule and replaced it with the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, providing relief and certainty for farmers and property owners.

Repealed the previous administration’s costly fuel economy regulations by finalizing the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule, which will make cars more affordable, and lower the price of new vehicles by an estimated $2,200.

Americans now have more money in their pockets.

Deregulation had an especially beneficial impact on low-income Americans who pay a much higher share of their incomes for overregulation.

Cut red tape in the healthcare industry, providing Americans with more affordable healthcare and saving Americans nearly 10 percent on prescription drugs.

Deregulatory efforts yielded savings to the medical community an estimated $6.6 billion – with a reduction of 42 million hours of regulatory compliance work through 2021.

Removed government barriers to personal freedom and consumer choice in healthcare.

Once fully in effect, 20 major deregulatory actions undertaken by the Trump Administration are expected to save American consumers and businesses over $220 billion per year.

Signed 16 pieces of deregulatory legislation that will result in a $40 billion increase in annual real incomes.

Fair and Reciprocal Trade

Secured historic trade deals to defend American workers.

Immediately withdrew from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Ended the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and replaced it with the brand new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

The USMCA contains powerful new protections for American manufacturers, auto-makers, farmers, dairy producers, and workers.

The USMCA is expected to generate over $68 billion in economic activity and potentially create over 550,000 new jobs over ten years.

Signed an executive order making it government policy to Buy American and Hire American, and took action to stop the outsourcing of jobs overseas.

Negotiated with Japan to slash tariffs and open its market to $7 billion in American agricultural products and ended its ban on potatoes and lamb.

Over 90 percent of American agricultural exports to Japan now receive preferential treatment, and most are duty-free.

Negotiated another deal with Japan to boost $40 billion worth of digital trade.

Renegotiated the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement, doubling the cap on imports of American vehicles and extending the American light truck tariff.

Reached a written, fully-enforceable Phase One trade agreement with China on confronting pirated and counterfeit goods, and the protection of American ideas, trade secrets, patents, and trademarks.

China agreed to purchase an additional $200 billion worth of United States exports and opened market access for over 4,000 American facilities to exports while all tariffs remained in effect.

Achieved a mutual agreement with the European Union (EU) that addresses unfair trade practices and increases duty-free exports by 180 percent to $420 million.

Secured a pledge from the EU to eliminate tariffs on American lobster – the first United States-European Union negotiated tariff reduction in over 20 years.

Scored a historic victory by overhauling the Universal Postal Union, whose outdated policies were undermining American workers and interests.

Engaged extensively with trade partners like the EU and Japan to advance reforms to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Issued a first-ever comprehensive report on the WTO Appellate Body’s failures to comply with WTO rules and interpret WTO agreements as written.

Blocked nominees to the WTO’s Appellate Body until WTO Members recognize and address longstanding issues with Appellate Body activism.

Submitted 5 papers to the WTO Committee on Agriculture to improve Members’ understanding of how trade policies are implemented, highlight areas for improved transparency, and encourage members to maintain up-to-date notifications on market access and domestic support.

Took strong actions to confront unfair trade practices and put America First.

Imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions worth of Chinese goods to protect American jobs and stop China’s abuses under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.

Directed an all-of-government effort to halt and punish efforts by the Communist Party of China to steal and profit from American innovations and intellectual property.

Imposed tariffs on foreign aluminum and foreign steel to protect our vital industries and support our national security.

Approved tariffs on $1.8 billion in imports of washing machines and $8.5 billion in imports of solar panels.

Blocked illegal timber imports from Peru.

Took action against France for its digital services tax that unfairly targets American technology companies.

Launched investigations into digital services taxes that have been proposed or adopted by 10 other countries.

Historic support for American farmers.

Successfully negotiated more than 50 agreements with countries around the world to increase foreign market access and boost exports of American agriculture products, supporting more than 1 million American jobs.

Authorized $28 billion in aid for farmers who have been subjected to unfair trade practices – fully funded by the tariffs paid by China.

China lifted its ban on poultry, opened its market to beef, and agreed to purchase at least $80 billion of American agricultural products in the next two years.

The European Union agreed to increase beef imports by 180 percent and opened up its market to more imports of soybeans.

South Korea lifted its ban on American poultry and eggs, and agreed to provide market access for record exports of American rice.

Argentina lifted its ban on American pork.

Brazil agreed to increase wheat imports by $180 million a year and raised its quotas for purchases of United States ethanol.

Guatemala and Tunisia opened up their markets to American eggs.

Won tariff exemptions in Ecuador for wheat and soybeans.

Suspended $817 million in trade preferences for Thailand under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program due to its failure to adequately provide reasonable market access for American pork products.

The amount of food stamps redeemed at farmers markets increased from $1.4 million in May 2020 to $1.75 million in September 2020 – a 50 percent increase over last year.

Rapidly deployed the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, which provided $30 billion in support to farmers and ranchers facing decreased prices and market disruption when COVID-19 impacted the food supply chain.

Authorized more than $6 billion for the Farmers to Families Food Box program, which delivered over 128 million boxes of locally sourced, produce, meat, and dairy products to charity and faith-based organizations nationwide.

Delegated authorities via the Defense Production Act to protect breaks in the American food supply chain as a result of COVID-19.

American Energy Independence

Unleashed America’s oil and natural gas potential.

For the first time in nearly 70 years, the United States has become a net energy exporter.

The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.

Natural gas production reached a record-high of 34.9 quads in 2019, following record high production in 2018 and in 2017.

The United States has been a net natural gas exporter for three consecutive years and has an export capacity of nearly 10 billion cubic feet per day.

Withdrew from the unfair, one-sided Paris Climate Agreement.

Canceled the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, and replaced it with the new Affordable Clean Energy rule.

Approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

Opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska to oil and gas leasing.

Repealed the last administration’s Federal Coal Leasing Moratorium, which prohibited coal leasing on Federal lands.

Reformed permitting rules to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and speed approval for mines.

Fixed the New Source Review permitting program, which punished companies for upgrading or repairing coal power plants.

Fixed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) steam electric and coal ash rules.

The average American family saved $2,500 a year in lower electric bills and lower prices at the gas pump.

Signed legislation repealing the harmful Stream Protection Rule.

Reduced the time to approve drilling permits on public lands by half, increasing permit applications to drill on public lands by 300 percent.

Expedited approval of the NuStar’s New Burgos pipeline to export American gasoline to Mexico.

Streamlined Liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal permitting and allowed long-term LNG export authorizations to be extended through 2050.

The United States is now among the top three LNG exporters in the world.

Increased LNG exports five-fold since January 2017, reaching an all-time high in January 2020.

LNG exports are expected to reduce the American trade deficit by over $10 billion.

Granted more than 20 new long-term approvals for LNG exports to non-free trade agreement countries.

The development of natural gas and LNG infrastructure in the United States is providing tens of thousands of jobs, and has led to the investment of tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure.

There are now 6 LNG export facilities operating in the United States, with 2 additional export projects under construction.

The amount of nuclear energy production in 2019 was the highest on record, through a combination of increased capacity from power plant upgrades and shorter refueling and maintenance cycles.

Prevented Russian energy coercion across Europe through various lines of effort, including the Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation, civil nuclear deals with Romania and Poland, and opposition to Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Issued the Presidential Permit for the A2A railroad between Canada and Alaska, providing energy resources to emerging markets.

Increased access to our country’s abundant natural resources in order to achieve energy independence.

Renewable energy production and consumption both reached record highs in 2019.

Enacted policies that helped double the amount of electricity generated by solar and helped increase the amount of wind generation by 32 percent from 2016 through 2019.

Accelerated construction of energy infrastructure to ensure American energy producers can deliver their products to the market.

Cut red tape holding back the construction of new energy infrastructure.

Authorized ethanol producers to sell E15 year-round and allowed higher-ethanol gasoline to be distributed from existing pumps at filling stations.

Ensured greater transparency and certainty in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program.

Negotiated leasing capacity in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Australia, providing American taxpayers a return on this infrastructure investment.

Signed an executive order directing Federal agencies to work together to diminish the capability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.

Reformed Section 401 of the Clean Water Act regulation to allow for the curation of interstate infrastructure.

Resolved the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis during COVID-19 by getting OPEC, Russia, and others to cut nearly 10 million barrels of production a day, stabilizing world oil prices.

Directed the Department of Energy to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to mitigate market volatility caused by COVID-19.

Investing in America’s Workers and Families

Affordable and high-quality Child Care for American workers and their families.

Doubled the Child Tax Credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child and expanded the eligibility for receiving the credit.

Nearly 40 million families benefitted from the child tax credit (CTC), receiving an average benefit of $2,200 – totaling credits of approximately $88 billion.

Signed the largest-ever increase in Child Care and Development Block Grants – expanding access to quality, affordable child care for more than 800,000 low-income families.

Secured an additional $3.5 billion in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to help families and first responders with child care needs.

Created the first-ever paid family leave tax credit for employees earning $72,000 or less.

Signed into law 12-weeks of paid parental leave for Federal workers.

Signed into law a provision that enables new parents to withdraw up to $5,000 from their retirement accounts without penalty when they give birth to or adopt a child.

Advanced apprenticeship career pathways to good-paying jobs.

Expanded apprenticeships to more than 850,000 and established the new Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship programs in new and emerging fields.

Established the National Council for the American Worker and the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board.

Over 460 companies have signed the Pledge to America’s Workers, committing to provide more than 16 million job and training opportunities.

Signed an executive order that directs the Federal government to replace outdated degree-based hiring with skills-based hiring.

Advanced women’s economic empowerment.

Included women’s empowerment for the first time in the President’s 2017 National Security Strategy.

Signed into law key pieces of legislation, including the Women, Peace, and Security Act and the Women Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act.

Launched the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative – the first-ever whole-of-government approach to women’s economic empowerment that has reached 24 million women worldwide.

Established an innovative new W-GDP Fund at USAID.

Launched the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) with 13 other nations.

Announced a $50 million donation on behalf of the United States to We-Fi providing more capital to women-owned businesses around the world.

Released the first-ever Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security, which focused on increasing women’s participation to prevent and resolve conflicts.

Launched the W-GDP 2x Global Women’s Initiative with the Development Finance Corporation, which has mobilized more than $3 billion in private sector investments over three years.

Ensured American leadership in technology and innovation.

First administration to name artificial intelligence, quantum information science, and 5G communications as national research and development priorities.

Launched the American Broadband Initiative to promote the rapid deployment of broadband internet across rural America.

Made 100 megahertz of crucial mid-band spectrum available for commercial operations, a key factor to driving widespread 5G access across rural America.

Launched the American AI Initiative to ensure American leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), and established the National AI Initiative Office at the White House.

Established the first-ever principles for Federal agency adoption of AI to improve services for the American people.

Signed the National Quantum Initiative Act establishing the National Quantum Coordination Office at the White House to drive breakthroughs in quantum information science.

Signed the Secure 5G and Beyond Act to ensure America leads the world in 5G.

Launched a groundbreaking program to test safe and innovative commercial drone operations nationwide.

Issued new rulemaking to accelerate the return of American civil supersonic aviation.

Committed to doubling investments in AI and quantum information science (QIS) research and development.

Announced the establishment of $1 billion AI and quantum research institutes across America.

Established the largest dual-use 5G test sites in the world to advance 5G commercial and military innovation.

Signed landmark Prague Principles with America’s allies to advance the deployment of secure 5G telecommunications networks.

Signed first-ever bilateral AI cooperation agreement with the United Kingdom.

Built collation among allies to ban Chinese Telecom Company Huawei from their 5G infrastructure.

Preserved American jobs for American workers and rejected the importation of cheap foreign labor.

Pressured the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to reverse their decision to lay off over 200 American workers and replace them with cheaper foreign workers.

Removed the TVA Chairman of the Board and a TVA Board Member.

Life-Saving Response to the China Virus

Restricted travel to the United States from infected regions of the world.

Suspended all travel from China, saving thousands of lives.

Required all American citizens returning home from designated outbreak countries to return through designated airports with enhanced screening measures, and to undergo a self-quarantine.

Announced further travel restrictions on Iran, the Schengen Area of Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Brazil.

Issued travel advisory warnings recommending that American citizens avoid all international travel.

Reached bilateral agreements with Mexico and Canada to suspend non-essential travel and expeditiously return illegal aliens.

Repatriated over 100,000 American citizens stranded abroad on more than 1,140 flights from 136 countries and territories.

Safely transported, evacuated, treated, and returned home trapped passengers on cruise ships.

Took action to authorize visa sanctions on foreign governments who impede our efforts to protect American citizens by refusing or unreasonably delaying the return of their own citizens, subjects, or residents from the United States.

Acted early to combat the China Virus in the United States.

Established the White House Coronavirus Task Force, with leading experts on infectious diseases, to manage the Administration’s efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and to keep workplaces safe.

Pledged in the State of the Union address to “take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from the Virus,” while the Democrats’ response made not a single mention of COVID-19 or even the threat of China.

Declared COVID-19 a National Emergency under the Stafford Act.

Established the 24/7 FEMA National Response Coordination Center.

Released guidance recommending containment measures critical to slowing the spread of the Virus, decompressing peak burden on hospitals and infrastructure, and diminishing health impacts.

Implemented strong community mitigation strategies to sharply reduce the number of lives lost in the United States down from experts’ projection of up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States without mitigation.

Halted American funding to the World Health Organization to counter its egregious bias towards China that jeopardized the safety of Americans.

Announced plans for withdrawal from the World Health Organization and redirected contribution funds to help meet global public health needs.

Called on the United Nations to hold China accountable for their handling of the virus, including refusing to be transparent and failing to contain the virus before it spread.

Re-purposed domestic manufacturing facilities to ensure frontline workers had critical supplies.

