Trump

Day 758 Sunday February 3, 2019

638 Days to the 2020 election and 716 Days to Inauguration Day

I’m reading Alec Baldwin’s memoir “Nevertheless.” I was drawn to it based on an interview I heard with him on NPR. In that interview he said he grew up on Long Island. The family struggled financially on the salary of a high school teacher. Alec found ways to stay home from school or to stay up late to watch movies on TV. He said his mother was constantly exhausted by all the kids and chores. He said of his siblings and friends of that time, “We were idiots.” In the summer, his mother would throw them out of the house and they’d play outside until suppertime. 

Alec is a few years younger than me, but because he grew up outside of New York City, as I did, we shared the same radio and TV stations. His descriptions of lying next to his mother watching TV is wonderful. He’s a very good writer. He recalled how one TV station played the same movie all week long, (It had to be WPIX. The only independent station out of New York and the show was called “Million Dollar Movie.”) 

At a young age he became a student of film. One weekend he said he watched “Inherit the Wind” five times and memorized every line in it. That is where we differ. Not only would it not occur to me to memorize those lines, I would be terrible at it. 

As the book progressed to his start in acting I was struck by how he criticized people in the industry that he said had no talent or creative vision. These were typically management types. I don’t think I would have the guts to do that. I also kept seeing his wonderful SNL skit “Sweaty Balls” playing over and over in my mind as I read on. He did assume that you knew some of the things that happened in his life and didn’t describe them, other than to talk about his reaction to events, leaving me to wonder what exactly those events were. 

Oh yes, that’s right he was married to Kim Basinger and there were problems. What were they? There were a few other references. 

Late in the book he talked about his short lived gig on MSNBC. It was a late night talk show. Stark, stripped down, two people talking. Something like the old Tom Snyder show, Tomorrow, and a Larry King interview. I remember the first episode. I liked it. Then something happened and he was gone. Alec described the something. He was being hounded by photographers who were in his personal space and that of his wife, car and family. He yelled at them to back off and at the end of the tirade said, “cocksucking.” The press picked up on the tirade, but dropped the last word and ran a headline saying, “Faggot,” which made it look like he hated gay people. Never mind that he had worked for many gay causes over the years, the hunt was on. Anderson Cooper and Andrew Sullivan lambasted him, as did various gay organizations. This started on a Friday, by Monday he was fired by MSNBC. When it went to litigation they played the actual video footage, all the way through and the word “faggot” wasn’t in there, but the damage had been done.

A similar thing happened to Baldwin around the word “coon.” He didn’t say it but TMZ ran with it and when finally confronted they said they thought he said it. The damage was done.

Remarkably, a few years later after doing his Trump impression on SNL those same types now love him (Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer comes to mind.)

So now we have Ralph Northam. A mild mannered doctor who has become Governor of Virginia. A photo surfaced from his yearbook. On the same page as his photo is a photo of a guy in black face and a guy in a KKK costume. Who found this and published it? The guys who ran Roger Moore’s campaign. Okay. Stop. Right there is enough for me to say, “Let’s not go crazy.” Too late. The Dems are piling on, or as Alec said of Bill De Blasio “running to be the most politically correct politician…” The Dems are piling on saying he should resign. Will you all stop shooting yourselves in the feet? When a Republican gets caught he says, “So what?” the firestorm passes and the idiot is seen again. It seems Northam is getting the Franken treatment, and like with Al, it is uncalled for, at least until we get some clarity. But no. let’s jump on the band wagon shall we? That’s easier and safer.

It seems Northam got blind sided on Friday and asked for forgiveness. F That! Then he called around to his old med school buddies trying to figure out when the photo was taken, couldn’t remember it, and held a press conference on Saturday saying it wasn’t him in the photo. Not good enough. Why did he apologize on Friday? Because he was scared? How about that? Reading the heinous things that lawyers, paparazzi, and opinion people have done in Baldwin’s brushes with these folks a mild mannered guy like Northam will get savaged. He’ll have to stand pretty much alone because the Dems won’t stick by their own. Sad.

Speaking of Bill de Blasio he was on Bill Maher latest show. I really liked what he had to say. Curiously, Maher let people talk instead of jumping in and trying to force them to say something he believed and they thought more nuanced. I guess he had expended all that on the Texas Congressman who is a Republican, a Latino, and has most of the Mexican border in his district. Maher couldn’t get him to say we don’t need a wall.

