Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax and a Trump friend, said, “I’m bewildered when I see these reports that he’s in turmoil. Every time I speak to him he seems more relaxed and in control than ever. He seems pretty optimistic about how things are shaping up.” (Gleaned from Microsoft News Feed March 4, 2018)
Mr. Ruddy may be deluded because he is a wealthy friend of Donald or he may just be trying to spread propaganda, as his company is so fond of doing. Newsmax is no better than the Enquirer when it comes to political propaganda. Unless Mr. Trump is deliberately trying to destroy the institution of the presidency (which is a possibility that I have considered), there is no way he could be “relaxed and in control.”
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and novelrobinson)
“I spent years as a foreign correspondent in Latin America. To say we are being governed like a banana republic is an insult to banana republics. It’s that bad, and no one should pretend otherwise.”– Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post, March 1, 2018
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and RyanMcGuire)
The Guardian reported today (attributing the first report to Think Progress) that Carl Icahn, worth about $17 billion, sold a million shares in a company that experienced a sharp loss after President Trump announced a 25% tariff on imported steel to take effect next week. Mr. Icahn sold his shares in Manitowoc, who makes cranes, starting February 12, for roughly $32-34 million. The Commerce Department reported its recommendation for tariffs on February 16. By this morning, the share price had dropped 5.48%, meaning that Mr. Icahn avoided a loss of roughly $6 million.
A little history: Manitowoc was selling at roughly $23 a share until last July, when it began to rise dramatically, to a peak of $43.59 on January 26. It then began a rapid drop, past $32 on February 12, to $27 this morning. So Mr. Icahn should have sold in January. It seems that this company, which is barely making a profit, has share prices that are greatly affected by peripheral news, such as the performance of Caterpillar, a much larger maker of the same equipment. Mr. Icahn had been holding his shares for three years.
Mr. Icahn was named as one of Mr. Trump’s special advisors during the presidential election but resigned his position due to complaints about conflicts of interest. He apparently remains a major Trump supporter. Meanwhile, Australia obtained an assurance that they would be exempted from the tariffs last July at the G20 summit when Mr. Trump was considering a tax of 20%– less than his final figure of 25%.
The whole idea of slapping heavy tariffs on steel imports is a typical Trumpian nationalist notion, in line with his pronouncements since his presidential campaign. According to news accounts, companies that consume steel account for eighty times as many jobs as companies that produce steel in the United States. So this tariff will do nothing to improve the US jobs picture, at the same time that it risks starting a nasty global trade war. It is unlikely that US companies will suddenly start producing enough steel to satisfy the demands of our companies that consume steel, and the imposition of tariffs will have a distinctly negative effect on our economy.
Jim Sciutto tweeted that the European Union is planning to place retaliatory tariffs on Harley-Davidson, Levi’s, and bourbon whiskey.
Therefore, the likelihood of US economic growth improving over the next year has suddenly been significantly reduced. Negative effects on our economy will result in Mr. Trump becoming even less popular than he is today, perhaps making his impeachment and removal more likely. The substitution of “Moral Mike” Pence as president will, however, not be an improvement.
Logically, if we establish that Russian meddling in the presidential election has caused a fraudulent result, both Trump and Pence should be impeached and removed for cheating. That will probably not happen.
“Gun manufacturers are in the midst of the worst business crisis in decades, with double-digit sales drops driving some to the brink of bankruptcy. The NRA, which gets its funding not only from individual members but also major gunmakers, is in a position to help. Nothing gooses gun sales like the threat of new gun-control measures. And behind the scenes, two senior GOP officials tell TIME, the NRA has given lawmakers the green light to float new gun limits without the threat of retribution. The logic: introducing those policies — or even better, debating them — will be good for business. Jennifer Baker, a NRA spokeswoman, denied that her organization made such overtures to Congress and said the NRA’s main concern was not gun sales but rather defending gun rights.”– Time online March 1, 2018
(and if you believe that the NRA’s main concern is not gun sales we can get you a discount…)
(cartoon courtesy of pixabay.com and Merio)
Today Mr. Trump announced that he would impose tariffs on imports of aluminum and steel. He has stated that he would commence the tariffs next week. He plans to claim that he is doing so as a matter of national security, which would be a loophole in the World Trade Organization rules.
This action is potentially the beginning of a trade war in which NAFTA may be the ultimate casualty and the global economy may be collateral damage.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly expressed his views that countries with death penalty laws for drug trafficking have no problems with drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. The countries that have the worst problems have reacted to them in the most retrogressive fashion. The Philippines is one country that has devolved into open warfare between government agents and drug users, with many innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. Contrariwise, countries that have embraced decriminalization or even legalization have tamed their drug problems. Portugal is a good example of a country that has dramatically reduced its problems with drugs by legalizing them and putting their resources into treatment and rehabilitation for drug users.
Mexico may follow the example of Portugal in decriminalizing drugs– former President Vicente Fox has come out strongly in favor of this position (See this Time article from 2011). The bloodshed in Mexico that followed their declaration of a “war on drugs” has shown that drugs are simply too profitable and too popular to interdict successfully.
Mr. Trump’s retrograde position on drugs (and that of his Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions) is openly hostile to the concept of rehabilitation and harm reduction, and in favor of failed, violent responses to the problem. If he is allowed to continue along this track, we will see increasing levels of reactive violence in the United States approaching those that have developed in Mexico. Those who make their money selling drugs, if they are threatened with the death penalty, will have no hesitation in obtaining firearms and dealing death to their competitors, the police, the DEA, and innocent bystanders.