Distributed billions of pieces of Personal Protective Equipment, including gloves, masks, gowns, and face shields.

Invoked the Defense Production Act over 100 times to accelerate the development and manufacturing of essential material in the USA.

Made historic investments of more than $3 billion into the industrial base.

Contracted with companies such as Ford, General Motors, Philips, and General Electric to produce ventilators.

Contracted with Honeywell, 3M, O&M Halyard, Moldex, and Lydall to increase our Nation’s production of N-95 masks.

The Army Corps of Engineers built 11,000 beds, distributed 10,000 ventilators, and surged personnel to hospitals.

Converted the Javits Center in New York into a 3,000-bed hospital, and opened medical facilities in Seattle and New Orleans.

Dispatched the USNS Comfort to New York City, and the USNS Mercy to Los Angeles.

Deployed thousands of FEMA employees, National Guard members, and military forces to help in the response.

Provided support to states facing new emergences of the virus, including surging testing sites, deploying medical personnel, and advising on mitigation strategies.

Announced Federal support to governors for use of the National Guard with 100 percent cost-share.

Established the Supply Chain Task Force as a “control tower” to strategically allocate high-demand medical supplies and PPE to areas of greatest need.

Requested critical data elements from states about the status of hospital capacity, ventilators, and PPE.

Executed nearly 250 flights through Project Air Bridge to transport hundreds of millions of surgical masks, N95 respirators, gloves, and gowns from around the world to hospitals and facilities throughout the United States.

Signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that Americans have a reliable supply of products like beef, pork, and poultry.

Stabilized the food supply chain restoring the Nation’s protein processing capacity through a collaborative approach with Federal, state, and local officials and industry partners.

The continued movement of food and other critical items of daily life distributed to stores and to American homes went unaffected.

Replenished the depleted Strategic National Stockpile.

Increased the number of ventilators nearly ten-fold to more than 153,000.

Despite the grim projections from the media and governors, no American who has needed a ventilator has been denied a ventilator.

Increased the number of N95 masks fourteen-fold to more than 176 million.

Issued an executive order ensuring critical medical supplies are produced in the United States.

Created the largest, most advanced, and most innovative testing system in the world.

Built the world’s leading testing system from scratch, conducting over 200 million tests – more than all of the European Union combined.

Engaged more than 400 test developers to increase testing capacity from less than 100 tests per day to more than 2 million tests per day.

Slashed red tape and approved Emergency Use Authorizations for more than 300 different tests, including 235 molecular tests, 63 antibody tests, and 11 antigen tests.

Delivered state-of-the-art testing devices and millions of tests to every certified nursing home in the country.

Announced more flexibility to Medicare Advantage and Part D plans to waive cost-sharing for tests.

Over 2,000 retail pharmacy stores, including CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens, are providing testing using new regulatory and reimbursement options.

Deployed tens of millions of tests to nursing homes, assisted living facilities, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribes, disaster relief operations, Home Health/Hospice organizations, and the Veterans Health Administration.

Began shipping 150 million BinaxNOW rapid tests to states, long-term care facilities, the IHS, HBCUs, and other key partners.

Pioneered groundbreaking treatments and therapies that reduced the mortality rate by 85 percent, saving over 2 million lives.

The United States has among the lowest case fatality rates in the entire world.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched the Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program to expedite the regulatory review process for therapeutics in clinical trials, accelerate the development and publication of industry guidance on developing treatments, and utilize regulatory flexibility to help facilitate the scaling-up of manufacturing capacity.

More than 370 therapies are in clinical trials and another 560 are in the planning stages.

Announced $450 million in available funds to support the manufacturing of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail.

Shipped tens of thousands of doses of the Regeneron drug.

Authorized an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for convalescent plasma.

Treated around 100,000 patients with convalescent plasma, which may reduce mortality by 50 percent.

Provided $48 million to fund the Mayo Clinic study that tested the efficacy of convalescent plasma for patients with COVID-19.

Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of AstraZeneca’s cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies.

Approved Remdesivir as the first COVID-19 treatment, which could reduce hospitalization time by nearly a third.

Secured more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of Remdesivir, enough to treat over 850,000 high-risk patients.

Granted an EUA to Eli Lilly for its anti-body treatments.

Finalized an agreement with Eli Lilly to purchase the first doses of the company’s investigational antibody therapeutic.

Provided up to $270 million to the American Red Cross and America’s Blood Centers to support the collection of up to 360,000 units of plasma.

Launched a nationwide campaign to ask patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to donate plasma.

Announced Phase 3 clinical trials for varying types of blood thinners to treat adults diagnosed with COVID-19.

Issued an EUA for the monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab.

FDA issued an EUA for casirivimab and imdevimab to be administered together.

Launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium with private sector and academic leaders unleashing America’s supercomputers to accelerate coronavirus research.

Brought the full power of American medicine and government to produce a safe and effective vaccine in record time.

Launched Operation Warp Speed to initiate an unprecedented drive to develop and make available an effective vaccine by January 2021.

Pfizer and Moderna developed two vaccines in just nine months, five times faster than the fastest prior vaccine development in American history.

Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines are approximately 95 effective – far exceeding all expectations.

AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson also both have promising candidates in the final stage of clinical trials.

The vaccines will be administered within 24 hours of FDA-approval.

Made millions of vaccine doses available before the end of 2020, with hundreds of millions more to quickly follow.

FedEx and UPS will ship doses from warehouses directly to local pharmacies, hospitals, and healthcare providers.

Finalized a partnership with CVS and Walgreens to deliver vaccines directly to residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities as soon as a state requests it, at no cost to America’s seniors.

Signed an executive order to ensure that the United States government prioritizes getting the vaccine to American citizens before sending it to other nations.

Provided approximately $13 billion to accelerate vaccine development and to manufacture all of the top candidates in advance.

Provided critical investments of $4.1 billion to Moderna to support the development, manufacturing, and distribution of their vaccines.

Moderna announced its vaccine is 95 percent effective and is pending FDA approval.

Provided Pfizer up to $1.95 billion to support the mass-manufacturing and nationwide distribution of their vaccine candidate.

Pfizer announced its vaccine is 95 percent effective and is pending FDA approval.

Provided approximately $1 billion to support the manufacturing and distribution of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate.

Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate reached the final stage of clinical trials.

Made up to $1.2 billion available to support AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate reached the final stage of clinical trials.

Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of Novavax’s vaccine candidate with 100 million doses expected.

Partnered with Sanofi and GSK to support large-scale manufacturing of a COVID-19 investigational vaccine.

Awarded $200 million in funding to support vaccine preparedness and plans for the immediate distribution and administration of vaccines.

Provided $31 million to Cytvia for vaccine-related consumable products.

Under the PREP Act, issued guidance authorizing qualified pharmacy technicians to administer vaccines.

Announced that McKesson Corporation will produce store, and distribute vaccine ancillary supply kits on behalf of the Strategic National Stockpile to help healthcare workers who will administer vaccines.

Announced partnership with large-chain, independent, and regional pharmacies to deliver vaccines.

Prioritized resources for the most vulnerable Americans, including nursing home residents.

Quickly established guidelines for nursing homes and expanded telehealth opportunities to protect vulnerable seniors.

Increased surveillance, oversight, and transparency of all 15,417 Medicare and Medicaid nursing homes by requiring them to report cases of COVID-19 to all residents, their families, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Required that all nursing homes test staff regularly.

Launched an unprecedented national nursing home training curriculum to equip nursing home staff with the knowledge they need to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Delivered $81 million for increased inspections and funded 35,000 members of the Nation Guard to deliver critical supplies to every Medicare-certified nursing homes.

Deployed Federal Task Force Strike Teams to provide onsite technical assistance and education to nursing homes experiencing outbreaks.

Distributed tens of billions of dollars in Provider Relief Funds to protect nursing homes, long-term care facilities, safety-net hospitals, rural hospitals, and communities hardest hit by the virus.

Released 1.5 million N95 respirators from the Strategic National Stockpile for distribution to over 3,000 nursing home facilities.

Directed the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council to refocus on underserved communities impacted by the coronavirus.

Required that testing results reported include data on race, gender, ethnicity, and ZIP code, to ensure that resources were directed to communities disproportionately harmed by the virus.

Ensured testing was offered at 95 percent of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC), which serve over 29 million patients in 12,000 communities across the Nation.

Invested an unprecedented $8 billion in tribal communities.

Maintained safe access for Veterans to VA healthcare throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic and supported non-VA hospital systems and private and state-run nursing homes with VA clinical teams.

Signed legislation ensuring no reduction of VA education benefits under the GI Bill for online distance learning.

Supported Americans as they safely return to school and work.

Issued the Guidelines for Opening Up America Again, a detailed blueprint to help governors as they began reopening the country. Focused on protecting the most vulnerable and mitigating the risk of any resurgence, while restarting the economy and allowing Americans to safely return to their jobs.

Helped Americans return to work by providing extensive guidance on workplace-safety measures to protect against COVID-19, and investigating over 10,000 coronavirus-related complaints and referrals.

Provided over $31 billion to support elementary and secondary schools.

Distributed 125 million face masks to school districts.

Provided comprehensive guidelines to schools on how to protect and identify high-risk individuals, prevent the spread of COVID-19, and conduct safe in-person teaching.

Brought back the safe return of college athletics, including Big Ten and Pac-12 football.

Rescued the American economy with nearly $3.4 trillion in relief, the largest financial aid package in history.

Secured an initial $8.3 billion Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Act, supporting the development of treatments and vaccines, and to procure critical medical supplies and equipment.

Signed the $100 billion Families First Coronavirus Relief Act, guaranteeing free coronavirus testing, emergency paid sick leave and family leave, Medicaid funding, and food assistance.

Signed the $2.3 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, providing unprecedented and immediate relief to American families, workers, and businesses.

Signed additional legislation providing nearly $900 billion in support for coronavirus emergency response and relief, including critically needed funds to continue the Paycheck Protection Program.

Signed the Paycheck Protection Program and Healthcare Enhancement Act, adding an additional $310 billion to replenish the program.

Delivered approximately 160 million relief payments to hardworking Americans.

Through the Paycheck Protection Program, approved over $525 billion in forgivable loans to more than 5.2 million small businesses, supporting more than 51 million American jobs.

The Treasury Department approved the establishment of the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility to provide liquidity to the financial system.

The Treasury Department, working with the Federal Reserve, was able to leverage approximately $4 trillion in emergency lending facilities.

Signed an executive order extending expanded unemployment benefits.

Signed an executive order to temporarily suspend student loan payments, evictions, and collection of payroll taxes.

Small Business Administration expanded access to emergency economic assistance for small businesses, faith-based, and religious entities.

Protected jobs for American workers impacted by COVID-19 by temporarily suspending several job-related nonimmigrant visas, including H-1B’s, H-2B’s without a nexus to the food-supply chain, certain H-4’s, as well as L’s and certain J’s.

Great Healthcare for Americans

Empowered American patients by greatly expanding healthcare choice, transparency, and affordability.

Eliminated the Obamacare individual mandate – a financial relief to low and middle-income households that made up nearly 80 percent of the families who paid the penalty for not wanting to purchase health insurance.

Increased choice for consumers by promoting competition in the individual health insurance market leading to lower premiums for three years in a row.

Under the Trump Administration, more than 90 percent of the counties have multiple options on the individual insurance market to choose from.

Offered Association Health Plans, which allow employers to pool together and offer more affordable, quality health coverage to their employees at up to 30 percent lower cost.

Increased availability of short-term, limited-duration health plans, which can cost up to 60 percent less than traditional plans, giving Americans more flexibility to choose plans that suit their needs.

Expanded Health Reimbursement Arrangements, allowing millions of Americans to be able to shop for a plan of their choice on the individual market, and then have their employer cover the cost.

Added 2,100 new Medicare Advantage plan options since 2017, a 76 percent increase.

Lowered Medicare Advantage premiums by 34 percent nationwide to the lowest level in 14 years. Medicare health plan premium savings for beneficiaries have totaled $nearly 1.5 billion since 2017.

Improved access to tax-free health savings accounts for individuals with chronic conditions.

Eliminated costly Obamacare taxes, including the health insurance tax, the medical device tax, and the “Cadillac tax.”

Worked with states to create more flexibility and relief from oppressive Obamacare regulations, including reinsurance waivers to help lower premiums.

Released legislative principles to end surprise medical billing.

Finalized requirements for unprecedented price transparency from hospitals and insurance companies so patients know what the cost is before they receive care.

Took action to require that hospitals make the prices they negotiate with insurers publicly available and easily accessible online.

Improved patients access to their health data by penalizing hospitals and causing clinicians to lose their incentive payments if they do not comply.

Expanded access to telehealth, especially in rural and underserved communities.

Increased Medicare payments to rural hospitals to stem a decade of rising closures and deliver enhanced access to care in rural areas.

Issued unprecedented reforms that dramatically lowered the price of prescription drugs.

Lowered drug prices for the first time in 51 years.

Launched an initiative to stop global freeloading in the drug market.

Finalized a rule to allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada.

Finalized the Most Favored Nation Rule to ensure that pharmaceutical companies offer the same discounts to the United States as they do to other nations, resulting in an estimated $85 billion in savings over seven years and $30 billion in out-of-pocket costs alone.

Proposed a rule requiring federally funded health centers to pass drug company discounts on insulin and Epi-Pens directly to patients.

Ended the gag clauses that prevented pharmacists from informing patients about the best prices for the medications they need.

Ended the costly kickbacks to middlemen and ensured that patients directly benefit from available discounts at the pharmacy counter, saving Americans up to 30 percent on brand name pharmaceuticals.

Enhanced Part D plans to provide many seniors with Medicare access to a broad set of insulins at a maximum $35 copay for a month’s supply of each type of insulin.