Back to de Blasio, what he said was the Dems need to speak up loud and clear as progressives because trying to say you are middle of the road gets you no where politically. He also said they need big bold ideas not tinkering with existing ones. You need to make it clear to people who’s side you are on. The trouble with Hillary was working people couldn’t figure out if she was on their side or that of big business. The problem with Obamacare was that people couldn’t figure out if it applied to them. Medicare is easy. If you turn 65, you’re covered. Make it easy for folks. The problem with health insurance is that it’s hard to figure out what applies to you. Lift that burden, cover everybody. If they know they’re covered and they don’t have to jump through all those hoops then costs will come down Yes, if you do Medicare for all then it will cost 32 trillion over ten years, but what is left out of that criticism is that if you do nothing it will cost 50 trillion. (Part of this was what the panel said and not de Blasio.) I liked the point about doing things big. It would get the job done and we could move on.

Let’s stop apologizing and being jerked around by our perfectionism and let’s do something and see if it works.

638 Days to the 2020 election and 716 Days to Inauguration Day

PS North Gate, Jerash, Jordan

 

Day 757 Saturday February 2, 2019

639 Days to the 2020 election and 717 Days to Inauguration Day

Our remote clicker has a undocumented feature and that is that if you press the DVR rewind or forward button, from time to time, it will take you out of what you were watching and bring you back to live TV and move you up one channel from what you had been watching previously on live TV. (I guess I could have written “it changes the channel.” Oh well. Ever onward.)

When it did it to me last night I found myself watching Stephen Colbert. He announced that his next guest was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or as all of us old folk who think we are being cool say, “AOC,” and besides that’s easier to remember how to spell than her name.

I watched. Let me say anyone who messes with her does so at their peril. She is personable, engaging, and genuine. She is well spoken and what she says is practical and easy to understand. Watch out in six years when when is old enough to run for President. When she walked out from behind the curtain the crowd greeted her with a roar and a standing ovation, which didn’t stop right away. There is great affection for her. I was struck by her size. She is petite, like Ariana Grande petite. I had no idea. She has tweeted about her life, so far, as a Congressperson. One shot was a picture of her snuggled in bed eating ice cream after a long day. Somehow, I can’t see Mitch McConnell or any other politician doing that, nor would I want to see the pic. There is a level of genuineness that I have rarely seen in someone in political life. She was asked by Colbert about her being told “to wait her turn” and how many Fs did she gives about that. She looked down, laughed, and held up her hand with thumb and forefinger touching to form a “zero.” 

She was asked about the shutdown. She said that because of that she couldn’t get her office set up. She couldn’t get to work on the things she was sent to Congress to do. There was therefore “more time to get in trouble.” She recounted how she and her colleagues went over to the Senate building to look for McConnell. Not being able to find him, (she didn’t know, I suspect, about the Senator’s unmarked “hidden” offices), she started a hashtag “Where’s Mitch?” Oh boy. You in trouble Mitch-ey! 

Asked about her 70% tax plan. She pointed out this is not a new idea. This wasn’t taxing all of a person’s income at that rate, only that portion over $10,000,000.00 that a person makes in a year. She and Stephen talked that under Eisenhower the rate was 90%. The talked about her being called a socialist. “I’m not. Democratic Socialist – big difference.” Oh boy. Are you going to force the right wing, Fox and Friends to try and ferret out the difference?

Kids today: millennials, Gen Xers, Gen Y, whatever don’t give a damn about the tag Socialist. Got it? No? You will. Bye-bye.

Then we get to the freak out over Ralph Northam. OMG. The guys who ran Roy Moore’s campaign found a picture of Northam in his medical school yearbook It’s unfortunate. It’s insensitive in today’s world. So what are the Dems doing? Like they did to Franken, they are invoking a purity test based on today’s standards. Yes, it’s unfortunate, but has he shown any tendencies or behavior that would bolster the idea that Northam is racist? I haven’t heard of any, but I’m sure if there are any such evidence we’ll hear about it now. I can’t figure out how much of this is about Northam, and how much about certain politicians ganging up to appear to be in the “my poop don’t stink” camp, and how many want the Lieutenant Governor who is a black man to become Governor based on his race.

