Trump-onomics

It ain't workin' for us.

via Seattle Times:

U.S. farm bankruptcies in September surged 24% to the highest since 2011 amid strains from President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and a year of wild weather.

Growers are also becoming increasingly dependent on trade aid and other federal programs for income, figures showed in a report by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest general farm organization.

The squeeze on farmers underscores the toll China’s retaliatory tariffs have taken on a critical Trump constituency as the president enters a re-election campaign and a fight to stave off impeachment. The figures also highlight the importance of a “phase one” deal the administration is currently negotiating with Beijing to increase agriculture imports in return for a pause in escalating U.S. levies.

Almost 40% of projected farm profit this year will come from trade aid, disaster assistance, federal subsidies and insurance payments, according to the report, based on Department of Agriculture forecasts. That’s $33 billion of a projected $88 billion in income.

The trade war and two straight years of adverse weather rattled farmers already facing commodity price slumps.

Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings in the 12 months ended September rose to 580 from a year earlier. That marked the highest since 676 cases in 2011 under the chapter of the bankruptcy code tailored for farms. The total “remains well below” historical highs in the 1980s, the federation said.

Recent bankruptcies were concentrated in the 13-state Midwestern region, a key battleground in the presidential election where grain, soybean, hog and dairy farms have been hit by trade disputes. More than 40%, or 255 filings, were in the region.

This story was originally published at bloomberg.com. Read it here.

And also too - Newsweek:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman took issue with President Donald Trump's repeated claims that the economy is doing better than ever under his administration.

The economic expert wrote on Twitter Wednesday that the president's promises regarding manufacturing jobs and GDP growth have failed to materialize.

"The meh GDP numbers won't help Trump next year. But what should really scare him is his utter failure to boost manufacturing in swing states," Krugman, who is a columnist for The New York Times and won the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, wrote on Twitter. He shared a graph of manufacturing job levels over time in Wisconsin to emphasize his point.

- snip -

Krugman also explained that Trump has fallen fall short of his promises regarding GDP growth. The economist tweeted an article by The Hill from last year, which highlighted how Trump was promising that GDP growth "could be in the fives," referring to 5 percent growth or higher.

Coded Language

We're finally starting to zero in on the main point of all this Cult45 shit.

Ukraine seems to be the absolute key, and the way the Trump administration is talking about it has been very revealing - even though they're working hard to smoke-screen everything.

Rachel Frazen, The Hill:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that President Trump's infamous July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was "consistent" with the administration's policies.

The phone call in which Trump pressed Zelensky to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is at the center of House Democrats' impeachment inquiry into the president.

"The call was consistent with what I had a long set of conversations with President Trump on our policy for an awfully long time," Pompeo said in an interview with Fox News. "Our policy has been very clear all along with respect to Ukraine."

Asked whether any parts of the call were not included in the rough transcript released by the White House, Pompeo doubled down on the fact that it was "consistent" with the administration's Ukraine policy.

"I heard the President very clearly on that call talking about making sure that corruption – whether that corruption took place in the 2016 election, whether that corruption was continuing to take place, that the monies that were being provided would be used appropriately," Pompeo said.

"It was very consistent with what I’d understood President Trump and our administration to be doing all along," he added.

We've been hearing some real whoppers from these guys.

One that 45* popped off with (paraphrasing): "Rudy looks for corruption everywhere he goes."

IMHO, this is not an untrue statement. He's just careful to leave out the operative phrase.

"Rudy looks for...(opportunities to cash in on)...corruption everywhere he goes."

Then along comes Pompeo telling us the Zelensky call was "consistent" with the president's policy regarding Ukraine.

Again, it's not an untrue statement, but what he doesn't tell us is that "the policy" is all about setting up Ukraine:

• to be the patsy for Russian fuckery
• as a conduit for money laundering
• to be a vending machine for phony political dirt

We're starting to see a lot of what the real deal is - Ukraine is a key to whatever is included in Putin's plans, and Trump is key to neutralizing American resistance to his plans.

What's even more certain is that we won't ever be allowed to see some of the really shitty things that're happening.

Today's Tweet

I've been pretty indifferent about Sportsball stuff in general. The big-time games have gotten to be more spectacle than sport. But when your team's got some real-people fans like this guy - go Nats.

“You’ve been such a gracious fan tonight tell me what your thoughts are about this win tonight.”
“I think this is huge for DC. DC needed this. We’ve got some asshole in the fucking White House...(camera cuts away)”
WHAT AN ABSOLUTE FUCKING LEGEND. #WONTHEFIGHT pic.twitter.com/9t8watN5FE

— This American Adam (@adamconner) October 31, 2019

Today's Today

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Today's Tweet

Nicolle Wallace has been one of the pimpiest of the political pimps - she helped give us Sarah Palin - but she's since taken to calling out the bad guys on her own side, and while there's always the probability that she's just hangin' out on my Librul TV Box waiting for the next cycle to come around so she can get back to the Big Pimp, I can respect her recent efforts.

