Quote of the Day - October 31

This op-ed piece in the NY Times by Jamelle Bouie is behind a paywall, but if you can get to it, it is definitely worth a read. The title is "Don't Fool Yourself. Trump Is Not an Aberration". This quote from the essay is a pretty good summary of Bouie's take.

For as much as it seems that Donald Trump has changed something about the character of this country, the truth is he hasn’t. What is terrible about Trump is also terrible about the United States. Everything we’ve seen in the last four years — the nativism, the racism, the corruption, the wanton exploitation of the weak and unconcealed contempt for the vulnerable — is as much a part of the American story as our highest ideals and aspirations. The line to Trump runs through the whole of American history, from the white man’s democracy of Andrew Jackson to the populist racism of George Wallace, from native expropriation to Chinese exclusion.

And this:

Perhaps more than most, Americans hold many illusions about the kind of nation in which live in. We tell ourselves that we are the freest country in the world, that we have the best system of government, that we welcome all comers, that we are efficient and dynamic where the rest of the world is stagnant and dysfunctional. Some of those things have been true at some points in time, but none of them is true at this point in time.

Every Time Cops Do This Crap it Makes It Easier To Demand Defunding

This story is pretty disgusting. Why do cops think people want to defund them? Because they keep doing things like this.

Trump's 2016 Promises

The way I see it, Trump ran in 2016 on broad promises in four areas.

1. Big infrastructure spending.
2. A trade war that would return millions of manufacturing jobs to the US, as well as getting rid of all trade deals and have new bilateral ones instead.
3. Dynamite new health care that was cheap and great for everyone.
4. Racist and xenophobic immigration policies.

(In fairness, he also said he wouldn't cut Social Secirity or Medicare and he pretty much kept that promise. But I also have no doubt that if he has a second term, those will also be in the chopping block.)

Well, number one simply never happened, and there is no objective way to claim otherwise.

For number two, the short answer is that Trump has pretty much already lost the trade war, if you can call it that. Other than a few photo ops at Carrier, Foxconn, and other plants (which just waited until Trump wasn't looking and sent the jobs to Mexico or somewhere else anyway), the manufacturing sector is worse than when he took office, and the tariffs have just made things more expensive for American consumers. Wisconsin has lost dairy farms at a record pace. The only people who think we are winning the trade war are Trump, Peter Navarro, and all the farmers who got billions in welfare checks. So much winning.

Health care doesn't require much discussion. It's a mess. And it's probably better than 50/50 that SCOTUS will scrap the ACA and leave millions without health coverage and Medicaid. No plan was ever in sight and never will be.

Well lo amd behold, that leaves us with number four! If there is one promise that Trump kept, this is the one. Then he went one better and brought his racism home as well. The one thing that Trump is successful at is racist shit. So if someone says they are voting for Trump because he delivered on his promises, we know which of those promises were important to them.

Quote of the Day

From Andrew Marantz's article in The New Yorker (October 19 issue), "Why Facebook Can't Fix Itself".

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/why-facebook-cant-fix-itself

In retrospect, it seems that the company’s strategy has never been to manage the problem of dangerous content, but rather to manage the public’s perception of the problem. In Clegg’s [a Facebook VP] recent blog post, he wrote that Facebook takes a “zero tolerance approach” to hate speech, but that, “with so much content posted every day, rooting out the hate is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” This metaphor casts Zuckerberg as a hapless victim of fate: day after day, through no fault of his own, his haystack ends up mysteriously full of needles. A more honest metaphor would posit a powerful set of magnets at the center of the haystack—Facebook’s algorithms, which attract and elevate whatever content is most highly charged. If there are needles anywhere nearby—and, on the Internet, there always are—the magnets will pull them in. Remove as many as you want today; more will reappear tomorrow. This is how the system is designed to work.