I wish Northam would just say, “Yup, I was stupid when I was younger. Sorry.” and get on with it. 

Speaking of stupid…Donald Trump…

Need I go on?

639 Days to the 2020 election and 717 Days to Inauguration Day

PS Went downtown to a small theater to see Red Velvet. The story of Ira Aldridge a black actor in the 1800s, who went to Europe to avoid the discrimination in the U.S. The play itself is about whether a black man should play the part of Iago in Shakespeare’s “Othello” in London in 1833. Powerful stuff. The theater where it was held is the small theater above the Carpenter Theater part of the Dominion Theater (ie the Altria) Group. It plays through Feb 9^th. (pictured is the actor Jamar Jones in lead as Ira Aldridge in the play “Red Velvet.”)

https://www.dominionenergycenter.com/events/detail/quill-theatre-presents-red-velvet

PPS The Super Bowl is tomorrow. I forgot. I thought we had another week. Who’s going to win? The Patriots. Don’t bet against Tom Brady. People wrote him off at the beginning of this season and I think it really pissed him off. I think he’s got this Super Bowl and maybe another in him. Just sayin’. The other team? Who cares? Now maybe he gets skunked. Maybe. Don’t bet on it. Patriots by 1, 7, 3, 2 or 38. You heard it here first!

Day 755 Thursday Jan 31, 2019
641 Days to the 2020 election and 719 Days to Inauguration Day

Those of you who have been following my screeds will notice the new countdown figures. Somehow I got off in my countdown and I can’t tell you how that happened because I don’t know. But above are the all new and improved countdown figures.
Three things to talk about: Chris Christie, Howard Shultz, and the silly and the sublime.

Chris Christie was interviewed by Nicole Wallace about his book. I was surprised. He seemed normal and not the in-your-face sarcastic bully I’ve seen before. This doesn’t mean I don’t think he’d be a good candidate for the Republicans to put up for elective office, but still, I was surprised. He was quiet, respectful, and overall gave a good cogent interview. It reminded me of Robin Williams. I’ve heard that Robin Williams in one-on-one interviews was a quiet wonderful guy, but the minute another person came into the room a switch went off and he was on stage performing. I wondered if that was true, in some sense, with Christie. Is he a regular guy one-on-one, but when the circle grows does he become that sarcastic cynical defensive bully we’ve seen so often? Interesting data point, I’ll keep my eyes and ears open to see how this progresses. Moving on.

I also saw Howard Shultz interviewed on Morning Joe. He’s impressive, which I didn’t expect. He was hit rapid fire with questions and he answered them all well. In a nutshell his pitch is this: The system is broken and I think I can change things. I grew up in the projects and I’m a self-made billionaire. I’ve run a successful company and I think I can bring my expertise to government. If I were President I’d get the smartest people and put them in a room and tell them they have to figure it out. Also, we don’t need Elizabeth Warren style socialism. It’s not what the American people want. They want a more middle of the road moderate guy like me.