Especially one that sparks and crackles like this one.

“Except those people aren’t chicken shit like the three of you and they know that he passed a background check that the President’s daughter and son-in-law didn’t” - Nicolle Wallace responding to Laura Ingraham’s panel pic.twitter.com/aGnDDpcrt8

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) October 29, 2019

Death By Coal

Hillary got slammed hard in 2016 for a selectively edited comment about "...we're going to kill the coal industry..."

Of Course #1: Trump and the GOP seized on the opportunity to make empty promises in order to drag Hillary down and boost their own prospects because...

...Of Course #2: They always deliberately ignored the context. She was talking about how people worked their asses off - for generations - producing that coal and making the coal companies rich as fuck, and we can't just leave them to rot when the market and technology pass them by.

Of Course #3: The Press Poodles never clarified anything - they let the bullshit slide.

Because a good political slap fight sells lots of mouth wash and boner pills.

WaPo:

Murray Energy Corp., the private coal giant whose founder pushed the Trump administration for an overhaul of what it called “anti-coal” environmental policy, filed for Chapter 11 protection on Tuesday.

It’s the fifth coal company to land in bankruptcy court this year, in a rapidly shrinking industry that’s being squeezed out of the U.S. power market by cheaper options such as natural gas, solar and wind power.

The long-anticipated bankruptcy is another sign that President Trump’s efforts to save the sputtering coal industry, a central promise of his 2016 campaign, have largely failed.

It also speaks to the “significant stress on the coal industry today,” said Benjamin Nelson, a coal analyst and Moody’s vice president. Coal once fueled about half of all U.S. electricity; now it powers less than a quarter.

Penny post card - ca 1920
Pollution was a sign of progress and power, and it made us proud.

And the kicker:

That's Bob Murray - founder and CEO of Murray Energy. He has to wear a cannula because he needs the oxygen; because his lungs were damaged; because he worked in the mines.

Murray, who started working in coal mines at 16 to support his family, has long been a Trump ally, donating generously to his campaign and hosting a fundraiser in West Virginia this summer. Murray Energy operates more than a dozen mines throughout Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois and Utah and produces 76 million tons of coal annually.

In 2017, Murray met with White House energy officials to offer an “action plan” calling for deep cuts in the Environmental Protection Agency’s staff, withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, a rollback of safety and pollution regulations, and the repeal of President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Within a year, the administration followed through by pledging to withdraw from the Paris accord, delivering cuts at the EPA and beginning to repeal and replace the Obama-era plan to curb climate-warming emissions from coal-fired power plants.

There's very little that could better exemplify the perverse delusions of today's version of Unfettered Free Market Capitalism.

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

Today's Tweet

Whiny-butt pussies.

MAGA's... if you're the brave ones, why are you all so afraid of everything?

I mean, you're like timid forest animals.

Oh no, a leftist! Oh no a Socialist. Oh no a person of color. Oh no an HONEST ELECTION.

The sound of your sniveling is deafening! pic.twitter.com/FZKx5JKZxS

— Saint Brian The Godless (@AWorldOutOfMind) October 29, 2019

A Bob Cesca Moment In Real Time

On his podcast (every Tuesday & Thursday), Bob will often reiterate that "Trump always makes things worse for Trump." And we were not disappointed.

Here's the bet: Somebody must've been pretty sure that 45*'s moment had arrived, because al-Baghdadi was offed and it should've been a good bump for Cult45.

But, of course, he botched it by turning the announcement into some stoopid end zone dance that was basically 48 minutes of cringe.

Here's a quick look as Jimmy Kimmel compares 45*'s big moment with Obama's.

So anyway, 45* might've had an OK victory lap at the game, but it didn't go quite the way he needed it to go.

LA Times:

There’s no crying in baseball — but there is booing, jeering and chanting “Lock Him Up!” if President Trump is in the ballpark.

Forget whatever happened on the field, Game 5 of the 2019 World Series will be remembered as one of the rare occasions a sitting (or former) president has been met with the type of high-decibel, visceral loathing usually reserved for visiting teams.

It’s all the more remarkable considering the last 48 hours should have been a media boon for the president rather than a colossal bust with his humiliation at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., documented on hundreds of cellphones then posted and re-posted for laughs, if not posterity. (Though it’ll certainly be good for future laughs.)

The public spanking wasn’t how things were supposed to go in Trump world. The ballpark appearance should have been a glory walk for POTUS, who just hours earlier had announced the dramatic demise of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi in a raid by U.S. special forces. The world’s most-wanted terrorist had been eliminated after a 10-year hunt, on Trump’s watch. Finally, a real reason to brag.