 

Some Bullets

• If you want to get a pretty good feel for Coronavirus in China, I recommend a series of articles by Peter Hessler in The New Yorker. Hessler has lived and taught there for number of years. His articles are pretty level-headed, informative, and without a particular ax to grind.
• I read Soul on Ice about fifty years ago. I decided to read it again. (I actually still have the 95-cent paperback that I think I bought in 1970 at the Army PX in Fort Campbell when I was in basic training.) I must admit that I don't remember a lot of it, so I'm glad I'm rereading. My reaction is: holy crap, this could have been written last week!
• Another story in The Washington Post today showing us again that Daniel Cameron's Breonna Taylor grand jury was a shit show. And showing again that--at the very least--Cameron grossly mischaracterized the proceedings, and maybe even out-and-out lied about it.  (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/20/breonna-taylor-grand-juror-says-no-homicide-charges-offered/) All Republicans have become Trump.
• Another WaPo article. This one about the Foxconn scam in Wisconsin. Scott Walker and Donald Trump had their lunch handed to them. If Trump can be had by one Taiwanese company, no wonder he lost whatever trade war he thought he was having with the China.  Trump is out of his league here, but the koolaid drinkers think he is winning something, not sure what.
  

Vote for Reagan (?!?), and The Lincoln Project

• Governor Hogan of Maryland says he wrote in Ronald Reagan's name on his ballot. He must have gone to the Susan Collins School of Ethical Principles. He is apparently "deeply concerned" about Trump, but not enough to actually do all he can to vote him out. (Let's not forget that lots of establishment Dems in the state effectively supported Hogan for re-election in the last election instead of the Democratic nominee.) Thanks for nothin'.
• There is a very good article in the October 12 issue of The New Yorker. While I am not entirely on board with the Never-Trump "movement", I still welcome any Republican who acknowledges the dangers of our current Fascist in Chief. And their political ads are very good. I do, however, take issue with what was said and implied a few times in this article, namely, that these Lincoln Project Republicans criticize the Dems for not being more explicitly anti-Trump (like they are) in ways that are more scorched earth in their approach. The issue I have is that today's main stream media--which are inexplicably assumed to be "liberal" by almost everyone--would never permit it. The Lincoln Project dudes are able to get away with it precisely because they are Republicans. If the Democrats tried the same tactics, the MSM would crucify them. Only Republicans are allowed to act that way. So go to it, Lincoln Project. We appreciate the help. Just be glad you are allowed to do it.

More Opinions

• After the 2016 election, and Trump's inauguration, the stock market went up largely because investors expected huge infrastructure spending, on which Trump campaigned. Of course, that never happened. The tax cut had some short-lived stimulus. And the trade war has been lost. The market is where it is today entirely because of the Fed, rather than for any organic reason.
• Do I believe ex-felons should have the right to vote? Yup. But then I also believe that felons in prison should have the right to vote.
• The fact that SCOTUS almost uniformly sides with voter suppression efforts in Republican states really is a tell of their agenda. Under the guise of "states-are-responsible-for-running-elections-and-we-can't-Consitutionally-interfere", we see a ruse for their political activism. They definitely have an agenda and then reverse engineer the case before them to put a "Constitutional" veneer on their agenda. In Bush v Gore they actually told the state to stop counting votes. And some current and future SCOTUS justices were involved in that case. Bald-faced activissm.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the day. From Elie Mystal in The Nation, describing the Republican Convention, or as he called it, the Republican Infomercial.

"But there are other racist white people who miss their dog whistles. There are white people who want every drop of privilege and power that flows from America’s systemic oppression of Black people, but don’t want that MAGA-hat-induced heat when they go to the grocery store. They don’t think of themselves as “racists”—and get more offended when they’re called racist than they do over actual acts of racism. They support the bigotry and xenophobia that Trump brings, but they don’t want to feel like bigots and xenophobes while supporting it.
These white people need some cover, and this year’s RNC is providing it in the form of Black people who support Trump. The Republicans have invited a cadre of professional “Black friends” to validate Donald Trump and make white people feel a little less racist while supporting white supremacy.
There’s a word for what Republicans are doing—tokenism—and there are a lot of definitions of the term floating around. So, at the risk of sounding as intellectually constrained as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, I’ll use the dictionary definition of the term:
tokenism | noun | the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce.
It is important to understand that tokenism is not done to benefit minorities, not even the token minorities used in the scheme. Tokenism is done for the benefit of white people, to make them feel more comfortable and less complicit in the prejudice and bias of their institutions, schools, and workplaces. It’s done to shield white endeavors from accusations of discrimination. It is, quite literally, a cosmetic adjustment: a mere lacquer of Black faces gilded onto the same old white spaces."