Howard Shultz is like a lot of folks I’ve heard over my life: sound good when you are in the room with them and when they leave you say to yourself, “Huh? What did they say?” In Shultz’s case I couldn’t help thinking, “Didn’t we hear this before?” Isn’t this what Trump promised to do? Get “the best people” and clean up the mess? Few business people do well in government. I think that’s because government is a different animal than business and most hard driving CEO types can’t stand trying to kick the whale down the road. They expect to give orders and people will jump. Obviously they haven’t run into a GS15 before. Not going to happen.
Shultz’s Billy Jack* approach doesn’t work. He has no experience in government so his “new approach” or “radical change” or whatever he is calling it is likely, imho, to not work. I heard someone say, “Go be a mayor or something like that. Do something and come back in a few years and we can talk.” In other words, prove yourself politically on a smaller stage first. Michael Bloomberg did that a Mayor of New York, but even he had troubles in government. Remember his attempt to limit the size of a soda you could buy? His reasoning, which I liked, was that if you limited the size of a glass of soda you could limit people’s sugar intake, even if they had free refills. Not earth shaking, pretty practical, at least I thought it would be good to try and see how it worked. Oh man, Jon Stewart ripped on Bloomberg night after night on the Daily Show. It was a “Don’t Tread on Me” kind of thing. Even that simple suggestion would have taken more finesse to get through than Michael’s ordering it.
Then Shultz went on that unions are not the answer that he built a huge company without them and that he gave his employees a piece of the pie and health care and all companies can do this sort of thing. Yeah? I’ve seen this before too. It’s the Phantom way of governing. For those of you who don’t remember that comic strip it featured a masked white guy who kept the jungle natives safe from the predations of the outside mainly white world. Many companies were founded by a visionary kind of person. They treated their employees well. They were down in the trenches with their people, but then … they left. They died, They moved on. They hired someone from the Harvard School of Business or the like. Then things changed. The person who had worked there 29 1/2 years and was looking forward to their thirty year pension got fired to save the company money. The workers started to get chipped away at, little by little. They got pissed off. Trust was gone.They tried to form a union, only to have the location close, or the people that were trying to do that got fired. Yeah. I’ve seen the movie before.
I’ve listened to CEOs talk about how “we are family.” The funniest one was an interview with the CEO of Walmart a few years ago. He was talking that stuff when the interviewer asked, “Why not pay everyone a dollar more an hour?” Oh, no, he said that would bankrupt the company. Really? Or don’t forget kindly old Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, he got taken to court over not paying overtime. He lost and had to pay. What did kindly old Sam say? “They made me write the checks, but if anyone cashes one I’ll fire them.”
Shultz on health care was same-o same-o, “I’ll get people smarter than me in a room and make them figure it out.” Haven’t we heard this before? Then he attacked Warren’s tax plan as too radical. Well, yeah. You’d lose some of your money under her plan. The argument against Warren’s plan (tax the ultra rich 2% on all their assets) is that it wouldn’t fund the government for more than two weeks. Really? Let’s try it. The other argument against any Democratic proposals on health care was “people don’t want to give up their health insurance plan they have now.” Again, I say, “Really?” Steve Schmidt, who has been working for Shultz for months parroted these talking points too. Of course, what Shultz and Schmidt are doing is leaving open what would replace the insurance as we have it now, and in the case of Warren’s proposal they aren’t offering anything substantive. So in the one case they are offering arguments that are empty on one side or the other of the proposition. (This in sales’ school is known as “The Ben Franklin close technique” where by you draw a T on a large piece of paper and put up all the pros of your plan and leave the other side blank. Or conversely, you put up all the cons of their plan and ask why would you want that?
So let me fill in the blanks. Two percent of a billion dollars is twenty million. Warren is suggesting that for every billion you have you have to give up twenty million annually. Hey, that’s what a bank trust department or Fischer investments charges. Is that so bad?
Let’s move on to the argument that people don’t want to give up their health insurance coverage that they have. Really? I’ve heard people don’t want to switch doctors, but their health insurance? Okay, lemme see if that’s true. What if I could offer you total health care coverage for half of what you are paying now? And what if your cost of prescriptions was reduced by 80%? Any takers? Wait, how can I make such an outrageous proposition? Well, most countries pay half of what we do for health care and it’s not only better in terms of outcomes, but it covers basically everything. Oh and the wait time argument? That’s the one Rush likes to say about the Canadian health care system. When I’ve asked Canadians (those are people who live in Canada and whom I know) they don’t know what I’m talking about. They aren’t aware of any wait times. I mean, yeah, a day or two, like you do here to see a doctor. And btw Canadian health care is not government run; it is government regulated.
I was talking to a guy down here that sold medical policies. One of the big problems he said was every local government has a health department and each has slightly different rules. Therefore, you can’t have a nationwide policy and you have to maintain lots of staff to keep track of it all. If you pull back and think about the overhead of all those little health departments with their rules and regulations and their staff, on a nationwide basis, it adds up.
As to the cost of drugs. I know from personal experience that I can buy the same prescriptions in Mexico for $400 that cost $2100 here. That’s 19% of what that drug costs here. Hum. Any takers?