Reduced Medicare Part D prescription drug premiums, saving beneficiaries nearly $2 billion in premium costs since 2017.

Ended the Unapproved Drugs Initiative, which provided market exclusivity to generic drugs.

Promoted research and innovation in healthcare to ensure that American patients have access to the best treatment in the world.

Signed first-ever executive order to affirm that it is the official policy of the United States Government to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.

Passed Right To Try to give terminally ill patients access to lifesaving cures.

Signed an executive order to fight kidney disease with more transplants and better treatment.

Signed into law a $1 billion increase in funding for critical Alzheimer’s research.

Accelerated medical breakthroughs in genetic treatments for Sickle Cell disease.

Finalized the interoperability rules that will give American patients access to their electronic health records on their phones.

Initiated an effort to provide $500 million over the next decade to improve pediatric cancer research.

Launched a campaign to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in America in the next decade.

Started a program to provide the HIV prevention drug PrEP to uninsured patients for free.

Signed an executive order and awarded new development contracts to modernize the influenza vaccine.

Protected our Nation’s seniors by safeguarding and strengthening Medicare.

Updated the way Medicare pays for innovative medical products to ensure beneficiaries have access to the latest innovation and treatment.

Reduced improper payments for Medicare an estimated $15 billion since 2016 protecting taxpayer dollars and leading to less fraud, waste, and abuse.

Took rapid action to combat antimicrobial resistance and secure access to life-saving new antibiotic drugs for American seniors, by removing several financial disincentives and setting policies to reduce inappropriate use.

Launched new online tools, including eMedicare, Blue Button 2.0, and Care Compare, to help seniors see what is covered, compare costs, streamline data, and compare tools available on Medicare.gov.

Provided new Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits, including modifications to help keep seniors safe in their homes, respite care for caregivers, non-opioid pain management alternatives like therapeutic massages, transportation, and more in-home support services and assistance.

Protected Medicare beneficiaries by removing Social Security numbers from all Medicare cards, a project completed ahead of schedule.

Unleashed unprecedented transparency in Medicare and Medicaid data to spur research and innovation.

Remaking the Federal Judiciary

Appointed a historic number of Federal judges who will interpret the Constitution as written.

Nominated and confirmed over 230 Federal judges.

Confirmed 54 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, making up nearly a third of the entire appellate bench.

Filled all Court of Appeals vacancies for the first time in four decades.

Flipped the Second, Third, and Eleventh Circuits from Democrat-appointed majorities to Republican-appointed majorities. And dramatically reshaped the long-liberal Ninth Circuit.

Appointed three Supreme Court justices, expanding its conservative-appointed majority to 6-3.

Appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.

Appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Achieving a Secure Border

Secured the Southern Border of the United States.

Built over 400 miles of the world’s most robust and advanced border wall.

Illegal crossings have plummeted over 87 percent where the wall has been constructed.

Deployed nearly 5,000 troops to the Southern border. In addition, Mexico deployed tens of thousands of their own soldiers and national guardsmen to secure their side of the US-Mexico border.

Ended the dangerous practice of Catch-and-Release, which means that instead of aliens getting released into the United States pending future hearings never to be seen again, they are detained pending removal, and then ultimately returned to their home countries.

Entered into three historic asylum cooperation agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to stop asylum fraud and resettle illegal migrants in third-party nations pending their asylum applications.

Entered into a historic partnership with Mexico, referred to as the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” to safely return asylum-seekers to Mexico while awaiting hearings in the United States.

Fully enforced the immigration laws of the United States.

Signed an executive order to strip discretionary Federal grant funding from deadly sanctuary cities.

Fully enforced and implemented statutorily authorized “expedited removal” of illegal aliens.

The Department of Justice prosecuted a record-breaking number of immigration-related crimes.

Used Section 243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to reduce the number of aliens coming from countries whose governments refuse to accept their nationals who were ordered removed from the United States.

Ended asylum fraud, shut down human smuggling traffickers, and solved the humanitarian crisis across the Western Hemisphere.

Suspended, via regulation, asylum for aliens who had skipped previous countries where they were eligible for asylum but opted to “forum shop” and continue to the United States.

Safeguarded migrant families, and protected migrant safety, by promulgating new regulations under the Flores Settlement Agreement.

Proposed regulations to end the practice of giving free work permits to illegal aliens lodging meritless asylum claims.

Issued “internal relocation” guidance.

Cross-trained United States Border Patrol agents to conduct credible fear screenings alongside USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) adjudication personnel to reduce massive backlogs.

Streamlined and expedited the asylum hearing process through both the Prompt Asylum Claim Review (PACR) and the Humanitarian Asylum Review Process (HARP).

Launched the Family Fraud Initiative to identify hundreds of individuals who were fraudulently presenting themselves as family units at the border, oftentimes with trafficking children, in order to ensure child welfare.

Improved screening in countries with high overstay rates and reduced visa overstay rates in many of these countries.

Removed bureaucratic constraints on United States consular officers that reduced their ability to appropriately vet visa applicants.

Worked with Mexico and other regional partners to dismantle the human smuggling networks in our hemisphere that profit from human misery and fuel the border crisis by exploiting vulnerable populations.

Secured our Nation’s immigration system against criminals and terrorists.

Instituted national security travel bans to keep out terrorists, jihadists, and violent extremists, and implemented a uniform security and information-sharing baseline all nations must meet in order for their nationals to be able to travel to, and emigrate to, the United States.

Suspended refugee resettlement from the world’s most dangerous and terror-afflicted regions.

Rebalanced refugee assistance to focus on overseas resettlement and burden-sharing.

85 percent reduction in refugee resettlement.

Overhauled badly-broken refugee security screening process.

Required the Department of State to consult with states and localities as part of the Federal government’s refugee resettlement process.

Issued strict sanctions on countries that have failed to take back their own nationals.

Established the National Vetting Center, which is the most advanced and comprehensive visa screening system anywhere in the world.

Protected American workers and taxpayers.

Issued a comprehensive “public charge” regulation to ensure newcomers to the United States are financially self-sufficient and not reliant on welfare.

Created an enforcement mechanism for sponsor repayment and deeming, to ensure that people who are presenting themselves as sponsors are actually responsible for sponsor obligations.

Issued regulations to combat the horrendous practice of “birth tourism.”

Issued a rule with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to make illegal aliens ineligible for public housing.

Issued directives requiring Federal agencies to hire United States workers first and prioritizing the hiring of United States workers wherever possible.

Suspended the entry of low-wage workers that threaten American jobs.

Finalized new H-1B regulations to permanently end the displacement of United States workers and modify the administrative tools that are required for H-1B visa issuance.

Defended United States sovereignty by withdrawing from the United Nations’ Global Compact on Migration.

Suspended Employment Authorization Documents for aliens who arrive illegally between ports of entry and are ordered removed from the United States.

Restored integrity to the use of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by strictly adhering to the statutory conditions required for TPS.

Restoring American Leadership Abroad

Restored America’s leadership in the world and successfully negotiated to ensure our allies pay their fair share for our military protection.

Secured a $400 billion increase in defense spending from NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies by 2024, and the number of members meeting their minimum obligations more than doubled.

Credited by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg for strengthening NATO.

Worked to reform and streamline the United Nations (UN) and reduced spending by $1.3 billion.

Allies, including Japan and the Republic of Korea, committed to increase burden-sharing.

Protected our Second Amendment rights by announcing the United States will never ratify the UN Arms Trade Treaty.

Returned 56 hostages and detainees from more than 24 countries.

Worked to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific region, promoting new investments and expanding American partnerships.

Advanced peace through strength.

Withdrew from the horrible, one-sided Iran Nuclear Deal and imposed crippling sanctions on the Iranian Regime.

Conducted vigorous enforcement on all sanctions to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero and deny the regime its principal source of revenue.

First president to meet with a leader of North Korea and the first sitting president to cross the demilitarized zone into North Korea.

Maintained a maximum pressure campaign and enforced tough sanctions on North Korea while negotiating de-nuclearization, the release of American hostages, and the return of the remains of American heroes.

Brokered economic normalization between Serbia and Kosovo, bolstering peace in the Balkans.

Signed the Honk Kong Autonomy Act and ended the United States’ preferential treatment with Hong Kong to hold China accountable for its infringement on the autonomy of Hong Kong.

Led allied efforts to defeat the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to control the international telecommunications system.

Renewed our cherished friendship and alliance with Israel and took historic action to promote peace in the Middle East.

Recognized Jerusalem as the true capital of Israel and quickly moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Acknowledged Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and declared that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not inconsistent with international law.

Removed the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council due to the group’s blatant anti-Israel bias.

Brokered historic peace agreements between Israel and Arab-Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Bahrain, and Sudan.

In addition, the United States negotiated a normalization agreement between Israel and Morocco, and recognized Moroccan Sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara, a position with long standing bipartisan support.

Brokered a deal for Kosovo to normalize ties and establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

Announced that Serbia would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

First American president to address an assembly of leaders from more than 50 Muslim nations, and reach an agreement to fight terrorism in all its forms.

Established the Etidal Center to combat terrorism in the Middle East in conjunction with the Saudi Arabian Government.

Announced the Vision for Peace Political Plan – a two-state solution that resolves the risks of Palestinian statehood to Israel’s security, and the first time Israel has agreed to a map and a Palestinian state.

Released an economic plan to empower the Palestinian people and enhance Palestinian governance through historic private investment.

Stood up against Communism and Socialism in the Western Hemisphere.

Reversed the previous Administration’s disastrous Cuba policy, canceling the sellout deal with the Communist Castro dictatorship.

Pledged not to lift sanctions until all political prisoners are freed; freedoms of assembly and expression are respected; all political parties are legalized; and free elections are scheduled.

Enacted a new policy aimed at preventing American dollars from funding the Cuban regime, including stricter travel restrictions and restrictions on the importation of Cuban alcohol and tobacco.

Implemented a cap on remittances to Cuba.

Enabled Americans to file lawsuits against persons and entities that traffic in property confiscated by the Cuban regime.

First world leader to recognize Juan Guaido as the Interim President of Venezuela and led a diplomatic coalition against the Socialist Dictator of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro.

Blocked all property of the Venezuelan Government in the jurisdiction of the United States.

Cut off the financial resources of the Maduro regime and sanctioned key sectors of the Venezuelan economy exploited by the regime.

Brought criminal charges against Nicolas Maduro for his narco-terrorism.

Imposed stiff sanctions on the Ortega regime in Nicaragua.

Joined together with Mexico and Canada in a successful bid to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with 60 matches to be held in the United States.

Won bid to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California.

Colossal Rebuilding of the Military

Rebuilt the military and created the Sixth Branch, the United States Space Force.

Completely rebuilt the United States military with over $2.2 trillion in defense spending, including $738 billion for 2020.

Secured three pay raises for our service members and their families, including the largest raise in a decade.

Established the Space Force, the first new branch of the United States Armed Forces since 1947.

Modernized and recapitalized our nuclear forces and missile defenses to ensure they continue to serve as a strong deterrent.

Upgraded our cyber defenses by elevating the Cyber Command into a major warfighting command and by reducing burdensome procedural restrictions on cyber operations.

Vetoed the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act, which failed to protect our national security, disrespected the history of our veterans and military, and contradicted our efforts to put America first.

Defeated terrorists, held leaders accountable for malign actions, and bolstered peace around the world.

Defeated 100 percent of ISIS’ territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Freed nearly 8 million civilians from ISIS’ bloodthirsty control, and liberated Mosul, Raqqa, and the final ISIS foothold of Baghuz.

Killed the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and eliminated the world’s top terrorist, Qasem Soleimani.

Created the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center (TFTC) in partnership between the United States and its Gulf partners to combat extremist ideology and threats, and target terrorist financial networks, including over 60 terrorist individuals and entities spanning the globe.

Twice took decisive military action against the Assad regime in Syria for the barbaric use of chemical weapons against innocent civilians, including a successful 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles strike.

Authorized sanctions against bad actors tied to Syria’s chemical weapons program.

Negotiated an extended ceasefire with Turkey in northeast Syria.

Addressed gaps in American’s defense-industrial base, providing much-needed updates to improve the safety of our country.

Protected America’s defense-industrial base, directing the first whole-of-government assessment of our manufacturing and defense supply chains since the 1950s.

Took decisive steps to secure our information and communications technology and services supply chain, including unsafe mobile applications.

Completed several multi-year nuclear material removal campaigns, securing over 1,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and significantly reducing global nuclear threats.

Signed an executive order directing Federal agencies to work together to diminish the capability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.

Established a whole-of-government strategy addressing the threat posed by China’s malign efforts targeting the United States taxpayer-funded research and development ecosystem.

Advanced missile defense capabilities and regional alliances.

Bolstered the ability of our allies and partners to defend themselves through the sale of aid and military equipment.

Signed the largest arms deal ever, worth nearly $110 billion, with Saudi Arabia.

Serving and Protecting Our Veterans

Reformed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to improve care, choice, and employee accountability.

Signed and implemented the VA Mission Act, which made permanent Veterans CHOICE, revolutionized the VA community care system, and delivered quality care closer to home for Veterans.

The number of Veterans who say they trust VA services has increased 19 percent to a record 91 percent, an all-time high.

Offered same-day emergency mental health care at every VA medical facility, and secured $9.5 billion for mental health services in 2020.

Signed the VA Choice and Quality Employment Act of 2017, which ensured that veterans could continue to see the doctor of their choice and wouldn’t have to wait for care.

During the Trump Administration, millions of veterans have been able to choose a private doctor in their communities.

Expanded Veterans’ ability to access telehealth services, including through the “Anywhere to Anywhere” VA healthcare initiative leading to a 1000 percent increase in usage during COVID-19.