 

Bible Stuff

Several months ago, my wife and I decided to finally do the read-the-whole-Bible thing. So, we followed an outline and after dinner, a few chapters at a time, read the whole thing. What we found wasn't surprising, inasmuch as there has always been a conflict about what the Bible "says" about any number of topics.

It seems to me that--having read the entire thing--one is left with the impression that scripture values things like mercy, caring for "widows and orphans",  justice, and respect for the marginalized. Then, one can "interpret" the particulars of the Bible with those principles as a backdrop. Using this approach, I think, helps to keep the forest and the trees in perspective.

Conservatives have kind of flipped this over. The church from which we recently severed our relationship (Wisconsin Synod, aka WELS), seems to work in the opposite direction. They pick out a few particulars--in the recent past, most notably abortion and homosexuality--and then interpret the Bible in the direction from the trees to the forest. There is almost no mention in the Bible of either of these sins, at least not in the context of how they are used by WELS. For example, the verses about "knowing me in the womb" are presented as proof that life begins at conception, but those verses are an expression of the omnipotence and omniscience of God, not a biological definition of personhood. To use the passages in that way is injecting human beliefs that aren't there.

Today's conservative churches like the WELS have become two-sin churches, and all else revolves around that. This is why the church has become a big player in the culture wars--and therefore the political Right. Once you've declared your allegiance to that camp, you can work backwards and justify any human (or political) opinion as Biblical truth. To read the Bible in its entirety and conclude that God is "for" small government, low taxes, and lots of military spending, and is "against" immigration and Obamacare, is to mix up the forest and the trees. And it also explains why the most hateful things I have seen on social media have come from WELS people I know (as well as some Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod relatives). 

But this is where we are today. Scripture is used to justify all sorts of hate, injustice, and intolerance. If you cherry pick the right "trees" out of scripture, you can make the Biblical "forest" be anything you want.

Forced Labor in the US

I thought this was really interesting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/08/international-complaint-worker-protections/

Some US labor unions have filed a complaint with the UN's International Labour Organization, claiming--among other things--that American companies are utilizing a form of forced labor:

"And it charges the United States with violating workers’ rights in terms not typically associated with well-off countries, at one point saying the bind many essential workers have been placed in during the pandemic — forced to risk infection or lose their jobs and potentially unemployment benefits — amounts to a system of forced labor."

One thing is for sure. The NLRB views its job as protecting capital from labor, rather than the other way around. So, we have a Department of Commerce that looks out for corporations, and a Department of Labor that looks out for corporationns. Level playing field, huh? This has been happening under both Republican and Democratic administrations, but has reached its pinnacle with Trump, especially during the pandemic.

Some Opinions

• 200,000+ Americans dead (which is almost certainly an undercount) and Trump tells us not to worry about COVID.
• Quote of the day (from Max Boot): "The White House is a bigger coronavirus hot spot than all of New Zealand (which had just one new case in the past 24 hours)."
• I know by this headline (from Marketwatch.com) that this is an article I don't need to read. Next!

  Joe Biden defines income of $400,000 as ‘wealthy,’ but here’s why it’s barely scraping by for some

• Among the Trump supporters I know, there has never been a single thing he has done that they haven't enthusiastically supported, defended, and applauded.
• Abolish ICE.
• If Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron is so convinced that he did things right in the Beonna Taylor non-indictment, then why did he misrepresent what happened in the grand jury? It would have been another successful cover-up, except for one member of the grand jury going public with Taylor's dishonesty. If you are hiding the truth, I will assume you know you were wrong.

Pandemic Stimulus Was Misguided

I said at the time that these pandemic relief bills were passed that they were inadequate, misguided, and misdirected. They were not necessarily inadeqaute as to the total price tag, but rather that--as usual--they were top heavy. Also, "relief" to the wealthy was more permanent than the relief given to workers, the unemployed, and other individuals.