On to The Silly and The Sublime:
Okay, I got nothing in the Sublime category, but it rhymes.
How about the Silly and the Dangerous.
First up, Sarah Sanders. Now that she is no longer giving daily lie sessions she has time to be interviewed by various news outlets. She’s appeared on Fox, but she’s also been interviewed by the Christian Broadcasting Network where she said that it was God’s will that Trump be president and the he (Trump, not God) is doing a heck of a job. (So we can all rest easy?)
Then there’s the intelligence folks. The head of some of the agencies were on Capital Hill yesterday presenting their Annual Threat Assessment. Shockingly, they are not in the Trump club of “Putin is my Pal.” In fact, they say quite the opposite, and they say China and Russia are working closer together than ever before – against the United States. They disagree with the president on Syria, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran to name a few. They also say that Trump’s actions are dangerous and have put us in a weaker position world wide. It was also stated that Russia and China have infiltrated our gas pipeline systems and power grid. They could shut off parts of either one whenever they wanted to do so. What have we done in response? Nothing. Just like what we’ve done about our election systems.
Trump immediately attacked those folks. It is so bad, and so embarrassing that Chuck Schumer has asked that the DNI chief get hold of Trump and “educate him.” Oh boy. Good luck with that.
It has also been revealed that the Russians have gotten hold of some of the papers in the Mueller probe and have fabricated things that are derogatory to the probe. A Treasury official has been arrested for leaking some papers to a reporter.
There is also a report that Trump met with Putin secretly at the G20 Summit after saying he wasn’t going to do so. Hey, get this. It’s not the short little “Hi, How are you?” meeting it was claimed to be.
There is more and more evidence and more and more people and groups that are asking the question, “If Trump isn’t a Russian agent than what explains his behavior toward Putin?”
*Billy Jack was a movie starring Tom Laughlin as an ex-Vietnam vet who happened to have all kinds of crazy karate kicking skills. When the red necks started making fun of the hippies in town and Billy Jack stood up for them why he just had to go into the town green and circularly kick each redneck in the head with his foot. Laughlin ran as an independent for President. His pitch was “put me in charge, I’ll clean up the mess, then I’ll resign and the Vice-President can take over.” Somehow his message didn’t catch on.

And in Fantasyland the president is now making up figures on immigration. It appears that he tried to copy numbers from the right leaning America One News graphic about immigrants to this country, but he got the numbers and the overall meaning incorrect. Some might say he was lying, but I don’t think so, I’d say he’s delusional and incompetent.

641 Days to the 2020 election and 719 Days to Inauguration Day**

** Now with all new and improved countdowns!

PS The crescent moon with Venus this morning. Jupiter is out of the shot to the upper right.

Day 754 Wednesday January 30, 2019    840 Days to Go

I feel like I’m in the part of a really bad B movie where they are trying to show the narrator/protagonist is having a bad trip on drugs. There are quick flash cuts with disconnected dialogue and rain-bowed kaleidoscopic colors pulsing. Various voices are speaking. Certain bits of dialogue are repeated. Then there’s a shot of the person twirling around trying to get a grip. Luckily, for them, the next scene shows them waking up in a cold sweat clutching the sheets, breathing heavily and looking around. (They are asking themselves the question, which is never stated but R. Crumb’s COMIX repeatedly asked (and answered) “What does it all mean Mr. Natural?” (“It don’t mean shit.” says Mr. Natural.) )

Okay, Here we go. I’ve got three things swirling around in my brain:

1. A really bad tortured analogy that doesn’t make sense, like waking up from a dream that doesn’t make sense when you try to tell someone about it. That kind of “doesn’t make sense” thing. It involves Steve Mnunchin and a disconnected voice like that of the narrator of one of those doggie treat ads that is trying to funnel the thoughts of a dog wanting the doggie treat. That “Who’s a good boy?” voice and the dog going crazy saying, “Me! Me! Me! Gimme the treat! Ya ya ya gotta have it!”

2. The guy yelling in the background as Howard Shultz is trying to make the case for his running for president, “Go back to Davos you egotistical fuck!” (or something like that.)

3. How the Democratic presidential race for president is trying to be portrayed in regards to Harris, Warren, and AOC. 

And the conclusions I draw from the three themes above.

Let’s start with Steve Mnuchin. He apparently has said that for the second year in a row the Federal government will have to borrow a trillion dollars to cover the cost of the tax cut to the wealthy. “Who’s a good boy?” “Me! Me! Me! Gimme. Gimme. Gimme.”