Signed the Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and removed thousands of VA workers who failed to give our Vets the care they have so richly deserve.

Signed the Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act of 2017 and improved the efficiency of the VA, setting record numbers of appeals decisions.

Modernized medical records to begin a seamless transition from the Department of Defense to the VA.

Launched a new tool that provides Veterans with online access to average wait times and quality-of-care data.

The promised White House VA Hotline has fielded hundreds of thousands of calls.

Formed the PREVENTS Task Force to fight the tragedy of Veteran suicide.

Decreased veteran homelessness, improved education benefits, and achieved record-low veteran unemployment.

Signed and implemented the Forever GI Bill, allowing Veterans to use their benefits to get an education at any point in their lives.

Eliminated every penny of Federal student loan debt owed by American veterans who are completely and permanently disabled.

Compared to 2009, 49 percent fewer veterans experienced homelessness nationwide during 2019.

Signed and implemented the HAVEN Act to ensure that Veterans who’ve declared bankruptcy don’t lose their disability payments.

Helped hundreds of thousands of military service members make the transition from the military to the civilian workforce, and developed programs to support the employment of military spouses.

Placed nearly 40,000 homeless veterans into employment through the Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program.

Placed over 600,000 veterans into employment through American Job Center services.

Enrolled over 500,000 transitioning service members in over 20,000 Department of Labor employment workshops.

Signed an executive order to help Veterans transition seamlessly into the United States Merchant Marine.

Making Communities Safer

Signed into law landmark criminal justice reform.

Signed the bipartisan First Step Act into law, the first landmark criminal justice reform legislation ever passed to reduce recidivism and help former inmates successfully rejoin society.

Promoted second chance hiring to give former inmates the opportunity to live crime-free lives and find meaningful employment.

Launched a new “Ready to Work” initiative to help connect employers directly with former prisoners.

Awarded $2.2 million to states to expand the use of fidelity bonds, which underwrite companies that hire former prisoners.

Reversed decades-old ban on Second Chance Pell programs to provide postsecondary education to individuals who are incarcerated expand their skills and better succeed in the workforce upon re-entry.

Awarded over $333 million in Department of Labor grants to nonprofits and local and state governments for reentry projects focused on career development services for justice-involved youth and adults who were formerly incarcerated.

Unprecedented support for law-enforcement.

In 2019, violent crime fell for the third consecutive year.

Since 2016, the violent crime rate has declined over 5 percent and the murder rate has decreased by over 7 percent.

Launched Operation Legend to combat a surge of violent crime in cities, resulting in more than 5,500 arrests.

Deployed the National Guard and Federal law enforcement to Kenosha to stop violence and restore public safety.

Provided $1 million to Kenosha law enforcement, nearly $4 million to support small businesses in Kenosha, and provided over $41 million to support law enforcement to the state of Wisconsin.

Deployed Federal agents to save the courthouse in Portland from rioters.

Signed an executive order outlining ten-year prison sentences for destroying Federal property and monuments.

Directed the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and prosecute Federal offenses related to ongoing violence.

DOJ provided nearly $400 million for new law enforcement hiring.

Endorsed by the 355,000 members of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Revitalized Project Safe Neighborhoods, which brings together Federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement officials to develop solutions to violent crime.

Improved first-responder communications by deploying the FirstNet National Public Safety Broadband Network, which serves more than 12,000 public safety agencies across the Nation.

Established a new commission to evaluate best practices for recruiting, training, and supporting law enforcement officers.

Signed the Safe Policing for Safe Communities executive order to incentive local police department reforms in line with law and order.

Made hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment available to local law enforcement.

Signed an executive order to help prevent violence against law enforcement officers.

Secured permanent funding for the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund for first responders.

Implemented strong measures to stem hate crimes, gun violence, and human trafficking.

Signed an executive order making clear that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism.

Launched a centralized website to educate the public about hate crimes and encourage reporting.

Signed the Fix NICS Act to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals.

Signed the STOP School Violence Act and created a Commission on School Safety to examine ways to make our schools safer.

Launched the Foster Youth to Independence initiative to prevent and end homelessness among young adults under the age of 25 who are in, or have recently left, the foster care system.

Signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which tightened criteria for whether countries are meeting standards for eliminating trafficking.

Established a task force to help combat the tragedy of missing or murdered Native American women and girls.

Prioritized fighting for the voiceless and ending the scourge of human trafficking across the Nation, through a whole of government back by legislation, executive action, and engagement with key industries.

Created the first-ever White House position focused solely on combating human trafficking.

Cherishing Life and Religious Liberty

Steadfastly supported the sanctity of every human life and worked tirelessly to prevent government funding of abortion.

Reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, ensuring that taxpayer money is not used to fund abortion globally.

Issued a rule preventing Title X taxpayer funding from subsiding the abortion industry.

Supported legislation to end late-term abortions.

Cut all funding to the United Nations population fund due to the fund’s support for coercive abortion and forced sterilization.

Signed legislation overturning the previous administration’s regulation that prohibited states from defunding abortion facilities as part of their family planning programs.

Fully enforced the requirement that taxpayer dollars do not support abortion coverage in Obamacare exchange plans.

Stopped the Federal funding of fetal tissue research.

Worked to protect healthcare entities and individuals’ conscience rights – ensuring that no medical professional is forced to participate in an abortion in violation of their beliefs.

Issued an executive order reinforcing requirement that all hospitals in the United States provide medical treatment or an emergency transfer for infants who are in need of emergency medical care—regardless of prematurity or disability.

Led a coalition of countries to sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration, declaring that there is no international right to abortion and committing to protecting women’s health.

First president in history to attend the March for Life.

Stood up for religious liberty in the United States and around the world.

Protected the conscience rights of doctors, nurses, teachers, and groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor.

First president to convene a meeting at the United Nations to end religious persecution.

Established the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.

Stopped the Johnson Amendment from interfering with pastors’ right to speak their minds.

Reversed the previous administration’s policy that prevented the government from providing disaster relief to religious organizations.

Protected faith-based adoption and foster care providers, ensuring they can continue to serve their communities while following the teachings of their faith.

Reduced burdensome barriers to ensure Native Americans are free to keep spiritually and culturally significant eagle feathers found on their tribal lands.

Took action to ensure Federal employees can take paid time off work to observe religious holy days.

Signed legislation to assist religious and ethnic groups targeted by ISIS for mass murder and genocide in Syria and Iraq.

Directed American assistance toward persecuted communities, including through faith-based programs.

Launched the International Religious Freedom Alliance – the first-ever alliance devoted to confronting religious persecution around the world.

Appointed a Special Envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism.

Imposed restrictions on certain Chinese officials, internal security units, and companies for their complicity in the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.

Issued an executive order to protect and promote religious freedom around the world.

Safeguarding the Environment

Took strong action to protect the environment and ensure clean air and clean water.

Took action to protect vulnerable Americans from being exposed to lead and copper in drinking water and finalized a rule protecting children from lead-based paint hazards.

Invested over $38 billion in clean water infrastructure.

In 2019, America achieved the largest decline in carbon emissions of any country on earth. Since withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States has reduced carbon emissions more than any nation.

American levels of particulate matter – one of the main measures of air pollution – are approximately five times lower than the global average.

Between 2017 and 2019, the air became 7 percent cleaner – indicated by a steep drop in the combined emissions of criteria pollutants.

Led the world in greenhouse gas emissions reductions, having cut energy-related CO2 emissions by 12 percent from 2005 to 2018 while the rest of the world increased emissions by 24 percent.

In FY 2019 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cleaned up more major pollution sites than any year in nearly two decades.

The EPA delivered $300 million in Brownfields grants directly to communities most in need including investment in 118 Opportunity Zones.

Placed a moratorium on offshore drilling off the coasts of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida.

Restored public access to Federal land at Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Recovered more endangered or threatened species than any other administration in its first term.

Secured agreements and signed legislation to protect the environment and preserve our Nation’s abundant national resources.

The USMCA guarantees the strongest environmental protections of any trade agreement in history.

Signed the Save Our Seas Act to protect our environment from foreign nations that litter our oceans with debris and developed the first-ever Federal strategic plan to address marine litter.

Signed the Great American Outdoors Act, securing the single largest investment in America’s National Parks and public lands in history.

Signed the largest public lands legislation in a decade, designating 1.3 million new acres of wilderness.

Signed a historic executive order promoting much more active forest management to prevent catastrophic wildfires.

Opened and expanded access to over 4 million acres of public lands for hunting and fishing.

Joined the One Trillion Trees Initiative to plant, conserve, and restore trees in America and around the world.

Delivered infrastructure upgrades and investments for numerous projects, including over half a billion dollars to fix the Herbert Hoover Dike and expanding funding for Everglades restoration by 55 percent.

Expanding Educational Opportunity

Fought tirelessly to give every American access to the best possible education.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expanded School Choice, allowing parents to use up to $10,000 from a 529 education savings account to cover K-12 tuition costs at the public, private, or religious school of their choice.

Launched a new pro-American lesson plan for students called the 1776 Commission to promote patriotic education.

Prohibited the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the Federal government.

Established the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.

Called on Congress to pass the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act to expand education options for 1 million students of all economic backgrounds.

Signed legislation reauthorizing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program.

Issued updated guidance making clear that the First Amendment right to Free Exercise of Religion does not end at the door to a public school.

Took action to promote technical education.

Signed into law the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, which provides over 13 million students with high-quality vocational education and extends more than $1.3 billion each year to states for critical workforce development programs.

Signed the INSPIRE Act which encouraged NASA to have more women and girls participate in STEM and seek careers in aerospace.

Allocated no less than $200 million each year in grants to prioritize women and minorities in STEM and computer science education.

Drastically reformed and modernized our educational system to restore local control and promote fairness.

Restored state and local control of education by faithfully implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Signed an executive order that ensures public universities protect First Amendment rights or they will risk losing funding, addresses student debt by requiring colleges to share a portion of the financial risk, and increases transparency by requiring universities to disclose information about the value of potential educational programs.

Issued a rule strengthening Title IX protections for survivors of sexual misconduct in schools, and that – for the first time in history – codifies that sexual harassment is prohibited under Title IX.

Negotiated historic bipartisan agreement on new higher education rules to increase innovation and lower costs by reforming accreditation, state authorization, distance education, competency-based education, credit hour, religious liberty, and TEACH Grants.

Prioritized support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Moved the Federal Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Initiative back to the White House.

Signed into law the FUTURE Act, making permanent $255 million in annual funding for HBCUs and increasing funding for the Federal Pell Grant program.

Signed legislation that included more than $100 million for scholarships, research, and centers of excellence at HBCU land-grant institutions.

Fully forgave $322 million in disaster loans to four HBCUs in 2018, so they could fully focus on educating their students.

Enabled faith-based HBCUs to enjoy equal access to Federal support.

Combatting the Opioid Crisis

Brought unprecedented attention and support to combat the opioid crisis.

Declared the opioid crisis a nationwide public health emergency.

Secured a record $6 billion in new funding to combat the opioid epidemic.

Signed the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, the largest-ever legislative effort to address a drug crisis in our Nation’s history.

Launched the Initiative to Stop Opioid Abuse and Reduce Drug Supply and Demand in order to confront the many causes fueling the drug crisis.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded a record $9 billion in grants to expand access to prevention, treatment, and recovery services to States and local communities.

Passed the CRIB Act, allowing Medicaid to help mothers and their babies who are born physically dependent on opioids by covering their care in residential pediatric recovery facilities.

Distributed $1 billion in grants for addiction prevention and treatment.

Announced a Safer Prescriber Plan that seeks to decrease the amount of opioids prescriptions filled in America by one third within three years.

Reduced the total amount of opioids prescriptions filled in America.

Expanded access to medication-assisted treatment and life-saving Naloxone.

Launched FindTreatment.gov, a tool to find help for substance abuse.

Drug overdose deaths fell nationwide in 2018 for the first time in nearly three decades.

Launched the Drug-Impaired Driving Initiative to work with local law enforcement and the driving public at large to increase awareness.

Launched a nationwide public ad campaign on youth opioid abuse that reached 58 percent of young adults in America.

Since 2016, there has been a nearly 40 percent increase in the number of Americans receiving medication-assisted treatment.

Approved 29 state Medicaid demonstrations to improve access to opioid use disorder treatment, including new flexibility to cover inpatient and residential treatment.

Approved nearly $200 million in grants to address the opioid crisis in severely affected communities and to reintegrate workers in recovery back into the workforce.

Took action to seize illegal drugs and punish those preying on innocent Americans.

In FY 2019, ICE HSI seized 12,466 pounds of opioids including 3,688 pounds of fentanyl, an increase of 35 percent from FY 2018.

Seized tens of thousands of kilograms of heroin and thousands of kilograms of fentanyl since 2017.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecuted more fentanyl traffickers than ever before, dismantled 3,000 drug trafficking organizations, and seized enough fentanyl to kill 105,000 Americans.

DOJ charged more than 65 defendants collectively responsible for distributing over 45 million opioid pills.

Brought kingpin designations against traffickers operating in China, India, Mexico, and more who have played a role in the epidemic in America.

Indicted major Chinese drug traffickers for distributing fentanyl in the U.S for the first time ever, and convinced China to enact strict regulations to control the production and sale of fentanyl.

[checkoutafrica]

Being a Millennial Entrepreneur in Capitalistic Africa

We all know about the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts.

Tycoons who build their empires on sheer force, a drive to escape poverty and capitalism.  We refer to this as The American DreamTM and what makes it magical is that it could happen to anybody (although being white and male help….).