Some might say it’s cold, hard justice that his most impressive achievement as commander in chief was eclipsed by the type of mob mentality he’s encouraged and a slogan he popularized.

More likely? Trump became a victim of his own chaos offensive.

For three years, he’s been destabilizing the status quo while profiting from the mayhem. Washington protocol is in shambles. The wall is built, being built or ready to be built — on Colorado’s border, no less. Nepotism is a crime when the Bidens are involved, but Trump giving his daughter and son-in-law government positions is different. His personal attorney is the former mayor of New York, a onetime presidential hopeful who now butt-dials reporters during sensitive conversations about the need for more cash.

Until recently, the president has been untouchable inside the tower of subterfuge he built on his way to the Oval Office and has kept fortifying with batty conspiracy theories, spooky stories about immigrants at the border and the usual empty boasting about whatever is the best/biggest/most beautiful [fill in the blank] in the history of America and maybe even the world.

Pandemonium as an agenda, or the agenda: Think of it as Littlefinger’s infamous “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder” speech in “Game of Thrones,” but with all the smart bits swapped out for nursery rhymes and McDonald’s jingles.

No wonder that the sophomoric (but admittedly entertaining) stadium chants caught fire on social media while the stunning defeat of a globally feared terrorist smoldered in the background.

But it’s in situations that demand Trump act presidential that the president’s powers of improvisation tend to fail him most grievously. And that’s exactly what happened on Sunday. During the press conference about the raid, even Trump seemed to have lost control of the bedlam he once used as a launchpad.

The address should have been his finest hour, but minutes into his 40-minute briefing, Trump began embellishing an achievement that was already spectacular and horrific: U.S. forces had chased Baghdadi into a tunnel and he blew himself up along with three of his children.

Trump said he watched the raid and the Islamic State leader was “whimpering and crying and screaming ... like a dog” before he detonated a suicide vest. The president also said he had his eye on the self-proclaimed caliphate “From the first day I came to office, and now we‘re getting close to three years, I would say ‘Where is al-Baghdadi? I want al-Baghdadi.’ And we would kill terrorist leaders, but they were names I never heard of. ... They weren’t the big names.”

He went on to praise a dog the military used to corner Baghdadi: “Our K-9, as they call it — I call it a dog, a beautiful dog, a talented dog — was injured and brought back, but we had no soldier injured. … We had nobody even hurt. That’s why the dog was so great.”

It never gets better. It always gets worse. Because Trump always makes it worse.

Today's Quote

We live in a country where politicians try to make abortion rates go down by making it harder for women to get birth control.

More "Conservative" Fuckery

"Conservatives" play this game where they dangle your job in front of you and say, "Give us what we want or we'll fuck you over."

And then they fuck you over anyway, because that's how this game is played.

Sometimes, what they want is another tax cut. Sometimes it's the OK to siphon tax money directly out of the treasury and into their pockets.

When they're whining about "gubmint reggalations", it can mean anything from forcing us to accept the poisoning of the air and the water and the soil, to stripping away more of our labor rights (or consumer protections - or civil rights - or whatever) to making it impossible for most people to make their own way in the world without selling their souls for little more than subsistence level survival.

This is Daddy State plutocracy.

Catherine Rampell, WaPo:

Last week, amid damning new testimony in the impeachment inquiry, the White House tried to change the subject by touting one of its supposed wins: President Trump’s “historic deregulation.”

“We are now reducing the size, scope, and cost of Federal regulations for the first time in decades, and we are already seeing the incredible results,” Trump said. In a Cabinet meeting, senior officials likewise offered inflated economic numbers about Trump’s “gangbusters” deregulatory achievements.

In reality, Trump’s regulatory rollback has largely been a bust. In some cases, in fact, it’s been an outright fraud: The Trump administration has added bureaucracy and uncertainty for businesses that it either willfully misunderstands or overtly dislikes.

Consider a list of Trump’s major deregulatory efforts, many of which involve allowing companies to pollute more.

Yes, there are a few identifiable, isolated winners from this agenda. Like, imagine you run a company whose business model depends on dumping lead, mercury or arsenic into the water; pumping methane or fine particulates into the air; or using pesticides that give kids brain damage. Sure, recently loosened restrictions on these toxic activities might fatten your profit margins.

But whether such policy changes significantly boost the overall economy is a different question entirely.

One reason to distrust the administration’s claims about these regulatory rollbacks: In its official cost-benefit analyses of such changes, it has used a lot of shady — one might say dishonest — assumptions. In other words, it’s cooking the books.

For instance, in some cases it has thrown out solid scientific studies that happen to produce inconvenient results. In others, it has disqualified large categories of benefits historically counted in such assessments. It has also arbitrarily scaled back estimates for the social cost of carbon. And so on.