Okay, this is the party that claims to be conservative, and fiscally responsible. How they get away with that is beyond me. The Republicans always since Eisenhower outspend the Democrats. As Bill Clinton said when Hillary was running the biggest complaint the Republicans have about the Dems is “they don’t clean up the mess fast enough.” There’s another more sinister interpretation, and that is that if the government spends so much money that they can’t borrow anymore the government will be forced to shrink. Then the Republicans can go after what they call entitlement programs. Things like food stamps and Pell Grants and the National Endowment for the Arts. Many of the people who espouse this view are also of the Christian view that there is a coming apocalypse and when that happens Jesus will come down from heaven and we will all be lifted up; or at least the good white people. To facilitate that, certain things have to happen, one of them was moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The idea being that if you can make the situation worse, then when it gets really bad a change will come that will be really good. I equate this to the old cartoon of the two guys in lab coats in front of the college double row of three blackboards all filled with equations and one of the fellows is saying, “and then a miracle happens.”

Or as the boss in Office Space says in a long drawn out breath, “Yeaaah, I’m going to have to disagree with you on that one.”

Let’s deal with former Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz. He’s thinking of running for President as an independent. The guy yelling at him in the background summed it up really well. “Go back to Davos you egotistical billionaire.”  Frankly, I gotta hand it to Shultz, how was he able to make people get hooked on that crappy coffee? I mean there are a lot of coffee shops in this country. Why was his able to succeed spectacularly? I don’t get it. Didn’t get it, and probably never will. Shultz raises an interesting question that will, I think, define how a lot of the Democratic candidates will be portrayed by the media in this season of presidential lotto. But before we get to that let me point out that we have been warned about people like Shultz: billionaires who want to do good after making all their loot. That’s nice. However as Robert Kuttner points out in the title of his book “Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?” and Anand Giridharadas points out in his book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and how the guy that yelled at Shultz – IF YOU THINK THE RICH ARE GOING TO SAVE YOU – FUGGETABOUTIT! That ain’t happening. Yes, they might do some good work. Look at Bill Gates. Yes they may buy a newspaper to keep it from going under – look at Jeff Bezos. But if you think for a second that they are willing to give up their wealth, or a substantial portion, the answer is no, no, NO! Giridharadas (he’s the youngish looking Indian guy with the whitish hair dyed and waxed straight up in a Guy Fierie style that appears on political talk shows from time to time) makes the point that what the rich are doing with their good intentions is co-opting the role that governments have traditionally played in certain sectors. While the idea sounds nice and we can all say, “Aw, isn’t that nice,” the problem is that the people, ie government, needs to do these things if we really want to preserve our way of life and not be beholding to some rich f,f,f,f….person. Kuttner looks at this problem through the lens of global capitalism. Companies – theoretically serve at the pleasure of the people. If you take a class in your local community college about “How to Start a Business,” you will be told that a company gets a license to operate within that political entity under a certain name. You have to apply for the name, register it, etc. You serve at the pleasure of the government entity blah blah blah. 

While this may be true for a nail or muffle shop, international businesses are different, so are football teams. Let’s start with football teams because most of us are more familiar with their rapacious behavior. Hey, we can also throw into the mix the Amazon search for a new headquarters or warehouse or whatever it was that had so many local cities begging like that dog in the ad for the treat. Or that great conservative wonky governor of Wisconsin, Scott “do I look like a dork on a motorcycle?*” Walker. 

*Yes, Scott. You look like a total dork. On or off a motorcycle.

What international businesses, huge business like Amazon and football teams all have in common is the ability to manipulate governments to give them incentives to come to that locale to do business. Why cities throw millions and billions at football owners to have something that ultimately costs their tax base bazillions of dollars is beyond me. The bigger the company, the bigger the government they can screw with. So there’s Scott Walker – poster boy for economic idiocy. Not only did he enact Koch brothers Sam Brownback type Republican economic plans that left the state in dire straits, but to make sure they’d be suffering for years to come he made a deal with Foxconn that will cost Wisconsin approximately $240,000 per every employee FoxConn hires. Look it up in wikipedia. The deal? You meet certain targets Foxconn and we’ll pay you $3.8 to $4.0 Billion dollars. FoxConn said it will initially hire 3,000 people going up to 13,000. FoxConn is known for making similar pronouncements in the past and not living up to them. Independent economists looking at the deal say that if all the terms of the deal are met Wisconsin might – might – break even by 2043. Good going Scotty! The other thing Foxconn is known for is putting nets around the tops of its building so employees can’t kill themselves diving off the top of the building and taking a header. I hope the Wisconsin plant provides a diving board, better known as a plank, for Mr. Walker. Okay, I’m dreaming. 