In Africa this generation has seen the likes of Gaddaffi and Mugabe to the likes of Kagame. Capitalism is different here and as a mostly third world country filled continent, we have been trying to catch up with the rest of the world and greed (amongst other factors), often destroys us more than it builds. In our defence, it’s been a game we were destined to lose. Our generational wealth was stolen from us from early on, African money that Africans can access is relatively new money compared to the economies running the world in the present day. Due to this, Africans we can strive in 2 main areas, manufacturing and innovation. Our challenge to build wealth and power requires more skill than any economy before. A self-sufficient Africa is unheard of and ruins the ideals of the west. Because unlike any other struggle for power, the black one is political and within itself a revolution requiring innovation and skill without offending the wrong parties and being crushed. Also this would be defined as more communist than capitalist and THAT is a real problem.

This is where the hungry millennials fit right in.

We are the children of those who have either seen colonisation end, or the grand children of those people. As Africans we have seen ourselves go from having no wealth to being able to afford luxuries of the world.

Yes, there is the American dream, but what of the African dreams with households that went from having a domestic cleaner as the bread winner to her daughter an engineer in the same position in 20 years time?

Now being a millionaire before 30 is a standard in some of the greatest economies on the planet (Rockefeller did it before 27!) and South African is not far behind with young successful Forex traders and ambitious 19 year old rappers like Nasty C. However, the difference between us and them is that we are tasked with the burden and privilege of uplifting our communities.

Young 20 something facing economic crises back to back while trying to go to universities that most of us cannot afford, building businesses and doing their best to not feel inadequate for not having all the answers so early on in life.

As one of them I am forced to ask myself: How am I going to make my first million?

Can I even?

Should I want to?

Does capitalism suit Africans at all, with all this black tax we owe our families and our communities? Is this how it’s meant to be?

We aren’t America who can exploit an entire continent to lay the foundation for our wealth, we are the exploited. Our foundation can only be built together. Is capitalism really the way forward for Africans and millennials or are we just creating our own 1% for the next generation to attempt to dismantle?

The post Being a Millennial Entrepreneur in Capitalistic Africa appeared first on CheckoutAfrica.

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[shirlleycoyle]

Why the Future of Nuclear Power Is Tiny and Factory-Made

In the 1950s, few things seemed more futuristic and utopian than harnessing nuclear energy to power your home. Towering nuclear reactors popped up across the U.S. with the promise of harvesting energy from smashed atoms of Uranium to power everything from lights in an office to an oven cooking a pot roast. With clean and efficient nuclear power, anything seemed possible. 

But as the years went on, doubt about the safety of these reactors began to poison the bright future they’d once promised. Stories of nuclear waste polluting waterways downstream of power plants began to stir alarm, and in the 1980s the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion sent radiation billowing across Europe and into the tissues of an estimated 4,000 Ukrainians who died from radiation poisoning.  Even as recently as 2011, Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant faced catastrophe when a tsunami knocked out its power supply and led all three of its nuclear reactors to melt down.

All in all, it’s been a tough few decades for nuclear energy’s public image. But nuclear scientists say that now, more than ever, is the time to reinvest in nuclear innovation. Governments agree: In the U.K. Rolls-Royce plans to roll out 16 mini-nuclear plants over the next five years and China, an emerging nuclear super power, has pledged to ramp up its nuclear use to meet emissions goals.

“Nuclear energy has always been an emissions-free source of electricity,” Rita Baranwal, Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Office of Nuclear Energy, told Motherboard. “Countries around the world that have [emissions] targets and goals to really assess how they get to those targets. And what they're finding time and time again, is that nuclear has to be part of that energy portfolio.”

Renewable energy sources like solar and wind are too intermittent to carry the brunt of our emissions goals alone, says Baranwal. When done safely, nuclear energy can create emissions free energy for electricity and heat. It can even be used to help develop other green solutions, like synthetic fuel, which will also be crucial in crushing emissions levels.

“To achieve deep decarbonization, we need to decarbonize not just electricity, but also transportation (including shipping) and industrial processes,” Ashley Finan, director of the Idaho National Laboratory’s National Reactor Innovation Center, told Motherboard in an email.

Nuclear reactors have come a long way from the power plants of our parents and grandparents, and nuclear scientists say that innovation in material design, machine learning and even the design of the plants themselves has positioned this industry as an essential player in the quest for clean energy.

Nuclear energy has been quietly smashing its benchmarks for years now, says Baranwal, and now is the time to brag about it.

What is nuclear energy?  

Nuclear energy may seem futuristic and complex in its approach to power, but at its core, the process is really not that different from power created with coal or oil. Essentially, something is heated up (in this case, the nuclear core) which creates steam to turn turbines and generate electricity. 

The big difference for nuclear power is that these plants create their initial heat by smashing together Uranium atoms in a process called fission. Like a cue ball being shot across a pool table, a tiny neutron is sent careening towards an atom of Uranium—splitting it open upon contact. This splitting of the atom creates energy in the form of heat and radiation, and also sends out more neutrons that break apart other Uranium atoms in a domino effect. 

Carefully controlling this creation of power is the name of the game at nuclear power plants, and traditionally pressurized water has been used to cool down these Uranium cores. But in next generation nuclear reactors, this might look a little different.

Goodbye water, hello helium and molten salt

When it comes to the future of nuclear energy, the U.S.’s Department of Energy has its eyes (and wallet) focused on two projects in particular: TerraPower’s Natrium reactor and an Xe-100  reactor from X-Energy. These two reactors are the first to participate in the DOE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, an initiative to reinvest in nuclear innovation, and have each already received $80 million toward the development of their designs, with up to $4 billion available over the next five to seven years.

A key innovation of both of these reactors, Baranwal told Motherboard, is that neither will use pressurized water to cool their uranium cores. TerraPower, which is chaired by founder Bill Gates, will instead use molten salt, while X-Energy’s reactor will use pressurized helium. 

For TerraPower, this change to the reactor’s traditional coolant allows the plant to reduce both complexity and cost, while simultaneously increasing the reactor’s safety. Because molten salt has a higher boiling point than water, this material does not have to be pressurized when used as a coolant. Using molten salt would also allow nuclear engineers to finely tune the amount of energy coming out of the plant, making it an excellent companion to more intermittent sources of clean energy like solar and wind. A cloudy day? Crank up the nuclear plant.

TerraPower’s reactor is expected to be a little smaller than traditional reactors, but will still have a relatively large footprint, says Baranwal. X-Energy’s reactor, on the other hand, will be a much smaller type of new reactor called a small modular reactor, or SMR.

What are small modular reactors?

Traditionally, nuclear reactors have been housed in towering nuclear plants that take up more than a mile square footage of land per 1000 MW of energy production. This works well in communities with plenty of open space, but can be difficult to squeeze into more densely packed areas. As a solution, enter the SMR. 

With some hovering just over 23 meters tall, a single torpedo-shaped SMR will take up only about 1 percent the square footage of a traditional power plant. And, unlike large reactors that can take many years and a lot of money to build, SMRs can be built much cheaper and quicker using factory manufacturing. Each reactor can only produce a maximum of 300 MWe, but as many as twelve reactors can be grouped together like big cans of soda to match a larger power plant’s output. 

When combined together, these reactors could be used to power midsize cities, or separately, to power smaller towns. 

X-Energy’s design, which the DOE has its eyes on, is one such reactor and plans to use pressurized helium as well as slow release pebbles of fuel to achieve its efficient design. Another U.S. based company, NuScale, is also turning its sights to SMR and was the first in the U.S. to have its water coolant based design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commision.

“NuScale’s smarter and simplified advanced design eliminates the need for two-thirds of the safety systems and components found in today’s large reactors,” representatives from the company told Motherboard over email. “This results in reduced maintenance cost, reduced capital costs, and a level of safety that is magnitudes better than current gigawatt sized nuclear plants.”

And the U.S. isn’t alone in its interest in these miniature reactors, dozens are in development around the world. At the end of 2019, Russia floated an SMR out to sea to trial a future fleet of floating power plants and Japan’s Toshiba electronics company has been working for years on its Super Safe, Small Simple (4S) modular reactors.

But nuclear energy is good for more than just providing bulk electricity and heat, Jacopo Buongiorno, the director of MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, told Motherboard.

“[People] tend to think of nuclear as just electricity,” says Buongiorno. “But it’s also much more.”

What are microreactors? 

If you thought SMRs were tiny, then microreactors are absolutely miniscule. Also called nuclear batteries, Buongiorno said, these reactors are on scale with jet engines and can be easily and quickly manufactured on assembly lines and set up within a few days of arriving in a community.

Because of their small size, these reactors don’t necessarily supply a lot of bang for their buck—they can only generate between 1 and 20 MW of energy—but Buongiorno says that this isn’t necessarily a problem because nuclear solutions don’t require one-size-fits-all reactors. Especially when it comes to finding a solution to climate change.

“I would say it's one of the truly critical questions as we move forward for solutions for climate change—what is the optimal mix?” said Buongiorno. “And not surprisingly, it's not one size fits all. It's a combination… It's a well balanced mix of different technologies that will give you the path of least resistance.”

Instead, microreactors could be used to power remote communities, desalinate local water and even produce an emissions free source of hydrogen to fuel other industries. Buongiorno says that microreactors are even under consideration for space applications with NASA.

A nuclear future 

Nuclear energy is not a perfect solution to our energy problems, and there are still critics who are wary of the industry’s safety and cost, but nuclear scientists say the industry is ready for its time in the spotlight. 

With international partners around the world, nuclear energy has the potential to be a powerful ally to solar and wind production to help not only lower energy emissions but to provide energy independence to remote communities.

“I have the sense that when the public looks at nuclear energy they think of people and companies that don’t care about others,” Finan said. “[But] the truth is that many people are entering the nuclear energy field… in order to tackle huge environmental challenges [and] energy poverty… I think that as the public gets to know todays’ advanced nuclear energy companies, they will meet people with passion and purpose that they can identify with and respect.”

Many of these nuclear solutions are already here, and nuclear scientists are excited to see what the next decade of innovation will bring.

Why the Future of Nuclear Power Is Tiny and Factory-Made syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[njawaidofficial]

Not All Bad Girls Go To Prison

https://styleveryday.com/not-all-bad-girls-go-to-prison/

Not All Bad Girls Go To Prison

Sarah Maxwell and Alexis Miller

Netflix

“She don’t care who you are, how big you are, she’ll fight you if she needs to and it cracks me up.” That’s the introduction given by 16-year-old Sarah Maxwell when we first meet fellow inmate Alexis Miller, an otherwise soft-spoken 15-year-old with dimples and cascading brunette locks, in Episode 5 of Girls Incarcerated: Young and Locked Up, an eight-episode docuseries released on Netflix in March. It would work equally well as a tagline for the whole series, which delves into the lives of teen girls serving time in Indiana’s Madison Juvenile Correctional Facility for a range of mostly petty offenses like repeated runaways and drug and alcohol consumption, but in a few cases assault and vehicular manslaughter.

Executive producer Nick Rigg has described the show — which follows the emotional and behavioral growth of roughly 15 inmates (referred to as “students”) along with empathetic commentary from their correction officers, counselors, teachers, and occasional family members — as “Orange Is the New Black for a 13 Reasons Why generation.” But unlike both of those series, Girls Incarcerated is not fiction. The series sits at a provocative nexus of popular unscripted programming, where a wave of documentary-style shows that spotlight the issue of incarceration in the US, such as MSNBC’s Lockup and OWN’s Released, intersects with the trope of the troubled teen seen in many reality programs, such as MTV’s Teen Mom and A&E’s Beyond Scared Straight. Rigg maintains that Girls Incarcerated is not a “reality” series in the way that we’ve come to understand the term, because, he says, “we weren’t going to make TV stars of these girls.” And yet the show highlights the girls’ innate star quality. They are funny, and outrageously so, delivering an uncanny mix of outsized confidence and childish goofiness direct to your living room.

Madison Juvenile Correctional Facility

Netflix

Asked about practicing Zumba during the prison’s daily rec hour, Paige McAtee, a wide-eyed 17-year-old with a heart-shaped neck tattoo, explains matter-of-factly that she wants a body like Nicki Minaj, before smacking her hips for the camera and succumbing to a giggle fit about the “jiggle.” In another scene, Miller gushes over a girl she’s crushing on, an inmate named Armani Buckner, in her diary: “Let me find out she find another girl I’d be gettin’ a murder charge lol no joke.” (In reality, Miller is serving time because she started using drugs and running away after her mother became homeless and released her to foster care.)

“I’m too pretty to fight.”

Later, when Buckner discovers her cat has died back home, Miller and a group of Madison inmates stand around the cat’s makeshift funeral in the prison yard, reassuring Buckner that her cat is “probably eatin’ hella tuna up there.” And when 16-year-old Najwa Pollard, agitated, argues with correctional staff over a piece of her mail that’s been returned to sender, Pollard threatens, “Do you really wanna go down this road? … It ain’t gonna be pretty. It’s not gonna be peaches ’n’ cream. It’s gonna be baked beans ’n’ burritos ’cause I’m farting up a storm in here!” Pollard eventually cooled off, which reminds me of a common refrain when the girls at Madison decide to de-escalate a confrontation before it turns physical: “I’m too pretty to fight.”

The cheeky and combative bravado of the show’s teenage protagonists is, on the surface level, wildly amusing. (Believe me when I say that the girls of Girls Incarcerated are experts in throwing shade so brutal they make Khloé Kardashian’s comebacks seem almost tactful.) And despite Rigg’s stated intentions, it’s not hard to imagine this as a selling point for the show’s producers — one of whom, Jordana Hochman, formerly acted as vice president of Oxygen Media and might have recognized the bizarre appeal of something like a state-sanctioned version of Bad Girls Club. It would be easy to dismiss Girls Incarcerated as yet another example of questionable reality television, one that uses entertainment value as an excuse to capitalize on the real-life circumstances of some of the nation’s most vulnerable populations: girls of color; girls who live in poverty; girls who run away from home; girls whose parents are imprisoned; girls who have been molested, raped, and abused.