This article from the Washington Post addresses some of those issues. This quote from the article is a pretty good summing up of the problem:

The legislation bestowed billions in benefits on companies and wealthy individuals largely unscathed by the pandemic, ...while at the same time allowing special aid for unemployed workers to expire over the summer and leaving some local public health efforts struggling for money to conduct testing and other prevention efforts.

In fairness, this is not something unique to this administration. The Obama administration's response to the financial meltdown of the late aughts was also top-heavy: generous to those who caused the recession; and inadequate or nonexistent for those who were harmed the most.

It is just another example of the biases built into the economic system: bail out capital, and screw labor.

Reading this article is infuriating. This was entirely predictable. And it repudiates the Congressional Democrats' strategy that they'd get the things needed for workers and the states in "the next bill".

There's always a quote...

 

Trump actually said this on September 29.

Headline of the Day

Headline of the day:

 

Trump threw Saudi Arabia a lifeline after

 Khasshogi's death. Two years later, he has gotten 

 little in return

This is from a story in the Washington Post. I post it because it is kind of a poster child for the Trump presidency in the areas of trade and foreign policy. As long as the other party/country in question is sufficiently sycophantic to Trump, he pretty much lets them do whatever they want without consequence. He then tells us of all the concessions he got from the other party, but they are concessions that only exist in his head. So whether it's China, or Saudi Arabia, or North Korea, or the Eurozone, or anywhere else, the reality is far removed from what exists in the heads of Trump and his cultists.

So the farmers and factory workers and other kool aid drinkers continue to support him and will vote for him even though all his "victories" were really lost long ago.

Friday

 

• When Moscow Mitch is so insistent on giving Covid-related immunity to American companies, I interpret that as prima facie evidence that he knows many of them are guilty.

• As I said in a post a couple of days ago, the evidence of Trump's business non-success was always around. The fact that no reputable US Banks were willing to lend him money should have been a tip-off to the MSM.

• I will concede that there are probably things that are said by the Trump administration that are absolutely true. The problem is that when 80-90% of what you say is utterly false or made-up on the spot, it is hard to sift through what might be true. It's much more efficient to play the odds and assume it's another out-and-out lie.

• I have been a baseball fan my whole life, and I try not to be an old fuddy-duddy purist. But ESPN and MLB's decision to put a mic on a player in the field and converse with them while the ball is in play is one of the dumbest and worst ideas ever. (They are actually doing this during the playoffs.)

• The two American economies are on full display during this crisis, more than ever before. Also on display is how the Fed, Congress, and White House act with much more urgency when the financial markets are in distress than when actual people are in even greater distress.

Who Got "Owned"?

It's amazing to watch the Trump cultists, including friends and relatives, actually claim that Trump has been successful in his "trade wars". One of their problems is that they mistake his photo-ops for substance, and they especially like the photo-ops where Trump is especially noxious, arrogant, and cruel.

I remember him at the Carrier plant in Indiana, bragging about how he was keeping the plant open and saving all those jobs. The company was more that happy to have him there. I think there was even some government contracts or something directed to Carrier as a reward for kissing Trump's ass in public. It wasn't long after that about half those jobs went to Mexico, and another Carrier plant nearby was entirely closed. No photo-op for those events.

In 2017 Trump had Foxconn's chairman Terry Gou to the White house to brag up his role (along with the grifter Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin) for a new Foxconn plant in southeast Wisconsin. Lots of tax breaks and taxpayer investments in new roads and other infrastructure. There is no plant and there are no jobs.

These are only two examples out of many. Wisconsin dairy farms have been closing in record numbers during the Trump's reign. Trump's trade war with China was lost long ago. There have been two or three rounds of welfare payments to American farmers (aka vote buying). Instead of recognizing this as evidence of Trump's failure, farmers somehow seem to think it is proof of Trump's success?!? Or if they see the shortcomings they just blame it all on Obama or something. I am sure most of them are voting for him again.

The sad thing is that some people mistake owning the libs for improving their lives. Trump's disastrous "job-saving" and trade policies have cost working people their jobs and cost farmers their farms. Just who got "owned" here?