Mr. Session’s retrograde attitude to the state-led decriminalization of cannabis has already been noted and discussed. It is clear that Mr. Session’s treatment of states that oppose Federal laws on this subject will only lead to more dissension and potentially violent opposition, not to mention the immediate disastrous effects for powerless individual drug users.
Parenthetically, again, the DEA’s reaction to the crisis in opioid overdoses is counterproductive and mean-spirited. They have reacted by directing prescribers and pharmacists to greatly restrict the prescription of opioids for pain, and directing manufacturers to reduce the production of painkillers by 25%. This is despite the fact that there has been little increase in the volume of prescription opioids dispensed over the last ten years– the recent huge increase in overdose deaths has been entirely due to use of illicit heroin, much of which has been fortified with illicit fentanyl. Reducing the availability of prescription opioids will only drive those desperate for pain relief to the illicit market (where it is cheaper in any case) and increase overdose deaths from the use of fentanyl-enhanced heroin.
(photo “rastaman” courtesy of pixabay.com and Alexas_Fotos)
“Americans’ apparent need to imagine a Russian adversary as cunning, masterly, and strategic is matched only by the Russians’ own belief in a solid, stable, unshakable American society. ” So says Masha Gessen in a February 20, 2018 piece in the New Yorker.
The problem is that American society is not solid, stable, or unshakable. Russian meddling in our elections has made matters worse, but even aside from that interference, our society is more unstable, more fractious, and more riven by partisan, economic, and racial divisions than even we are willing to admit. Prior to January 20, 2017, our government had a fairly competent, professional bureaucracy, but that has been steadily eaten away by Mr. Trump’s appointment of millionaire friends and sycophants to positions of control combined with the dismissals and resignations of committed nonpartisan officials. Even before the presidential election, our society was cut up into mutually hostile cliques that differentiated themselves by race, social position, and wealth– relatively stable divisions that flared into open partisan warfare during and after the election.
Again, the problem is that Russia is not cunning, masterly, and strategic to a first approximation. The Russian government is full of patronage, embezzlement, incompetence, and ordinary corruption. They are not masters of global strategy or even of internal economic planning. The government that Vlad “the Impaler” Putin has cobbled together is set up so that he can exercise control through a network of informal friends and business associates who are not selected for their competence but for their loyalty to him personally. What was left of professional administration after the end of the Cold War was broken up and destroyed, associated with the fire sale of state assets to friends of government officials. Mr. Putin rebuilt the state along personal lines after the collapse of government control by the turn of the century.
Serious, worldwide problems have not been addressed by coalitions of willing stakeholders. Instead, the powerful with vested interests in business as usual have taken the lead in fashioning their own versions of “the facts” and oppressing less powerful groups affected by the destructive results of their profit-taking from the common treasury. As a result of increased pressure on the environment, migration has increased, bringing with it more human misery.
The fundamental misunderstanding between the US and Russia is taking place from a nationalist point of view, even though nationalist thinking is already becoming obsolete. The rise of giant multinational or transnational companies has rendered the concept of nation-states weaker and may someday soon completely transcend nationalism, with fatal results for national governments.
(photo of actors in Bangkok courtesy of pixabay.com and sasint)
The Guardian reported this morning that Ben Carson has cancelled an order for a $31,000 dining room set that is separate from the $165,000 (“for lounge furniture”) he has already spent on redecorating his office as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Apparently, according to department rules, he was only supposed to spend $5,000 on redecorating his office– the cost, perhaps, of a fairly standard nice new desk (“not even enough to buy a decent chair” as Mr. Trump’s appointee complained). Mr. Carson doesn’t have much work to do as Secretary in any case, except perhaps to study on what the Department was created for and why Mr. Trump is cutting its budget by 14% (perhaps it is abandoning any commitment to working on the homeless problem.) Congress has been prodded into investigating Mr. Carson’s HUD after a whistleblower alleged that she was demoted to a job that apparently had nothing but a title and a salary, no job description, for complaining about the way the budget for redecorating was side-stepped– and for discovering a $10m budget shortfall as well as exposing mishandling of Freedom of Information Act requests.
All this makes one wonder what sort of meetings are supposed to be conducted in Mr. Carson’s new office– dinners, lounge parties, or ?
Parenthetically, Ben Carson is titled “Mr. Carson” following the British tradition of naming surgeons “Mr.” instead of “Dr.”
(photo– not of Mr. Carson’s new office– courtesy of pixabay.com and maryrodgers1982)
Under the category of ridiculous but true, today we have news that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is slated for a $6.8 billion budget cut in Mr. Trump’s first budget proposal, is spending $165,000 on new furniture to remodel the office of its new chief, Ben Carson– reportedly at his wife’s insistence. Reported in full by the Guardian.
(This is not the new furniture. Photo courtesy of pixabay.com and maryrodgers1982)
Many Republican propagandists have tried to tie Barack Obama to Saul Alinsky in some way, in part because of Alinsky’s radical reputation, but aside from a similarity in that both were, for a time, community organizers, Obama was only ten years old when Alinsky died– so it is unlikely that they ever met or that Obama studied under Alinsky. There has also circulated a document falsely claiming to show Alinsky’s goals, which I will not reproduce here. The web site snopes.com evaluated those claims and found them without foundation. They did, however, present a real list of rules from Alinsky’s work, published in 1971, and that is probably just as maddening to conservatives:
Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings.
The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.
The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying “You’re right — we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”
The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
(photo of a radical skateboarder courtesy of pixabay.com and vivisorg; see Alinsky’s sixth rule)
Conrad Theodore Seitz 