Alexis Miller and Armani Buckner, and Najwa Pollard

Netflix

But Girls Incarcerated (thankfully) isn’t Bad Girls Club. Neither is it exactly like other popular television programs that gawk at out-of-control “bad” girls like the delinquent teen guests we’ve seen on Dr. Phil or the criminally self-obsessed aspiring reality stars of the 2010 E! series Pretty Wild. The inmates of Girls Incarcerated could only be cast on the show because they’d already been assigned their roles by the criminal justice system and trained to play those roles by the failure of the institutions around them, like public education and the foster care system. To some extent they’re performing for the show’s cameras, but there was no need for the producers to manufacture drama: These girls are already living it.

Instead, the show’s awkward balance between tragically adult situations and the final vestiges of childhood enables us to view the “bad” girls of Madison as, surprisingly, just what they are: living, breathing human teen girls — not yet fully formed. While the criminal behavior of young girls is typically flattened by the media into two-dimensional spectacles that humiliate these girls and serve them up as cautionary tales, the show’s (sometimes sad, sometimes banal) contextualizing of the complex histories of a girl’s race, class, and childhood feels like a considerable shift in how our culture turns its gaze on “bad” girls.

Yet for all the empathetic reframing it does, the hopeful optimism offered by Girls Incarcerated still positions the detention center as a site of redemption for its teenage protagonists, none of whom are rich, and many of whom are girls of color. The question is why, when other, more privileged “bad” girls enjoy lower stakes for the same behavior — think about the troubled teen celebrities of the mid-aughts — are the girls of Girls Incarcerated still only afforded redemption stories on television if they are funneled through traditional punitive measures of the state?

Girls walk back to their unit at Madison Juvenile Correctional Facility.

Netflix

“What are we to do with the ambition of young Midwestern girls?” critic Jessa Crispin asks in her introduction to the 2013 edition of I Await the Devil’s Coming, the forceful and unapologetic autobiography of Mary MacLane, the “Wild Woman of Butte,” who published her diary in 1902, when she was just 19. The book, in which MacLane proudly proclaims herself an amoral genius devoted to the devil, scandalized the US for its surprisingly self-assured teen girl ego, so uncommon for girls of MacLane’s time, or any time for that matter.

MacLane’s memoir was, needless to say, a hit, selling 100,000 copies in its first month of publication alone and jettisoning the defiant teen out of Butte, Montana, and into the decadent life of fame, fortune, and devilish pleasures she so desired. MacLane became a household name, but after she was found dead in a Chicago hotel room at the age of 48, her books fell out of print and the legacy of her youthful rebellion was largely forgotten. Still, there is something timeless about MacLane. Crispin describes her as “a feminine, Midwestern Napoleon” — the “teenager who, born in another place with a slight change of disposition, the government would have to send for with its gunboats.”

Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst is led to her 1976 trial by two federal marshals.

Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

In other words, the United States has always been invested in the surveillance and governance of “bad” girls, though their construction in the media has shape-shifted considerably throughout the last several decades. In 1974, 19-year-old Patty Hearst, who was famously recorded wielding a semiautomatic rifle while robbing a bank with the Symbionese Liberation Army, symbolized the wayward female revolutionary of the 1960s and ’70s. By the 1990s, it was the flashy urban girl gang — armed with box cutters, beer bottles, screwdrivers, and knives — who lined their lips and coated their faces in Vaseline before flocking to the streets in defense of the “hood.”

While Hearst — a rich, white heiress — was framed in the media as a lost girl suffering from Stockholm syndrome whose loving parents (and the rest of the nation) wanted her home, broadcast news reports on the ’90s girl gangsters serve as examples of race- and class-based fearmongering that paint girls of color as violent detriments to US society. Despite being found guilty of armed robbery after her story of brainwashing and coercion was deemed unbelievable by a jury, Hearst was released from prison after only two years when her original seven-year sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. She then enjoyed a brief acting career and quiet family life before being granted a full pardon by President Clinton in 2001. Talk about a redemptive arc.

In 2018, the girls of Girls Incarcerated are those teens sent for with gunboats, only the gunboats have now been replaced with a less metaphorical form of control: the juvenile justice system. They are angry, assertive, and loud, poised for a fight behind Madison’s barbed wire and cinder blocks — an entire squadron of “mouthy little girl[s],” which is the most common description given of any one of the teens featured on the show, both by the inmates themselves and their correction officers. The girls have all got mouths: Of course they know how to use them.

Heidi Lakin

Netflix

Take, for example, Madison’s young Heidi Lakin, who is locked up on violent assault charges (she beat up a kid and stole the keys to his car while drunk). Lakin is 16 years old, a wisecracking, bespectacled white girl with a soft spot for conspiracy theories and fart humor. “I like to fight,” says Lakin during an interview in the first episode, twisting her lips into a smirk for the camera before allowing: “But it’s a bad habit.” Anticipating an afternoon volleyball tournament between Unit 5 and Unit 6 later on in the series, she boasts, “5 is better than 6, of course, ’cause 6 is trash. Trash-ass females, trash-ass day room, trash-ass bedrooms — look at us.”

Or take Chrissy Hutchinson, whom we also meet in Episode 1, just a few weeks prior to her release from Madison. Hutchinson is 17, black, gay, and a bit of a heartthrob, sentenced to two years for a litany of charges, including selling drugs, stealing cars, and robbing homes. Proud of the change and emotional growth she’s accomplished inside, Hutchison, when interviewed about romantic relationships between the girls at Madison, smiles and says simply, “I’m a stud.”

It’s a sort of larger-than-life self-posturing we can’t seem to get enough of when it comes to young girls, especially as entertainment on TV. And it’s no more on view than with “mean girl” Brianna “Princess Thug” Guerra, the queen bee of Madison Juvenile, who, at 17, has been in and out of lockup for going on four years. When we first meet Guerra, her arrival on scene is precipitated by a series of strained commentary from fellow inmates and correctional staff alike. We learn from those around her that the popular and perennially lip-glossed teen is “blunt and honest,” a confident “alpha personality” who “tells people exactly how she feels,” with an added dramatic flair from the sparkle of her dermal face piercing. Regarding Lakin, for example, Guerra doesn’t beat around the bush. “She spit in my best friend’s lotion,” she says, disgusted, followed by the obvious: “I don’t like her.”

Clockwise from top left: Chrissy Hutchinson, Aubrey Wilson, Brianna Guerra, and Sarah Maxwell

Netflix

Since the ’80s and ’90s we’ve seen this bravado on reality or talk show programs in the form of the out-of-control white girl, whose crimes are ultimately redeemed through the kind of short-lived celebrity that brings a payday. Consider Danielle Bregoli’s rise to internet stardom after appearing on the 2016 Dr. Phil episode “I Want to Give Up My Car-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Year-Old Daughter Who Tried to Frame Me for a Crime,” which somehow led the teen to a record deal and later a Billboard nom for Top Rap Female Artist in 2018.

The obvious problem with all representations of “bad” girls in the media is that, no matter what, there is a flattening of the truth.

There was also 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham’s DUI and near collision with a police cruiser in 2013 (when Abraham was 21), to which she responded to press by tweeting “#I’mSuccessful & I don’t care about drama!” Abraham was sentenced to six months’ probation and a $500 fine, after which gossip blogs like TMZ continued to report about the “hard partying” mom who “knows how to get down,” allowing adequate wiggle room for Abraham to pass as “just a young girl having fun.” And in 2010, “Bling Ring” felon Alexis Neiers, an 18-year-old aspiring celebrity from a well-off part of the San Fernando Valley who was arrested for her involvement in the burglaries of several celebrities’ homes, secured an entire season of her own reality show, Pretty Wild, on E!.

Pretty Wild continued to film while Neiers was out on bail and negotiated the circumstances of her highly publicized court case, about which Vanity Fair’s Nancy Jo Sales reported that Neiers wore conspicuous “six-inch Louboutins” to her arraignment. The Vanity Fair article prompted this unforgettable voicemail scene in which a hysterical Neiers simultaneously prayed to God, swore at her mother, and shrieked through tears at Sales for misrepresenting her as a shallow, fame-obsessed brat, instead of the “great, amazing, talented, strong healthy girl” that she was — err, “not even a girl, a young woman.”

Alexis Neiers (right) and her attorney during the sentencing hearing for burglary charges in 2010.

Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images

[redwith-blog]

Socialism and Liberty (Bernard Shaw, 1928)

THE dread of Socialism by nervous people who do not understand it, on the ground that there would be too much law under it, and that every act of our lives would be regulated by the police, is more plausible than the terrors of the ignorant people Who think it would mean the end of all law, because under Capitalism we have been forced to impose restrictions that in a socialized nation would have no sense, in order to save the proletariat from extermination, or at least from extremities that would have provoked it to rebellion. 

Here is a little example. A friend of mine Who employed some girls in an artistic business in which there was not competition enough to compel him to do his worst in the way of sweating them, took a nice old riverside house, and decorated it very prettily with Morris wall-papers, furnishing it in such a way that the girls could have their tea comfortably in their workrooms, which he made as homelike as possible. All went well until one day a gentleman walked in and announced himself to my friend as the factory inspector. He looked round him, evidently much puzzled, and asked where the women worked.'Here,' replied my friend, with justifiable pride, confident that the inspector had never seen anything so creditable in the way of a factory before. But what the inspector said was 'Where is the copy of the factory regulations which you are obliged by law to post up on your walls in full view of your employees?' Surely you dent expect me to stick up a beastly ugly thing like that in a room furnished like a drawingroom,' said my friend.'Why, that paper on the wall is a Morris paper: I cant disfigure it by pasting up a big placard on it.' 'You are liable to severe penalties' replied the inspector 'for having not only omitted to post the regulations, but for putting paper on your walls instead of having them limewashed at the intervals prescribed by law.' 'But hang it all!' my friend remonstrated, 'I want to make the place homely and beautiful. You forget that the girls are not always working. They take their tea here.' 'For allowing your employees to take their meals in the room where they work you have incurred an additional penalty' said the inspector. 'It is a gross breach of the Factory Acts.' And he walked out, leaving my friend an abashed criminal caught redhanded.

As it happened, the inspector was a man of sense. He did not return; the penalties were not exacted; the Morris wall-papers remained; and the illicit teas continued; but the incident illustrates the extent to which individual liberty has been cut down under Capitalism for good as well as for evil. Where women are concerned it is assumed that they must be protected to a degree that is unnecessary for men (as if men were any more free in a factory than women); consequently the regulations are so much stricter that women are often kept out of employments to which men are welcomed. Beside's the factory inspector there are the Commissioners of Inland Revenue inquiring into your income and making you disgorge a lot of it, the school attendance visitors taking possession of your children, the local government inspectors making you build and drain your house not as you please but as they order, the Poor Law officers, the unemployment insurance officers, the vaccination officers, and others whom I cannot think of just at present. And the tendency is to have more and more of them as we become less tolerant of the abuses of our capitalist system. But if you study these interferences with our liberties closely you will find that in practice they are virtually suspended in the case of people well enough off to be able to take care of themselves: for instance, the school attendance officer never calls at houses valued above a certain figure, though the education of the children in them is often disgracefully neglected or mishandled. Poor Law officers would not exist if there were no poor, nor unemployment insurance officers if we all got incomes whether we were employed or not. If nobody could make profits by sweating, nor compel us to work in uncomfortable, unsafe, insanitary factories and workshops, a great deal of our factory regulations would become not only superfluous but unbearably obstructive.

Then consider the police: the friends of the honest woman and the enemies and hunters of thieves, tramps, swindlers, rioters, confidence tricksters, drunkards, and prostitutes. The police officer, like the soldier who stands behind him, is mainly occupied today in enforcing the legalized robbery of the poor which takes place whenever the wealth produced by the labor of a productive worker is transferred as rent or interest to the pockets of an idler or an idler's parasite. They are even given powers to arrest us for 'sleeping out', which means sleeping in the open air without paying a landlord for permission to do so. Get rid of this part of their duties, and at the same time of the poverty which it enforces, with the mass of corruption, thieving, rioting, swindling, and prostitution which poverty produces as surely as insanitary squalor produces smallpox and typhus, and you get rid of the least agreeable part of our present police activity, with all that it involves in prisons, criminal courts, and jury duties.

By getting rid of poverty we shall get rid of the unhappiness and worry which it causes. To defend themselves against this, women, like men, resort to artificial happiness, just as they resort to artificial insensibility when they have to undergo a painful operation. Alcohol produces artificial happiness, artificial courage, artificial gaiety, artificial self-satisfaction, thus making life bearable for millions who would otherwise be unable to endure their condition. To them alcohol is a blessing. Unfortunately, as it acts by destroying conscience, self-control, and the normal functioning of the body, it produces crime, disease, and degradation on such a scale that its manufacture and sale are at present prohibited by law throughout the United States of America, and there is a strong movement to introduce the same prohibition here.

The ferocity of the resistance to this attempt to abolish artificial happiness shows how indispensable it has become under Capitalism. A famous American Prohibitionist was mobbed by medical students in broad daylight in the streets of London, and barely escaped with the loss of one eye, and his back all but broken. If he had been equally famous for anything else, the United States Government would have insisted on the more ample reparation, apology, and condign punishment of his assailants; and if this had been withheld, or even grudged, American hotheads would have clamored for war. But for the enemy of the anaesthetic that makes the misery of the poor and the idleness of the rich tolerable, turning it into a fuddled dream of enjoyment, neither his own country nor the public conscience of ours could be moved even to the extent of a mild censure on the police. It was evident that had he been torn limb from limb the popular verdict would have been that it served him jolly well right.