The point is that big companies can shift resources around faster than government entities can keep up with. They and rich individuals are loath to part with their money. In fact, both groups will go to extremes to hold onto their money. Companies have moved headquarters to remote islands. Rich individuals have stashed money in Panama. Why? To avoid losing any of their money. 

This is the point of Nancy MacClean’s book “Democracy in Chains.” It’s not enough to hide your wealth from the government, become the government and change the rules so you can keep your money. (This seems to be the cornerstone of what people call Libertarianism.) The thinking is that the voters are really out to get your money and you have to talk in circular patriotic terms that hide your real game plan, which is to so bind up the government that legislators can’t do anything about it, Hence, the idea of “chains.” In other words: you can’t depend on politicians and judges to stay bought so you gotta change the constitution so that it’s much harder for those individuals to take action against your wealth. These folks went down to Chile when Pinochet was in power and helped him push through a new constitution, which the current leader discovered when she wanted to make changes was not able to do so. Game, Set, Match.

Now we get to how the Democratic candidates are being portrayed by the right, the Shultzes of the world, and the press – all to the detriment of those candidates. Words that are being used to describe Warren, Harris, and AOC are: “radical,” “far left”, “too liberal,” and the most dreaded word of all “socialist.” Throw in a few phrases like “I don’t think the American people are ready to accept …” and we’ve got a smear campaign, a hit job, a piece of work that Lee Atwater or Roger Stone or Karl Rove would be proud of.

What has Warren said that is so radical? “Tax the Rich.”

What has AOC said that is so radical? “Tax the Rich.”

What has Harris said that is so radical? “Tax Relief for the Middle Class.”

Wow. Hum. Why would Warren say something like that? Oh. They have all the money. So, where else are you going to get it? And, btw, the rich have been tipping the scales in their favor a little bit each year since 1980, when Reagan got in.

Why would Cortez make the rather modest suggestion that a higher tax on that portion of income that is in a year over a huge amount? Because that’s what worked before under Eisenhower? (Naw, because it makes sense.)

Why would Harris suggest tax relief for the middle class? Because they’ve been getting screwed by the wealthy since Reagan.

Yet these ideas are called “too liberal” and someone like Shultz is saying he’ll do a more moderate plan. Like Trump before him, he’s rather vague on specifics or exactly how he would do any of this, but trust him. He grew up in the projects and clawed his way to the top of the most successful coffee shop chain in history. But as we saw with Mr. Art of the Deal’s success or claimed success – success in business does not necessarily translate to success in government. As I pointed out yesterday look to Coolidge (“the job of business is business”) or Trump (“You’ll get tired of winning”) to see the failure of those kind of people. 

Special note: yesterday I also included Hoover in with Coolidge and Trump. That isn’t fair to him. He was an engineer. He was very successful at keeping the people of Belgium and the Netherlands feed during their occupation by the Germans. People thought this success would translate into being a good President. Unfortunately, it did not. He, like Gerry Ford, was overwhelmed by the job of President. It also shows that a person can be successful in a singular endeavor and not be able to handle the multiple demands of a job like President of the United States.

After Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt came in. The country was in the worst economic condition it had ever been in. This was brought about by one huge factor – the tightening of credit by the banks in the early 1930s following the crash of the stock market in 1929. In other words, the economy went from bad to worse due to the rich not willing to contribute. FDR had to pry it out of them. He tried all kinds of things. We need an FDR now. 

PS A programming note: The 2020 election is November 3, 2020 – 642 Days away from today, January 30, 2019.

      Inauguration Day is January 20, 2021 – 720 Days away. 

      How I arrived at the figure of 840 Days to Go is a mystery to me. I assume I forgot to cross off the hundreds digit and reduce by one at some point and that maybe I did that subtraction error twice on the ten’s place, but I don’t know.

      Starting with my next screed the “840 Days to Go” will be replaced with (if it was today) with

     “642 Days to the 2020 election and 720 Days to Inauguration Day”

PPS Yakumo Bridge at Nagata Shrine, Kobe, October 1934 by Kawase Hasui at VMFA

642 Days to the 2020 election and 720 Days to Inauguration Day