These are all wonky, technical accounting changes that go largely unnoticed by the public. That’s by design. The goal is to make Trump’s deregulatory efforts look like they’re turbocharging the economy.

In fact, even some of the companies the Trump administration claims to be helping have protested that they’re being harmed. As a result, several major deregulatory changes have faced opposition not just from the usual tree-huggers and public-health advocates, but from industry, too. That’s been true for the administration’s laxer requirements for methane and mercury emissions, as well as its automotive fuel-efficiency standards.

In those cases — as with the trade wars — the Trump administration seems plainly confused about what policies will be “pro-business.” In others, though, its regulatory changes seem deliberately anti-business. Or at least they seem designed to hurt certain disfavored businesses or populations.


Let's take a quick look at that one aspect - Trade Wars:

Gosh - maybe the "policies" coming out of Cult45 aren't meant to achieve peace and prosperity for all, but to blow smoke in our faces while the Kleptocrats loot the joint.

What Goes Around

The universe wears a karmic smile today.

Imagine a World Series game where the crowd has turned out to root root root for the home team, and they don't just boo when POTUS is introduced - they chant "LOCK HIM UP. LOCK HIM UP."

Then imagine the owners of the Washington Nationals preemptively asking the White House not to put them in the position of having to decline an invitation from POTUS to join him at the game.

Any given POTUS gets too much credit when things are good. And sometimes, when things are bad they get blamed too much.

You know things ain't right when POTUS is such a colossal fuckup that not even a baseball game comes away without the guy leaving a giant shit stain on it.

Slowly Slowly

All the "progress" being made by the Dems to bring this rogue POTUS to heel becomes so much sound and fury signifying nothing unless we all keep pushing.

And sometimes it amazes me how hard we have to push just to get people to see their way clear to do what's right, when it really should be obvious that an awful lot is wrong, and that something has to be done.

WaPo:

Republican senators are lost and adrift as the impeachment inquiry enters its second month, navigating the grave threat to President Trump largely in the dark, frustrated by the absence of a credible case to defend his conduct and anxious about the historic reckoning that likely awaits them.

Recent days have delivered the most damaging testimony yet about Trump and his advisers commandeering Ukraine policy for the president’s personal political goals, which his allies on Capitol Hill sought to undermine by storming the deposition room and condemning the inquiry as secretive and corrupt.

Those theatrics belie the deepening unease many Republicans now say they feel — particularly those in the Senate who are dreading having to weigh their conscience against their political calculations in deciding whether to convict or acquit Trump should the Democratic-controlled House impeach the president.

And there it is - the basic crux of our problems - politicians who won't follow their conscience unless it aligns with their political ambitions.

Politicians who have to borrow the courage to stand up for what's right - and stand against what's wrong - when it's perfectly clear the leader of their party is breaking the fucking law practically every fucking day.

And I'm getting pretty tired of hearing myself talk about about, but how do I not? How do I shrug it off? How do I ignore the nagging thought that the Repubs aren't doing what's clearly their duty unless what's happening is something they want to have happen?

I'll keep on indulging myself in this little exercise in Argument From Ignorance until someone points to something else that makes sense to me:

The Republican Party is a front - a mask - a beard - it's providing cover for a concerted effort to tear down our little experiment in self-government in order to replace it with plutocracy.

10 Years

Actually, it was a month ago, but hey - what would I do if I couldn't keep fucking myself over so I can get a good stiff dose of feeling the need to make excuses and apologize for it later?

Today's Tweet

Imagine the level of perverse discipline it takes to say this out loud with a straight face.

And the White House @PressSec Stephanie Grisham responded to former chief of staff John Kelly with a blistering comment. “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President.”

— Kelly O'Donnell (@KellyO) October 26, 2019

For reference (Business Insider):

On Saturday, Kelly said he regretted resigning as chief of staff. He added that he gave Trump advice on hiring his successor.

"I said, 'Whatever you do' — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said, 'Whatever you do, don't hire a yes man, someone who won't tell you the truth. Don't do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached,'" Kelly said.

BTW, none of what Kelly's been saying recently can reasonably accrue to his credit. He doesn't get to scrub his legacy clean now by pretending he is, or ever was, some kind of noble warrior in the middle of a rolling cluster fuck.

• Kelly pimped the policy of Cruelty-to-Immigrants-as-Deterrent-to-Immigration
• Kelly pushed for the building of US concentration camps
• Kelly is now - and has been - profiting from the companies making some big money on those camps.

John Kelly is no kind of hero.

A Product

Bellroy is a "B Corp" business, based in Australia.

• This is not an endorsement
• I don't get paid for any of this
• It could be bullshit
• Do your own thinking - Draw your own conclusions - Make your own decisions
• It just seems like a good idea to me

Today's Pix

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