Alcohol, however, is a very mild drug compared with the most effective modern happiness producers, These give you no mere sodden self-satisfaction and self-conceit: they give you ecstasy. It is followed by hideous wretchedness; but then you can cure that by taking more and more of the drug until you become a living horror to all about you, after which you become a dead one, to their great relief. As to these drugs, not even a mob of medical students, expressly educated to make their living by trading in artificial health and happiness, dares protest against strenuous prohibition, provided they may still prescribe the drug; nevertheless the demand is so great in the classes who have too much money and too little work that smuggling, which is easy and very profitable, goes on in spite of the heaviest penalties. Our efforts to suppress this trade in artificial happiness has already landed us in such interferences with personal liberty that we are not allowed to purchase many useful drugs for entirely innocent purposes unless we first pay (not to say bribe) a doctor to prescribe it.

Still, prohibition of the fiercer drugs has the support of public opinion. It is the prohibition of alcohol that rouses such opposition that the strongest governments shrink from it in spite of overwhelming evidence of the increase in material well-being produced by it wherever it has been risked. You prove to people that as teetotallers they will dwell in their own houses instead of in a frowsy tenement, besides keeping their own motor car, having a bank account, and living ten years longer. They angrily deny it; but when you crush their denials by unquestionable American statistics they tell you flatly that they had rather be happy for thirty years in a tenement without a car or a penny to put in the bank than be unhappy for forty years with all these things. You find a wife distracted because her husband drinks and is ruining her and her children; yet when you induce him to take the pledge, you find presently that she has tempted him to drink again because he is so morose when he is sober that she cannot endure living with him. And to make his drunkenness bearable she takes to drink herself, and lives happily in shameless degradation with him until they both drink themselves dead.

Besides, the vast majority of modern drinkers do not feel any the worse for it, because they do not miss the extra efficiency they would enjoy on the water waggon. Very few people ~re obliged by their occupations to work up to the extreme limit of their powers. Who cares whether a lady gardener or a bookkeeper or a typist or a shop assistant is a teetotaller or not, provided she always stops well short of being noticeably drunk? It is to the motorist or the aeroplane pilot that a single glass of any intoxicant may make the difference between life and death. What would be sobriety for a billiard marker would be ruinous drunkenness for a professional billiard player. The glass of stimulant that enlivens a routine job is often dropped because when the routineer plays golf 'to keep herself fit' she finds that it spoils her putting. Thus you find that you can sometimes make a worker give up alcohol partly or wholly by giving her more leisure. She finds that a woman who is sober enough to do her work as well as it need be done is not sober enough to play as well as she would like to do it. The moment people are in a position to develop their fitness, as they call it, to the utmost, whether at work or at play, they begin to grudge the sacrifice of the last inch of efficiency which alcohol knocks off, and which in all really fine work makes the difference between first rate and second rate. If this book owed any of its quality to alcohol or to any other drug, it might amuse you more; but it would be enormously less conscientious intellectually, and therefore much more dangerous to your mind.

If you put all this together you will see that any social change which abolishes poverty and increases the leisure of routine workers will destroy the need for artificial happiness, and increase the opportunities for the sort of activity that makes people very jealous of reducing their fitness by stimulants. Even now we admit that the champion athlete must not drink whilst training; and the nearer we get to a world in which everyone is in training all the time the nearer we shall get to general teetotalism, and to the possibility of discarding all those restrictions on personal liberty which the prevalent dearth of happiness and consequent resort to pernicious artificial substitutes now force us to impose.

As to such serious personal outrages as compulsory vaccination and the monstrous series of dangerous inoculations which are forced on soldiers, and at some frontiers on immigrants, they are only desperate attempts to stave off the consequences of bad sanitation and overcrowding by infecting people with disease when they are well and strong in the hope of developing their natural resistance to it by exercise sufficiently to prevent them from catching it when they are ailing and weak. The poverty of our doctors forces them to support such practices in the teeth of all experience and disinterested science; but if we get rid of poor doctors and overcrowded and insanitary dwellings we get rid of the diseases which terrify us into these grotesque witch rituals; and no woman will be forced to expose her infant to the risk of a horrible, lingering, hideously disfiguring death from generalized vaccinia lest it should catch confluent smallpox, which, by the way, is, in a choice between the two evils, much to be preferred. Dread of epidemics: that is, of disease and premature death, has created a pseudo-scientific tyranny just as the dread of hell created a priestly tyranny in the ages of faith. Florence Nightingale, a sensible woman whom doctors could neither humbug nor bully, told them that what was wrong with our soldiers was dirt, bad food, and foul water: in short, the conditions produced by war in the field and poverty in the slum. When we get rid of poverty the doctors will no longer be able to frighten us into imposing on ourselves by law pathogenic inoculations which, under healthy conditions, kill more people than the diseases against which they pretend to protect them. And when we get rid of Commercialism, and vaccines no longer make dividends for capitalists, the fairy tales by which they are advertized will drop out of the papers, and be replaced, let us hope, by disinterested attempts to ascertain and publish the scientific truth about them, which, by the way, promises to be much more hopeful and interesting.

As to the mass of oppressive and unjust laws that protect property at the expense of humanity, and enable proprietors to drive whole populations off the land because sheep or deer are more profitable, we have said enough about them already. Naturally we shall get rid of them when we get rid of private property.

Now, however, I must come to one respect in which official interference with personal liberty would be carried under Socialism to lengths undreamed of at present. We may be as idle as we please if only we have money in our pockets; and the more we look as if we had never done a day's work in our lives and never intend to, the more we are respected by every official·we come in contact with, and the more we are envied, courted, and deferred to by everybody. If we enter a village school the children all rise and stand respectfully to receive us, whereas the entrance of a plumber or carpenter leaves them unmoved. The mother who secures a rich idler as a husband for her daughter is proud of it: the father who makes a million uses it to make rich idlers of his children. That work is a curse is part of our religion: that it is a disgrace is the first article in our social code. To carry a parcel through the streets is not only a trouble, but a derogation from one's rank. Where there are blacks to carry them, as in South Africa, it is virtually impossible for a white to be seen doing such a thing. In London we condemn these colonial extremes of snobbery; but how many ladies could we persuade to carry a jug of milk down Bond Street on a May afternoon, even for a bet?

Now it is not likely, human laziness being what it is, that under Socialism anyone will carry a parcel or a jug if she can induce somebody else (her husband, say) to carry it for her. But nobody will think it disgraceful to carry a parcel because carrying a parcel is work. The idler will be treated not only as a rogue and a vagabond, but as an embezzler of the national funds, the meanest sort of thief. The police will not have much trouble in detecting such offenders. They will be denounced by everybody, because there will be a very marked jealousy of slackers who take their share without 'doing their bit'. The real lady will be the woman who does more than her bit, and thereby leaves her country richer than she found it. Today nobody knows what a real lady is; but the dignity is assumed most confidently by the women who ostentatiously take as much and give as nearly nothing as they can.

The snobbery that exists at present among workers will also disappear. Our ridiculous social distinctions between manual labor and brain work, between wholesale business and retail business, are really class distinctions. If a doctor considers it beneath his dignity to carry a scuttle of coals from one room to another, but is proud of his skill in performing some unpleasantly messy operation, it is clearly not because the one is any more or less manual than the other, but solely because surgical operations are associated with descent through younger sons from the propertied class, and carrying coals with proletarian descent. If the petty ironmonger's daughter is not considered eligible for marriage with the ironmaster's son, it is not because selling steel by the ounce and selling it by the ton are attributes of two different species, but because petty ironmongers have usually been poor and ironmasters rich. When there are no rich and no poor, and descent from the proprietary class will be described as'criminal antecedents', people will turn their hands to anything, and indeed rebel against any division of labor that deprives them of physical exercise. My own excessively sedentary occupation makes me long to be a half-time navvy. I find myself begging my gardener, who is a glutton for work, to leave me a few rough jobs to do when I have written myself to a standstill; for I cannot go out and take a hand with the nawies, because I should be taking the bread out of a poor man's mouth; nor should we be very comfortable company for one another with our different habits and speech and bringing-up, all produced by differences in our parents' incomes and class. But with all these obstacles swept away by Socialism I could lend a hand at any job within my strength and skill, and help my mates instead of hurting them, besides being as good company for them as I am now for professional persons or rich folk. Even as it is a good deal of haymaking is done for fun; and I am persuaded (having some imagination, thank Heaven!) that under Socialism open air workers would have plenty of voluntary help, female as well as male, without the trouble of whistling for it. Laws might have to be made to deal with officiousness. Everything would make for activity and against idleness: indeed it would probably be much harder to be an idler than it is now to be a pickpocket. Anyhow, as idleness would be not only a criminal offence, but unladylike and ungentlemanly in the lowest degree, nobody would resent the laws against it as infringements of natural liberty.

Lest anyone should at this point try to muddle you with the inveterate delusion that because capital can increase wealth people can live on capital without working, let me go back just for a moment to the way in which capital becomes productive.

Let us take those cases in which capital is used, not for destructive purposes, as in war, but for increasing production: that is, saving time and trouble in future work. When all the merchandise in a country has to be brought from the makers to the users on packhorses or carts over bad roads the cost in time and trouble and labor of man and beast is so great that most things have to be made and consumed on the spot. There may be a famine in one village and a glut in another a hundred miles off because of the difficulty of sending food from one to the other. Now if there is enough spare subsistence (capital) to support gangs of navvies and engineers and other workers whilst they cover the country with railways, canals, and metalled roads, and build engines and trains, barges and motor cars to travel on them, to say nothing of aeroplanes, then all sorts of goods can be sent long distances quickly and cheaply; so that the village which formerly could not get a cartload of bread and a few cans of milk from a hundred miles off to save its life is able to buy quite cheaply grain grown in Russia or America and domestic articles made in Germany or Japan. The spare subsistence will be entirely consumed in the operation: there will be no more left of it than of the capital lent for the war; but it will leave behind it the roadways and waterways and machinery by which labor can do a great deal more in a given time than it could without them. The destruction of these aids to labor would be a very different matter from our annual confiscations of the National Debt by taxation. It would leave us much poorer and less civilized: in fact most of us would starve, because big modern populations cannot support themselves without elaborate machinery and railways and so forth.

Still, roadways and machines can produce nothing by themselves. They can only assist labor. And they have to be continually repaired and renewed by labor. A country crammed with factories and machines, traversed in all directions by roadways, tramways and railways, dotted with aerodromes and hangars and garages, each crowded with aeroplanes and airships and motor cars, would produce absolutely nothing at all except ruin and rust and decay if the inhabitants ceased to work. We should starve in the midst of all the triumphs of civilization because we could not breakfast on the clay of the railway embankments, lunch on boiled aeroplanes, and dine on toasted steam-hammers. Nature inexorably denies to us the possibility of living without labor or of hoarding its most vital products. We may be helped by past labor; but we must live by present labor. By telling off one set of workers to produce more than they consume, and telling off another set to live on the surplus whilst they are making roads and machines, we may make our labor much more productive, and take out the gain either in shorter hours of work or bigger returns from the same number of hours of work as before, but we cannot stop working and sit down and look on while the roads and machines make and fetch and carry for us without anyone lifting a finger. We may reduce our working hours to two a day, or increase our income tenfold, or even conceivably do both at once; but by no magic on earth can any of us honestly become an idler. When you see a person who does no productive or serviceable work, you may conclude with absolute certainty that she or he is sponging on the labor of other people. It may or may not be expedient to allow certain persons this privilege for a time: sometimes it is; and sometimes it is not. I have already described how we offer at present, to anyone who can invent a labor-saving machine, what is called a patent: that is, a right to take a share of what the workers produce with the help of that machine for fourteen years. When a man writes a book or a play, we give him, by what is called copyright, the power to make everybody who reads the book or sees the play performed pay him and his heirs something during his lifetime and fifty years afterwards. This is our way of encouraging people to invent machines and to write books and plays instead of being content with the old handiwork, and with the Bible and Shakespear; and as we do this with our eyes open and with a definite purpose, and the privilege lasts no longer than enough to accomplish its purpose, there is a good deal to be said for it. But to allow the descendants of a man who invested a few hundred pounds in the New River Water Company in the reign of James I to go on for ever and ever living in idleness on the incessant daily labor of the London ratepayers is senseless and mischievous. If they actually did the daily work of supplying London with water, they might reasonably claim either to work for less time or receive more for their work than a water-carrier in Elizabeth's time; but for doing no work at all they have not a shadow of excuse. To consider Socialism a tyranny because it will compel everyone to share the daily work of the world is to confess to the brain of an idiot and the instinct of a tramp.

Speaking generally, it is a mistake to suppose that the absence of law means the absence of tyranny. Take, for example, the tyranny of fashion. The only law concerned in this is the law that we must all wear something in the presence of other people. It does not prescribe what a woman shall wear: it only says that in public she shall be a draped figure and not a nude one. But does this mean that a woman can wear what she likes? Legally she can; but socially her slavery is more complete than any sumptuary law could make it. If she is a waitress or a parlormaid there is no question about it: she must wear a uniform or lose her employment and starve. If she is a duchess she must dress in the fashion or be ridiculous. In the case of the duchess nothing worse than ridicule is the penalty of unfashionable dressing. But any woman who has to earn her living outside her own house finds that if she is to keep her employment she must also keep up appearances, which means that she must dress in the fashion, even when it is not at all becoming to her, and her wardrobe contains serviceable dresses a couple of years out of date. And the better her class of employment the tighter her bonds. The ragpicker has the melancholy privilege of being less particular about her working clothes than the manageress of a hotel; but she would be very glad to exchange that freedom for the obligation of the manageress to be always well dressed. In fact the most enviable women in this respect are nuns and policewomen, who, like gentlemen at evening parties and military officers on parade, never have to think of what they will wear, as it is all settled for them by regulation and custom.

This dress question is only one familiar example of the extent to which the private employment of today imposes regulations on us which are quite outside the law, but which are none the less enforced by private employers on pain of destitution. The husband in public employment, the socialized husband, is much freer than the unsocialized one in private employment. He may travel third class, wearing a lounge suit and soft bat, living in the suburbs, and spending his Sundays as he pleases, whilst the others must travel first class, wear a frock coat and tall hat, live at a fashionable address, and go to church regularly. Their wives have to do as they do; and the single women who have escaped from the limitations of the home into independent activity find just the same difference between public work and private: in public employment their livelihood is never at the mercy of a private irresponsible person as it is in private. The lengths to which women are sometimes forced to go to please their private employers are much more revolting than, for instance, the petty dishonesties in which clerks are forced to become accomplices.

Then there are estate rules: that is to say, edicts drawn up by private estate owners and imposed on their tenants without any legal sanction. These often prohibit the-building on the estate of any place of worship except an Anglican church, or of any public house. They refuse houses to practitioners of the many kinds that are now not registered by the General Medical Council. In fact they exercise a tyranny which would lead to a revolution if it were attempted by the King, and which did actually provoke us to cutoff a king's head in the seventeenth century. We have to submit to these tyrannies because the people who can refuse us employment or the use of land have powers of life and death over us, and can therefore make us do what they like, law or no law. Socialism would transfer this power of life and death from private hands to the hands of the constitutional authorities, and regulate it by public law. The result would be a great increase of independence, self-respect, freedom from interference with our tastes and ways of living, and, generally, all the liberty we really care about.

Childish people, we saw, want to have all their lives regulated for them, with occasional holiday outbursts of naughtiness to relieve the monotony; and we admitted that the ablebodied ones make good soldiers and steady conventional employees. When they are left to themselves they make laws of fashions, customs, points of etiquette, and 'what other people will say', hardly daring to call their souls their own, though they may be rich enough to do as they please. Money as a means of freedom is thrown away on these people. It is funny to hear them declaring, as they often do, that Socialism would be unendurable because it would dictate to them what they should eat and drink and wear, leaving them no choice in the matter, when they are cowering under a social tyranny which regulates their meals, their clothes, their hours, their religion and politics, so ruthlessly that they dare no more walk down a fashionable street in an unfashionable hat, which there is no law to prevent them doing, than to walk down it naked, which would be stopped by the police. They regard with dread and abhorrence the emancipated spirits who, within the limits of legality and cleanliness and convenience, do not care what they wear, and boldly spend their free time as their fancy dictates.

But do not undervalue the sheepish wisdom of the conventional. Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure for freedom than unconventionality does. Believe me, unless you intend to devote your life to preaching unconventionality, and thus make it your profession, the more conventional you are, short of being silly or slavish or miserable, the easier life will be for you. Even as a professional reformer you had better be content to preach one form of unconventionality at a time. For instance, if you rebel against high-heeled shoes, take care to do it in a very smart hat.

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Why Half of the Country Will Never Be Satisfied With the President

Why do millions of white working class and middle class people believe that Donald Trump cares about them? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.. Answer by Curtis Lindsay, musician, on Quora:

Why do millions of white working class and middle class people believe that Donald Trump cares about them? On the surface of it, it really is mystifying.

I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, and I remember well how most middle-American adults in my life thought and spoke of Donald Trump at that time. He was a Manhattanite billionaire playboy who couldn't stay off talk shows and tabloids. His name and image were synonymous with obscene wealth and a decadent lifestyle. He treated women badly, it was known. Small business people, farmers, and factory workers rolled their eyes at Donald Trump. His values could not have had less to do with theirs. Many probably hated him and everything he stood for.

There's always talk of how those politicians who are career attorneys with Ivy League pedigrees, hail from upper-crust families, and maybe vacation in the Hamptons or the French Riviera are maybe a bit out of touch with common people.

But here we have a real estate tycoon for whom the Reagan years were one long limousine ride, an unapologetic egomaniac who delighted in throwing his name up in lights, and a guy who made a television career out of firing people on camera: one would think such a person would represent a whole higher echelon of "out of touch."

So, yeah -- how did this man transform himself into the populist savior of the working class?

Maybe a good place to start is by summarizing the viewpoints of two different people on the state of America: mine, and my father's, which I feel I can represent with a reasonable degree of accuracy, though far from perfectly.

I am a professional classical musician and arts administrator in my mid-thirties. I had some childhood training in conservatories, and I have a college degree in music and philosophy. I make it a point to travel outside the U.S., though not that often.

When I go down to the local taqueria, I place my orders and make small talk in poor but earnest Spanish. It's natural for me be to curious about other cultures, enthusiastic about diversity.

As a boy, I ran around the neighborhood with black kids from families less affluent than mine. My friends throughout grade school included kids from India, Vietnam, Germany, the works. My friends and colleagues in adult life are a diverse bunch, too. Many of my closest friends are gay or trans, and my sexuality has been pretty fluid for most of my life.

My earnings place me in the lower middle class; I work a full-time job plus somewhere between one and three part-time jobs at any given time, as musicians often do. I am unmarried with no children, and plan to stay that way. I love kids, but am not interested in offspring.

I don't align strongly with either of the nation's major political parties.

My view is that the U.S. is run almost entirely in the interests of its very wealthiest citizens, some of whom exert undue influence on the government at every level and hamper its operations much as a cancer hinders the operations of tissues and organs in the body.

I am extremely sympathetic to the ideals of democratic socialism. I think that poverty is most often, though not always, the result of inadequate opportunity and socioeconomic disenfranchisement, and that extreme wealth is most often, though not always, the result of privilege rather than the natural reward for genuine hard work in a spirit of convivial cooperation.

It seems self-evident to me that the neo-feudal influence of increasingly powerful and cannibalistic corporations is directly responsible for the engagement of the United States in aggressive geopolitical posturing and resource wars, which are represented to the public as patriotic endeavors; for the failure of the U.S. to divert any portion of a truly corpulent defense budget to the better care of its citizens and its health and education infrastructures; for the extreme reliance of the American populace on credit; and for the refusal of the U.S. to regulate its economy with the imperfect but at least vaguely functional common sense exercised by comparable industrial nations.

The U.S. isn't run by sinister moguls in a smoky backroom enclave. Rather, plutocracy and oligarchy are predictable outcomes of the kind of socioeconomic principles on which the nation was founded to begin with. I can't see that capitalism and democracy are compatible without an awful lot of intercession, is the gist of it. I think that the market is chaotic and unreliable as a governing force, because the market is made in the image of a chaotic and unreliable population. Try as we might, we don't always know what is in our best interests, since our "needs" are now often manufactured by marketers.

I believe that the electoral system in our republic is such that it guarantees a near-total lack of diversity in viewpoints and approaches, and strongly encourages politicians to say and do whatever it takes to win over the necessary constituent base -- without then providing meaningful incentive for them to commit to genuine matters of policy with any degree of integrity.

I believe that the mass media in our country specialize not so much in informing the populace impartially as in creating and nurturing two opposing camps and then allowing each to bathe perpetually in whatever it is that they want to hear, ensuring the division of the nation into factions which are ideologically hostile toward one another and do not communicate with one another. It makes for great ratings. This is evidenced most acutely in questions of civil liberty and tolerance, which allow candidates to make great hay from simple hot-buttons, but indeed manifests in various ways throughout virtually every aspect of American life.

My father's view, as best I am able to represent it, is quite different.

He is a small business owner with no college degree, a father of five children by two marriages, and an extremely intelligent and down-to-earth individual whose ceaseless, gritty hard work and carefully managed business decisions have, even in the face of dire adversity at times, enabled his children to pursue their dreams in a way that he, to a great extent, could not.

His earnings place him in the upper middle class. He believes that he could have done even better for himself and his family, had politicians not been continually trying to steal his money.

Dad was always completely financially supportive of me, well above and beyond the call. But he never took much interest in me personally, and feels fundamentally that he and I have nothing in common. For my part, I have sadly done very little in life to disabuse him of that notion. We bonded over certain things when I was very young, and those are some of my most treasured memories; by the time I graduated high school, we were living on different planets. I was a rebellious hellion.

He loves his grandchildren and spoils them ridiculously. It's wonderful to watch.

He has never traveled outside the United States, and his daily life has, for pretty much all of my memory, been divided almost expressly between work and sleep.

Dad grew up on family farms, and his best friends were his cousins. In that place and time, white people and black people did not readily socialize on equitable terms. That's how he was taught to experience the world. He identifies strongly with George Wallace's stand against racial integration -- or did at one point, at least -- and believes, in a very general sense, that black people somehow want for free what white people have somehow achieved through hard work and sacrifice.

I should add that Wallace did not resonate with Dad because he detests black people. He does not. Dad liked Wallce because he believes that the federal government is essentially evil, and that nearly every imaginable issue ought to be handled by the states.

For Dad, integration was not the inexorable march of justice. It was the federal government telling him and his peers how to live, and turning Alabama into Ohio.

He believes that wealth is usually, but not always, the result of acumen and discipline, and that poverty is usually, but not always, the result of laziness and a sense of entitlement.

He judges the U.S. government to be corrupt and incompetent by nature, and that its officers make a living by sucking their subjects dry, the pursuit of which is their sole guiding interest. Environmentalism is, in his mind, only the latest and hottest money-making scheme in Washington.

He believes that the electoral system in the country exists to protect middle-class common sense and hard work from the self-congratulatory solipsism of the Hollywood and New York liberals, most of whom are criminals unaccountable to the law.

He'd tell you that the mass media exists solely to express the viewpoints of wackos who live in an alternate universe and are his ideological enemies.

Dad says that the United States is being overrun by Muslims and other foreign minorities. He'd say that most of the war activity of the United States in the past couple of generations has been carried out solely for the just purpose of crushing those who wish his country doom; now, that Great Other is in his neighborhood, waiting to take everything he has from him.

I'd guess that, in his view, homosexual and trans people are weak and psychologically flawed persons with an addiction to the attention of others -- they are not so much immoral as tragically afflicted, and he is okay with them as long as he doesn't have to think about them too much. Certainly he does not think they need to be "converted." He would say that such an approach is ridiculous, I bet.

Finally, he believes that the presidency of Barack Obama represented the ultimate ascendancy of anti-American traitors and their foreign hordes, and that a Clinton presidency would have maintained an identical agenda: enslaving white, middle-class Americans for the benefit of wealthy, crooked foreigners and their cohorts on the American coasts. He aligns with the Republican Party with perfect consistency, and has at least since I was born, at about the time of Reagan's first election.

You can probably see that I would never have voted for Donald Trump, and perhaps you can understand why I voted for Clinton only with great reluctance, primarily as a means of attempting to stop Trump from creating a billionaire theme park out of his drained swamp.

I am actually willing to give Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt on some of his economic positions, as shaky as I feel them to be on the whole; but I am sorely afraid for the future of civil liberties, cultural tolerance and integration, environmental health, and foreign policy under the strictly for-profit federal government that he is creating.

Likewise, you can probably surmise that my father was an enthusiastic Trump supporter. Quite beyond my ready comprehension, he esteems Donald Trump to be a selfless patriot who has recanting and given up his decadent billionaire lifestyle to serve the interests of the America That Time Forgot.

Dad is not a religious man, and he is probably elated to have been presented with a candidate who has built a platform mostly, if not entirely, devoid of religious sanctimoniousness, and otherwise using language which is almost perfectly aligned with his own worldview.

I've often felt that there are certain thinkers and movers in the American political spectrum whose views align reasonably closely with my own, but who are not really willing to go far enough to act upon them. I'm guessing that, until now, Dad has felt that pretty much no one in U.S. politics understands his frustrations.

That's all it takes. Donald Trump, however genuinely or disingenuously, has broadcast a clear message on the precise frequency to which my father and many people similar to him have long been listening in hopes of hearing something other than static. Under the right conditions, that's all you need to turn a delirious demagogue into the most powerful man on Earth.

Being blessed with two eyes, two ears, and a memory--and not hungering for a the "simpler times" that my father surely must--I see Trump for what he is: an opportunistic charlatan who cared only about November 8, 2016 and the ways in which the results of that day will benefit him personally. His only concern is winning, as he has written in print numerous times over the years.

True to form, most of the actions he has taken in his first few days in power have smacked of symbolic vindictiveness, a pouting child's revenge.

My opinion of Secretary Clinton is somewhat higher, but not a great deal higher, truth be told. I believe that she uses the insecurities and uncertainties of minorities and the poor to similar personal and political advantage, often quite superficially. I believe she is equally ruthless, in her own way.

If the progressive movement in the United States does not learn to engage and speak to the people that disagree with its tenets without making them feel like backwards simpletons, it will never move forward without then having to take two steps back.

If progressives do not learn to create fresh common ground and alliances with those whom they are told hate them and all they represent, then I think the future of the nation is a bleak one.

Electoral politics has unfortunately become a zero-sum sportsball game in our country. No more than half the nation's people feel, at any given time, that their interests are being represented. So greater inclusiveness and depth of relation are needed, I think, if genuine progress is to be made and sustained.

This is not an easy task. Ideological warfare has already taken its toll; the way forward is not clear. I think it will necessarily involve much original thought on the part of a people no longer as accustomed to such intricacies as perhaps they once were.

I've been sheltered from a number of the realities that my parents had to face in their lives. It's not difficult for me to appreciate them, but it is almost impossible for me to understand them. I am sure my parents can't fathom why it is that I want certain people and things in my life, and why I'm oblivious to certain matters that, for them, are nothing short of crucial.

I know many people my age, and younger, who feel themselves to be in similar generational disarray.

It is truly difficult for Dad and me to be in the same room when politics is in the air, and not for any lack of love. My journey through Trump's America begins with looking for a way to change that.

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